How Long Until DVD Ceases Production?

With all this talk about how everybody is moving to streaming, physical media sales keep declining year after year and VCR are no longer made; how long do you think it will be until film studios stop releasing movies on DVD? Would Blu-ray cease production not much long after, if this happened?

 

BluRay would have survived a lot longer if part of the deal for the signees was to end production of DVDs.

But, they didn't, and now chances are DVDs will be around longer than BluRays.

Your question was discussed recently in another thread, I'll see if I can find it.

 

I doubt physical media will go away completely, there are always going to be people who will only use physical media, and do not have internet to be able to stream or live in rural areas where the internet connections are fair at best. Imagine if they want to do away with DVDs or Blu Ray, the companies will start to release some titles as streaming or digitail only and only release certain titles on disc to sway people to go the direction that the studios wish. It's like when cassettes were still around. Some albums were released on both cd and cassette, but many were released only on cd buy the late 90's.

 

Found the thread:

How popular are iTunes etc paid for movie downloads? »

 

Also, Sony has a blind spot when it comes to computers. Had they tried to have computers switch over to Blu Ray drives as a standard, there would be a chance of DVDs disappearing. Instead, they have always defaulted to preventing their media from being copied, so they didn't want Blu Ray drives in PCs, so the standards are still DVD drives. (This was, also, one of the mistakes with MDs.)

DVD movies won't stop being manufactured until PCs abandon the DVD drive as a standard piece of hardware.

 

Not for a long while.....

Top Selling DVD's in 2016 - US only numbers

Top-Selling DVD Titles in the United States 2016 - The Numbers »


Top Selling Blu-Ray's

Top-Selling Blu-ray Titles in the United States 2016 - The Numbers »

 

9 years, 157 days, 16 hours and 25 minutes I reckon.

 

Not for a long time if I can help it. When customers buy DVD's, Blu-Rays & CD's at my store I thank them & explain the benefits of owning a physical copy to them (my opinion) & ask them to share this information with their friends & family. They then thank me for that.

 

At this point, I think it's a question of when, not if, DVDs will finally go away. But I've been saying for a long time that all physical media is on the way out: photographs, film, video, TV shows, music, books, magazines, and newspapers. All of these things are going to digital files, whether or not any of us like it. This explains why there's been massive layoffs at newspapers, magazine staffs, why bookstores are closing, and why mass-market merchandisers devote so little space to CDs and DVDs (and Blu-rays, too). Like it or not, the ultimate goal of all the media conglomerates is to make you pay every time you watch or listen to a recording (or read a book or news story), and to make it as difficult as possible to make a permanent copy of it.

It's possible there will always be a market for "limited-edition" collectors releases of some titles. I seem to recall reading a few years ago that a rock group released a 78RPM record of one of their songs, so anything is possible.

 

The declining trend in physical media will continue over the short to medium term. There will come a time (some think it's here already) when most people will look at you funny when you bring up DVD/Bluray discs. When that happens, you'll know the medium is history (despite still being available for sale). I think we're already at the peak-disc stage.

 

Well I am more selective about what I buy. I'd rather stream a series with many seasons. I mean how often will I watch 11 seasons of xyz TV show vs. a movie?

I can see physical releases of TV shows going first because of how quickly they are added to Netflix.

 

WRT to viewing habits, I'm exactly the opposite. I would much rather re-re-watch a YV show of 11 seasons (one which I like a lot), than any single movie.

A movie is just a singular thing - one story. Seeing it once, I don't need to see it again for a very, very long time until the details of the movie begin to fade.

Whereas a long running TV show has so many sub-plots, changes in direction or characters, etc, that it's almost impossible to remember all the details from every single episode over a long run of seasons. That's why I prefer to re-watch beloved TV series moreso than single films.

 

That is the end goal here: to do away with any form of pre-recorded content that is purchase once, play forever. Physical formats will continue to be sold while there is still money to be made from it but it is on the way out. I don't have an issue with that in theory but in practice it doesn't work for consumers. On the supply side you can be watching/listening to a movie, TV series or music one week on a streaming service and then discover a week later that it's been pulled by the content owner. And then the delivery system assumes that almost everyone has high speed internet for streaming which is just not true while for the most part delivering bit starved content that is inferior to what a physical product offers.

At this point, the vast majority of consumers are more interested in convenience over quality so the move away from physical content will continue unabated. So those prophetic words keep on coming back. Freedom of choice, is what you got. Freedom from choice, is what you want.

 

I think there is a generational thing going on. The need to possess a thing as opposed to borrowing it like a book. I OWN a physical copy. I am not beholden to anyone to see it again. That's why those limited play discs failed so spectacularly.

 

Agree with this. Although there's a lot more to the story, especially regarding the ownership of media conglomerates becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of a few. One positive thing I've read recently however is that it's not been an easy road for digital books as current preferences still favor physical media. I don't know how long that will last however.

 

Limited play discs were a dumb technology. One need only look at the evolution of Netflix to see why.

The ownership of movies and television shows is a relatively recent development. It was a foreign concept to most people until the late 70's. Before that, everyone was beholden to theater owners and television networks.

I think younger generations see physical media as cumbersome and wasteful. If they can watch what they want to just by scrolling through a menu, why should they have to pull out a disc and wait for it to load? Besides, isn't all that silicon and cardboard creating more environmental problems? (I must admit that I'm quite receptive to the "takes up too much space" argument my damn self.)

But, take away the digital connections (cable, internet, mobile networks, etc.) and what have they got? What can they actually watch?

Books are a different animal. They've been around forever.

If you look at the evolution of audio recordings, the consumer media have been relatively transient. Only the vinyl record and the CD have lasted for any length of time. The fact that the cassette lasted for almost four decades is a minor miracle.

Video recordings are even more transient. VHS tapes won the market in the 80's, only to be killed off by digital media two decades later.

So, in audio-visual realm, switching media has been quite common over the years.

Books have lasted for centuries. Some people attach an almost romantic quality to them. Personally, I love digital books, but for those other people, it can be a hard sell.

 

Once someone begins having to actually work and earn money for a living they become much less cavalier about paying for the same thing over and over again.

There is also frustration in finding that a content provider has withdrawn something you want to see/hear/read which you assumed would be there when you wanted it. Similar to trying to find something that has gone out of print but worse; at least for OOP material there's a chance you can find a used copy somewhere that you can legitimately obtain.

On the other hand, the concept of "cloud-only" lends itself quite well to the notion that most product is not necessarily worth hanging onto anyway.

 

No spit Sherlock. A library of films was the kind of thing only movie moguls and stars might have. Or the filthy rich. That was life growing up, no on demand anything. Except your home movies(8mm), or your records. I now have a film library and TV series collection that could program a network. It would make one of those rich guys from the 60s green.

 

Actually, I think this board is a direct rebuttal to that statement. You've seen the pictures of some guy's collection of 66 variations of Abbey Road, correct?

 

Bookmarking this post for future reference.

 

All disks can go tomorrow.

 

Understood, but that's an exception to the majority. There's a big difference between choosing to collect multiple copies of the same material, which you then own, versus having to pay for the something each time you want to hear it.

 

It's no longer a controversial, outside-the-box prediction to say that physical media is on its way out.

I think there will be a niche market for physical media for quite a few years to come. All of these articles saying "CDs to end production in 2018!" and stuff like that are silly. There are still people who buy physical media either by choice or by necessity.

I'd say in ten years, maybe even twenty, there will still be boutique labels issuing things on various physical formats. The big studios will eventually give it up, but I think labels like Criterion will continue to serve that niche higher-priced boutique market for quite some time.

The more interesting question, especially pertaining to music, is how long *downloads* will survive in the wake of streaming. There have been rumors that Apple will end sales of downloads on the iTunes store in the next few years.

I wouldn't be surprised if CDs and vinyl outlast actually purchasing and downloading music. Someone will either want (or need) it physically, or won't care how they get it if they're using a connected device.

Hopefully some folks will see the value in owning something physically so that when a studio "pulls" something, it can still be owned and viewed/listened to.

 

The best home theater I ever built is in a huge, rambling house out in the country outside of Ames, Iowa. 15 seats, and a Sony G90 9" CRT projector that was unrivaled in picture quality at the time (and still looks pretty damn good!), Lexicon and Cinepro audio, etc.

But his only sources of content are DirecTV, over-the-air or discs. Streaming requires a great Internet connection and he's too far for DSL, 4G is insanely expensive per gigabyte and the cable company wants thousands to run a cable to his home. All these people saying physical media is dead should visit my clients home.

My wife said that her dream, growing up on a farm in rural Kansas, was to have her own movie library.

 

Haven't PCs already abandoned the optical drive as a standard piece of hardware? I may be off base, but it seems like you can't really buy PC software on disc anymore, and if you do buy it in the store what you tend to buy is a download code.

Three of the last four PCs (all Windows machines) that my household has acquired have had no optical drive.