Fox thinks its shows being available on home video undercuts syndication and streaming viewership. It's a strategic decision regarding home video.

Will be interesting to see if the recent short seasons of 24 and Prison Break are also exceptions. 24 Live Another Day got a BD release and I picked it up when it got real cheap during a 50% off sale.

https://www.amazon.com/24-Legacy-Blu...ords=24+legacy


There is a placeholder and temp artwork for 24: Legacy on BD.



All 4 seasons of the original Prison Break recently just got released on BD, so I'm sure season 5 will get a BD release as well.

Prison Break is also available for preorder. Not bad at $30 either.

https://www.amazon.com/Prison-Break-...=ATVPDKIKX0DER

For only 9 episodes I will likely wait for price to drop.

I naively hoped that that 24: Legacy might finally get the original series onto BD. Yeah, right.

The only reason I can think of offhand as to why Fox decided to release all 4 seasons of the original Prison Break, was that all four seasons were previously released on bluray albeit in different regions. (No idea if the original four season blurays were region free).

Even if the original versions were region locked, it was a matter of just changing it when repressing the re-released versions.

The studios want to kill physical media, for exactly those reasons. Even bluray sets that don't do especially well still sell enough units to be profitable. This idea that no one is buying them is a fabricated narrative, a way of blaming customers for a change they're imposing for entirely different reasons. Since the 1970's when Big Media fought tooth and nail against the introduction of the VCR they have never liked the idea of people owning copies of anything. Despite all the money it's made them.

The studios are fixated on trying to control everything, sometimes to their own detriment. Streaming and VOD must seem like the promised land. Home video revenue, without anyone ever owning a permanent copy. This is what happens with an industry that enjoys monopoly style exclusivity on delivering their product. They don't adapt to consumers and give us what we want, they expect us to adapt and take whatever they feel like giving us - entirely on their terms.

While I agree with much of what you said, interest in physical media has been waning among consumers for quite some time. One would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to have seen it. While the studios are eagerly encouraging theses changing attitudes, the public was swiftly moving in that direction for a host of reasons both practical and economic. The failure of high definition to catch fire was early indication that this industry was beginning a death spiral. Don't get me wrong, I am not happy about it, but I live in realville. I keep collecting so that I can maintain a physical library till I am too old to give a damn.

That's true, but most people have never had much of a interest in physical media and are content to own copies of just a handful of favorites. It's been that way with all forms of physical media since its inception.

Most people like digital "ownership" simply because it's "easier" than physical, can be accessed "everywhere" (sure it can... want to buy a bridge?) and takes up no space in their home. This same group cares little for "quality," they bought into overpriced MP3 music files with abandon, and is a prime target for these types of distribution methods. They don't care. They trust their "stuff" to "the cloud" and don't blink about outages or when such services go belly up.

HDTV has slowly gained traction over the last 20 years so that nowadays very few people have a "standard definition" set anymore. A fair number of them own bluray players too, although there's also quite a few who have stuck with old style DVD. Expect a similar gradual adoption curve with 4K. It'll phase in and become the norm over a span of decades. Retail is an industry with the patience and attention span of a four year old, and tends to regard anything less than selling like hotcakes as a commercial failure. Trade publications are likely to take that view. If you want lots of cash in your pocket now, this second, today, the anemic spread of HD might strike you as positively unexciting. But despite never being "on fire" as a product at any point along the way, it's managed to spread to nearly every home in America. I'd call that pretty damn successful. It just took a while.

Exactly. This is hardly a new phenomenon. People only purchase copies of stuff they like a lot. With a movie you'll probably view once and then retire to the shelf permanently, it's just not worth it. Streaming it one time in decent quality is good enough. Streaming/VOD fills the same market niche that Blockbuster Video etc. occupied fifteen years ago. Most people (myself included) have never wanted to retain physical media copies of every movie they watched.

Like I said though, Big Media has never liked people being able to own permanent copies at all. One problem with blurays of course is price. They cost no more to produce now than DVDs yet they still charge us more. But the biggest problem is that studios are deliberately getting stingier. Season sets more and more seem to be compressed with lots of eps on each disc, and quality suffers. Also few special features if any. We used to get tons of deleted scenes, blooper reels, audition clips, and BTS stuff. Now many of those sets come with no special features whatsoever. That's when the studio deigns to offer us a bluray edition at all.

These problems don't just afflict unpopular or niche programming. Season 4 of Ray Donovan isn't being offered on bluray. Nothing. DVD only. And yet, season 3 sold pretty well. We're not getting it because Showtime doesn't want to give it to us. The entertainment industry is notoriously unresponsive to consumer demand. Most seasons of USA Network's White Collar aren't on bluray either and apparently they've been inundated for years with requests. Are you a fan of the breakout Netflix hit Stranger Things? Well good luck finding the bluray, because to my knowledge there's still no release date.

If the studios were smart, they could offer box sets they didn't anticipate massive demand for online-only. That way they wouldn't have to store large inventories or pay shipping costs to get them to stores. Each individual customer would cover the shipping when they placed their order. Or they could offer .iso files for download and do away with the physical discs and packaging altogether. But the industry has done everything possible to block products that manufacturers tried to introduce which could archive disc images on a set top hard drive and play them with menus and everything, just like a real disc. People have suggested they take advantage of these devices and fully embrace digital distribution instead of fighting it. They just don't have any interest in extending the span of time where people can own permanent irrevocable copies of their content. They want to make that a thing of the past.

DVD was a revolution in home video never to be seen again. Better picture, better sound, extra features, NO REWINDING, easier storage, longer shelf life than tape, and an immediate sell-through retail model instead of a rental first model. If anyone is expecting any of the subsequent formats to have the instant popularity of DVD, they'll have a long time to wait. There just isn't a big enough difference to justify the expense solely for the quality.

Just like when smart phones hit the market. A good many were sold but eventually everyone got them because that what was being offered want it or not.

I've been collecting movies on disc almost 20 years. If it's out and I want to own it, I already own it.

THIS! BINGO!

It's my sincere belief that the majority of people who frequent these forums would fail reading comprehension. When composing a paragraph, one should not have to repeat a statement already made within that paragraph and taking single sentences out-of-context often deceives the reader because the meaning often changes.

Anyone who doesn't think PHYSICAL MEDIA...whether in standard, high or ultra high definition is dying is deaf, dumb and blind. Again, the fact that Blu-ray never captured more than roughly 30% of the market was the first indication that physical media was on the wane. Nobody is saying you can stick a fork in it or rigor mortis has set in...but it is by all rational indications dying. And Jim Rochester's post contains a few reasons for this reality. And for those of you who invested in 4K, you may wish it to be so, but 4K discs don't have a prayer of reversing this trend. Personally, I have zero interest in the new format and I have been a media collector all my adult life. The audience is shrinking and the "law of diminishing returns" is in over drive.

Sure, but to this day physical media remains. In the most simplest way of saying it, it will never fully go away. It will never be the way it once was, but that doesn't mean it will die because it'll never reach those heights again.

I will that I always thought TV on physical media would die out. Yet here we are with stuff like Miami Vice, Star Trek, X-Files, etc that still continues to be released on physical media. And where can you stream The X-Files right now? I could care less because I plowed through them on blu.

Oh, it's gonna die...eventually. Five, 10, 15, 20 years, who knows? But it is disappearing far faster from retail shelves than I ever expected. I'm afraid "outta sight, outta mind" will apply. Oddly enough, the shift to online purchases has only served to accelerate its death. As Jim stated previously, the advantages DVD had over VHS were more than improvements in video and audio quality. The advantages of digital over physical are echoed by every friend and family member I speak to who has abandoned physical media completely: No need to store large numbers of discs, no need to spend large sums on movies you will view only once and no need to handle discs or worry about damage to the media and finally and most importantly, services like Netflix, Hulu and others offer unlimited viewing at relatively low cost.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer physical media, obviously, for a host of reasons. However, the average consumer has a casual interest in viewing movies and television shows. Their needs and desires are rapidly being served by digital services. Try doing a few garage sales on the weekends. Nearly every home has stacks of books, CDs, DVDs and yes, Blu-ray discs they are looking to unload.

I was talking about physical media but it applies equally to any potential digital replacement. The studios don't like .iso files any more than the discs they emulate. Their idea of how to replace optical media involves streamed titles you purchase and "own" without really owning. DRM encrypted data streams and files that expire or can only be played on devices registered under a subscription service. No more unrestricted permanent copies that are yours, free and clear. You can't copy them to other devices. You can't alter or remix the content in any way. Only software approved by a given service will be able to open them.

True but that is only a concern for a shrinking population of collectors. Most consumers are unconcerned by those realities. Try to explain your argument to the average person....their eyes will glaze over.

I'm still pissed about The Simpsons not being released any more. I'd even take burn on demand DVD's or Blu-ray's. Just irritating as hell that Fox abandoned the releases after eighteen sets.

They stopped after 17...

Well but they also put out season twenty for the show's twentieth anniversary so seasons one through seventeen plus that gives you eighteen.

Oh yeah, keep forgetting about season 20, since it had no extras.

It's the only one I never bought, for that reason.
I should probably off-load my DVD season sets on eBay or something. I have seasons 1-17 and will probably never watch them at this point.

I'm still keeping them even though the collection will be incomplete. Partly because I love the show and I have good memories of collecting as the first couple seasons are some of the first DVD's I bought and my parents bought a few of the sets for me yearly for my birthday or Christmas.

Yeah, I don't see a circumstance where I'd ever get rid of them - while I'd like to own the entire series, it's not like it's a continuing story where you need a "complete" set. And even though you can stream all episodes, there's extras and deleted scenes in the sets (not to mention the cool packaging and booklets) that you can't get elsewhere.

More love from Mill Creek. Hey, it's not sexy, but dammit they're releasing some good classic shows. I'll be picking this up. Streets 6/13.

http://www.millcreekent.com/the-rock...te-series.html