The Future of Home Video

[Zot!]

Personal preference is paramount, but since the time of the Sumerian tablets, the shape of written page has been a vertical rectangle. An iPad app is not going to change this simple gold standard. However, you are right that I've not used it, and while I was going to question even using the iPad as an eReader to begin with, I am willing to accept that I am simply ill-read .

[EricJ]

Home Media Magazine Article: "Blu-ray producers say studios should shift expectations about physical media"

Just bumping this article for truth:
I've been saying it since the beginning, the Digital rush is a bubble-economy artificially created by the studios, and the loggerheads on 4K created by their own delusions (disks or streaming?) is going to end up being one of the catalysts that pops it.

As they said in the conference:

“They want to get rid of us,” Burnett said. “If the alternative is to have a file that you can stream, then you get rid of all the manufacturing costs. You get rid of packaging. You get rid of everything. You just send the file and it’s out of your hair. And you get rid of us, which a lot of people would like.”

Which is particularly true of Warner, which would happily banish EVERY single 20th-century title to the Archive if it didn't mean having to go through the hassle of retail marketing or selling anything that wasn't Batman or Harry Potter.
There's just one problem--If they're going to make "Every title available forever", they're not doing it: Digital movies are usually sold, as studios and servers greedily sell packages and move away from rentals, and all but the diehard digital enthusiasts aren't going to pay $29, or inflated pre-order prices, for a new title they might not keep, are going to avoid it, wait till the price comes down, or, in the majority of cases, buy the disk and get the digital copy free. And those who thought they could sell their disk collection now that they had Netflix/Amazon subscriptions are now finding that the studios are now greedily bypassing and pricing themselves out of the subscription services to get their movie sales direct from the customer, leaving the subscription services empty, and not getting any of their own.
It's that constantly ignored bubble question of "We'll be rich!...Once the money actually comes in."

Studios convinced themselves that streaming had arrived:
A) because "Look what happened to CD", ignoring the complete context of why music listeners purchase individual songs,
B) because streaming/subscription replaced mail-Netflix and Redbox in the rental market it had settled into, and of course,
C) Microsoft's press agents went around whispering "Disks are dead!" after Toshiba lost HDDVD, in the hopes that they could still corner a digital market...And we've been suckered by it ever since.

You've got greedy rising prices, hopeful entrepreneurs failing, faulty pot-of-gold assumptions, putting carts before the horse, hopes of eliminating all other alternatives, a general happy obliviousness to customer disinterest, and a big double-down investment that's about to come crashing down on them in one big chain reaction if they don't look carefully--Sure sounds like oil prices and mortgage derivatives to me.

[David M.]

^ Couldn't agree more with this summary.

Comparing Netflix etc to physical media is a bad analogy. I like both of them, for different reasons. Netflix has more in common with television (it's subscription based, is only average to poor quality, and is ephemeral). Of course new ways to consume content is going to decrease the share of the others, but I dislike this attitude that for one to succeed the other has to go away.

[EricJ]

but I dislike this attitude that for one to succeed the other has to go away.

That's LITERALLY been the mentality since the Blu-vs.-HD wars:
Studios and hardware companies, who don't really use these things themselves as consumers, have no conceptual understanding of why the interactivity of DVD replaced VHS, why the clarity of Blu-ray (and the FCC move to flatscreen sets) replaced DVD, and why the song-based MP3 industry replaced the album-based CD.
They see it as "If something comes along, everyone's going to buy it, and it's going to replace the old technology forever!...Quick, get ready to welcome our new Overlords, so we won't be fooled again this time!" When 4K sets were announced, every 3DTV-hater had no idea what it was or why the public would want or understand it, but cheered it on anyway, being ironclad convinced, that hurray, it would now "replace" 3D entirely, and had no concept that half of the new sets would also happen to be 3D-compatible...In their minds, 4K was going to come in, bump 3D off the mountain, and replace it completely, because, well, that's what New Stuff does.

As it is now, Digital holds the rental market (taking down mail-Netflix and Redbox), Physical still holds the longterm purchase market, and Subscription holds the nightly-television market. That's called "The right tool for the right job."
It's more a matter of fear and superstition on the part of the studios and hardware companies that One Must Survive, and if they actually used this stuff themselves, they'd know that.

[Drucker]

EricJ, I just think you have the perspective of the companies all wrong. They want to make as much money as possible. They don't "misunderstand" anything, they just don't think there's enough money to be made in blu-ray. Removing the physical costs of storage and manufacturing and shipping are the incentive for companies to kill physical media. That's their mindset.

I do not stream anything, but to deny that streaming is the way the majority of people will be consuming media is crazy. People listen to spotify and youtube. They watch what's on Netflix and Hulu. I haven't seen a story about a large number of people departing Netflix because the selection changed in a given month, have you?

Furthermore, from a proprietary standpoint, every company wants to have exclusive access to their data. The best thing for Starz, from an advertising standpoint, is to be the only people that know who consumes Starz. With their own platform, they get that. If Starz is on Netflix, then Netflix also has access to the data of Starz users, thus making their data worth less. Why work with Starz to find your audience if Netflix has the data of Starz users AND HBO users AND Nickelodeon viewers AND the people who watch Dora the Explorer and Interstellar? These companies are transacting on the data of their audience, even if they aren't showing you advertising on your platform.

Again, everything you are saying is true. Studios are rushing to kill physical media and get everyone on streaming. But it's purely a money-based decision. They don't care about the consumer, and why should they? Few people see a need to buy physical media anymore.

[EricJ]

EricJ, I just think you have the perspective of the companies all wrong. They want to make as much money as possible. They don't "misunderstand" anything, they just don't think there's enough money to be made in blu-ray. Removing the physical costs of storage and manufacturing and shipping are the incentive for companies to kill physical media. That's their mindset.

It's partly that, and the need to CONTROL their titles even after we buy them:
Remember how dedicatedly the industry was supporting the technically inferior DiVX--even Disney, Lucas and Spielberg said it was the wave of the future!--during the DVD wars, because the pay-per-view model would be so profitable for the industry? Yeah, except for what turned out to be the one slight flaw that took down the entire format: Nobody wanted to keep paying for something they'd already bought.
The push for Satellite over cable, selling the "convenience" of VOD over disks, the brief fling for 24-hour degradable EZDisks...Studios have a twenty year history of supporting any format that will still allow them to shake the customers by the legs for loose change on every viewing even after the purchase deal is done, since once a hard disk is bought, that's IT--It's in the hands of the consumer.

As for those saying they "prefer to keep their libraries digital", let me guess: "I don't have a lot of room, and it's nice knowing I'll have all my movies forever in a place where they won't break, and I can't take my disks with me when I travel", am I close?
That's EXACTLY the strategic "customers' opinion" whispering Microsoft was doing after they wanted to "avenge" HDDVD, which war was all about who would have the monopoly on digital coding, Windows or Apple-friendly MP4. Don't let someone put words in your mouth, especially not when they come from the Evil Ones.

[Drucker]

Most people don't have physical media libraries, and if you do, you are the exception. You are probably buying more media than 95% of the population. Making DVDs for EricJ and the Criterionforum is not profitable enough to be worth doing.

[Zot!]

Most people don't have physical media libraries, and if you do, you are the exception. You are probably buying more media than 95% of the population. Making DVDs for EricJ and the Criterionforum is not profitable enough to be worth doing.

This is not a new thing. The reason that virtual media has such traction, is that the typical consumer has always been in "disposable" mode. Hence the great value assigned to golden age comics, 78 singles, and first editions of just about anything. I gives me some solace that today's Top 40 may soon be forgotten, so it's not all bad.

[tenia]

Making DVDs for EricJ and the Criterionforum is not profitable enough to be worth doing.

There is a way of getting this worth doing, and that's the wave of more expensive limited editions as seen in the UK.

[gorgeousnothings]

An interesting read, though it doesn't bring much new to the table that we don't already know: The Premature Death of Physical Media — and the Cult Home Video Labels Keeping It Alive

[EricJ]

An interesting read, though it doesn't bring much new to the table that we don't already know: The Premature Death of Physical Media — and the Cult Home Video Labels Keeping It Alive

Except that it gives into temptation and sells the Physical Collector image first with "He's so dedicated, he even collects VHS! He doesn't even watch Netflix, like normal people!"
Yeah. That's about the LAST thing we need right now, as portraying the image of Physical enthusiasts as a bunch of eccentrics collecting ships in bottles is only going to aid and comfort the propaganda of the Digital-mongers saying "See, we told you they were just a stubborn anal-retentive minority!"

Way at the bottom of the article do they finally go into the crux of the problem, namely that Netflix, and the industry, want to phase out physical, but the studios are keeping the movies away from subscription. The movies aren't on disk, and they're not anywhere else either. Unless you want to watch Herzog indies.
And really--Are we ACTUALLY that bothered by "The clutter taking up room" as much as the Digital companies tell us we are so we can parrot it in every argument? I'm in the middle of moving my collection in a half-dozen boxes, but it's never driven me to shout "Die, die, burn them all! I want to stream everything, so I don't have to deal with this anymore!"

[willoneill]

And really--Are we ACTUALLY that bothered by "The clutter taking up room" as much as the Digital companies tell us we are so we can parrot it in every argument? I'm in the middle of moving my collection in a half-dozen boxes, but it's never driven me to shout "Die, die, burn them all! I want to stream everything, so I don't have to deal with this anymore!"

Who are you asking, me or my wife?

[domino harvey]

I never understood the appeal of a Kindle until I had to pack and move boxes of books, it's not an unreasonable concern on the whole. Of course collectors don't care about accumulating objects of their affection, but the casual consumer is no longer the market since the DVD bubble burst years and years ago, thus the rise of niche labels and the prevalence of streaming, especially given the increased cultural desire for instant gratification

[zedz]

I never understood the appeal of a Kindle until I had to pack and move boxes of books, it's not an unreasonable concern on the whole. Of course collectors don't care about accumulating objects of their affection, but the casual consumer is no longer the market since the DVD bubble burst years and years ago, thus the rise of niche labels and the prevalence of streaming, especially given the increased cultural desire for instant gratification

We can probably look at the physical ownership model as the blip in home video, since the streaming model is basically analogous to the video rental model of the 80s and 90s. People might have owned a handful of treasured titles on VHS, but most were happy to go out to the video store and browse / check out the latest new release. Nobody wanted a wall of videotapes in their TV room. Physical ownership is in a much better position nowadays (in terms of respectability, price, quality and selection) than in the VHS era, even after the bubble has burst.

My preference for physical media boils down to lots of past experience with media (even digital, downloadable media) I want to watch / listen to becoming scarce, and an assumption that corporations will not operate in their customers' best interests if they can make a buck otherwise. A corporate-controlled streaming model is fine if all you want to watch is The Wizard of Oz, Jim Carrey movies and whatever the most recent bowdlerization of the Star Wars franchise happens to be (good luck trying to access the original version you remember fondly!), but many of the films I'm interested in are not, have never been, and never will be available on streaming services, and If I'm lucky enough that one of those films has been released on DVD or BluRay, it's probably no longer in print and is unlikely to return.

If you're gullible enough to believe the "one day, every movie ever made will be available at the click of a button" hype, you deserve the limited, conglomerate-approved choice you'll get.

[RossyG]

A lot of good points there, zedz.

[Zot!]

I would say however that during the VCR era people were actually fairly engaged in recording broadcast TV and keeping a library of things at home. Very few purchased films ("Priced for Rental" was the official term), but it was not uncommon for people to be hobbyists in this regard.

[EricJ]

We can probably look at the physical ownership model as the blip in home video, since the streaming model is basically analogous to the video rental model of the 80s and 90s. People might have owned a handful of treasured titles on VHS, but most were happy to go out to the video store and browse / check out the latest new release. Nobody wanted a wall of videotapes in their TV room. Physical ownership is in a much better position nowadays (in terms of respectability, price, quality and selection) than in the VHS era, even after the bubble has burst.

You keep saying "The (DVD) bubble has burst", wanna unpack that one for us?

Blu replaced DVD because the difference in picture quality became apparent after the FCC required us to upgrade to HD, high definition sparked a movement for more and better film restoration, and within a year of finally upgrading their player, no one wanted to buy a DVD anymore.
To studios, who can often still be stuck in the "Blu-ray's a fad!" 00's where they believe the numbers are too marginal compared to the "mainstream" numbers, they measure a movie's home theater success by the mass-market sales of DVD at the widest common denominator at TargetMartBuy, and buying a movie necessarily means "buying the DVD", as that was the word they got used to using after VHS disappeared--Either customers "buy the DVD", or they don't buy the movie, and if they're not buying the DVD, well, gosh, they must not be buying the movie!
And since a lot of customers haven't been buying DVD for the last four or five years, heavens, they must not like physical media! But some buy the digital, so maybe they like that one instead!

Oh, except for Jeffrey "Alibi Ike" Katzenberg proclaiming "Catalog sales are dead!" after not enough people continued to buy Shrek 2 as he'd anticipated (can't think why... ) which started the first industry cries that the sky was falling.

[Werewolf by Night]

See the bubble burst:

[Gregory]

Deflate, not burst. The "bubble" concept only applies in a limited way here. It's not as though there was demand driven by runaway speculation and eventually it had to come down in a sudden crash.
Seems like it would ground the discussion better if we could get away from dramatic terms about "death," bursting, sudden implosions that are thrown around by tech journalists and the popular media but aren't borne out by sales trends. Even the poor old CD, which people have been declaring dead for over a decade, has remained more popular than most articles about this stuff will admit. And there again, there wasn't a CD bubble that suddenly popped. It's a slow, gradual process of CD/record stores closing and big box chains shrinking or removing retail space for CDs as sales shrink, but even labels that would prefer to go download (+ vinyl) only still haven't been able to get away from pressing on the CD format as well. There's still a flow of CD releases, along with downloads, from thousands of the same old labels that were releasing stuff in the 90s, and in the world of jazz, for example, sales of CD reissues remain very strong in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, and remain a small niche in the U.S. as it always was, generally. Physical formats dying is something that happens sometimes, but it seems to take a lot longer than many expect or will acknowledge.
And releases that are are mostly talked about on this forum, boutique label editions of catalog titles, are not about the biggest trends, the mainstream of the marketplace, and what the average consumer is doing, and they never were exactly part of that. The small labels and the whole periphery of niche-interest releases are part of a separate phenomenon that has to be distinguished from the broad strokes of the broadest overall changes in home video, though of course this thread is really about both things simultaneously.

[tenia]

More and more, it looks to me that DVD is an exception in terms of sales and domestic adoption, and that now, the industry believes the DVD should be what they should be aiming at, without realising they'll never come close to it again within the next 15 years, especially not while producing new formats that look more and more an evolution on the previous one rather than a real innovation.

[MichaelB]

I would say however that during the VCR era people were actually fairly engaged in recording broadcast TV and keeping a library of things at home. Very few purchased films ("Priced for Rental" was the official term), but it was not uncommon for people to be hobbyists in this regard.

Yes, that's absolutely true. My first substantial film collection consisted of off-air copies, and they weren't replaced by commercial releases until DVDs took off about fifteen years later. And of course some of them weren't replaced at all.

[EricJ]

Deflate, not burst. The "bubble" concept only applies in a limited way here. It's not as though there was demand driven by runaway speculation and eventually it had to come down in a sudden crash.

Exactly: There was a PBS Nova special about the reasons how the Mortgage bubble could happen in the first place, and they cited an experiment done to demonstrate the psychological aspect of bubble investing.
A group of subjects were asked to play a computer-simulation stock-trading game, but were told at the outset that a new-startup Company X would suddenly rocket to phenomenal profits, but at some pre-determined point in the game, would suddenly begin plunging to oblivion, and there was nothing the investors could do about it.
Now, you're sitting there thinking, "Okay, I'd trade on my own strategies, keep a good stock of X as a growing nest-egg, and bail on it when it got to the sweet optimal price", right?...Didn't happen. As the stock prices for Company X started rising to delicious heights, the now-rich players all started banding together, dropping their other investments to pump the profits into buying more X, and fan-rallying each other on their own player chats to see how far into the stratosphere they could push the prices up if they worked together. When the Pop Point happened, nobody was smart enough to bail early, and the players all panickedly tried to ditch their stocks by selling, but nobody else wanted to be the buyer, because everyone was too busy trying to get rid of their now-plunging investment, and had nothing else left in their portfolio to make up the loss.
That was Mortgages. That was Oil Prices. In the 20's, that was Wheat and Margin Stocks. And a couple hundred years ago, that was Tulips. It's when investors don't see an earthly reason to invest in anything else, and realize too late it might have been a good idea.

DVDs declined, because they used to be the one industry yardstick for home-theater eight years ago, but now it's the '10's and even mass-market Wal-Mart folk are buying affordable sale-priced high-definition Blu-ray when they buy a disk, and studios and analysts don't know how to crunch those numbers. ("Gee, those purples still look pretty small...")
If anyone's going to toss the B-word around here, it's me, because boy, is it applying to the studio's It's All Digital mentality right now--Before they've even established outside of their own optimistic imaginations whether the public wants to pay sale prices for movies instead of renting them, whether they'd rather just get them on disk codes because it's Free Stuff, or whether abandoning 4K disk for 4K streaming is even going to be technologically possible on most people's Internet, let alone whether they'd even have bought all those new players in the first place.

(Most of the 4K articles are so impressed by the CES demos, even before they've hit the store, they tend to take the rather unrealistically optimistic investor/adopter tone of "Oh sure, we've got some doomsaying, but it's so neat and innovative, there's no way it's not going to take over and be the new big thing anyway, yay! "
Mortgages and margin stocks had some "doomsayers" too trying to get their warnings out before the disasters happened, but their economic arguments were passed over as just grumpy old party-poopers while everyone was having fun getting rich, while the important in-the-know people were telling us to get in on the good thing while the getting was good.)

Even the poor old CD, which people have been declaring dead for over a decade, has remained more popular than most articles about this stuff will admit. And there again, there wasn't a CD bubble that suddenly popped. It's a slow, gradual process of CD/record stores closing and big box chains shrinking or removing retail space for CDs as sales shrink, but even labels that would prefer to go download (+ vinyl) only still haven't been able to get away from pressing on the CD format as well. There's still a flow of CD releases, along with downloads, from thousands of the same old labels that were releasing stuff in the 90s, and in the world of jazz, for example, sales of CD reissues remain very strong in Japan and elsewhere in Asia, and remain a small niche in the U.S. as it always was, generally. Physical formats dying is something that happens sometimes, but it seems to take a lot longer than many expect or will acknowledge.

Why...WHY...WHY?? do people insist on using CD and print books as the model for why "Digital is here to stay" thinking it's the perfect illustration for movies' market?
iTunes didn't replace CD because "now I'll have more room on my shelf", it was because it made it more easy for teens to direct-buy the one song they wanted on their iPod, without having to get six or seven unimpressive filler songs with it (and artists didn't have to go through the drudgery of writing the filler songs), and without the extra step of having to transfer it off their disks. Whether or not people "take their movies and TV shows on the go", listeners do take their music on the go, and to a lot more places. You can listen to your music while you walk or drive, but you're not going to catch up on Game of Thrones while you're walking down Main St., or watch Jurassic World on the daily bus commute.
Kindle DID replace books because of space issue--especially as most new bestsellers still come out as hardbacks or very large and heavy trade paperbacks--and except for classics, most of us just read a new book once or twice. The used-bookstore pretty much vanished after Amazon established itself, so most of us don't want to buy new bestsellers we couldn't get rid of later, didn't want to wait for the smaller paperback version, and would rather hit the local library where we can get rid of the object once we've disposed of it. E-books are even more ideally suited to taking with you on the bus, since unlike music or movies, you read them at your own pace, there's no set length or stop time, and you're not bothering other passengers with your headphones (unless you're listening to audiobooks). Library hardback books are a rental market, and so are rental movies, but if there's a book you want on your shelf, you'll buy it, because you want it on your shelf.

[dx23]

This article reflects my view of why I'm more than willing to keep my physical formats (DVD/Blu-ray) instead of trusting content delivered digitally/streamed. Amazon, iTunes, Playstation Network, etc, will fall one day and we won't be able to stream the digital content we paid for.

[Numero Trois]

Kindle DID replace books because of space issue--especially as most new bestsellers still come out as hardbacks or very large and heavy trade paperbacks

Except that books aren't close to being replaced by digital and they won't be for quite some time-

E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/busin ... .html?_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[FrauBlucher]

NYTimes....Digital Culture, Meet Analog Fever.