Another sign the end of physical media is near (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

I don't know what's next for me. I'm invested in blu-ray and HD at present. I hope to upgrade to UHD HDR in two or three years, and I'll buy a UHD title if it's minimally more expensive than the blu version.

But on the matter of physical matter, it's possible that it's easier to go softcopy in three years for UHD.

I'm skimming some recent purchases, looking at special features. Putting in a movie like John Wick which causes my player to spin for 15 seconds checking for updates, and then have to manually skip seven trailers, and various warnings to not pirate the disc I've purchased. And then the menu has a video fade in. And finally I can do something.

There's my TiVo: instant access to shows. Streaming HD content from Netflix and Amazon: instant access no delay.

I would love for a solution that dispenses with the blu-ray garbage but has all the quality.

But, as I look at the commentaries on my movies...the great ensemble of special features on The Force Awakens...and I don't like the looming disappearance of that great content due to streaming and soft copies taking over.

I just want it all.

 

[bigshot]

I have thousands and thousands of movies in my collection in all kinds of formats. I've got a ten foot screen and a great projector to play them on. The best of my DVDs look just as good projected as blu-rays. In my experience, the quality of the film elements and transfer matter a lot more than if it's a DVD or a blu-ray.

I found a good price on Criterion's blu-ray of Kiss Me Deadly, so I grabbed it. It was fantastic and I was on my third time watching it when I glanced at the case and realized it was a DVD I was watching, not a blu-ray. The difference really isn't that great.

It could be that my particular equipment upscales DVDs better than other folks' players. I'm using an Oppo to deinterlace and Darbee to restore organic detail. But even without this, I can't imagine having to spend so much to re-buy movies on a higher resolution format that you can't afford to buy new movies you've never seen before.

I just got Kevin Brownlow's TV series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film that is sourced from laserdisc, and watching it I found a film I really wanted to see- Noah's Ark directed by Michael Curtiz. So I ordered the DVD from Warner Archive. I'd much rather be watching films I've never seen and documentaries that I can learn about more films I haven't seen in standard definition than worry about being able to count the gray hairs on Harrison Ford's head in Blade Runner with added pixels.

There are WAY too many great films out there to waste time watching the same movies over and over again in gradually higher and higher resolution. I really don't care about format, packaging or physical or digital... All I care about is seeing great films I haven't seen before. The wider I spread my net for that, the deeper I discover the ocean to be.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I

I found a good price on Criterion's blu-ray of Kiss Me Deadly, so I grabbed it. It was fantastic and I was on my third time watching it when I glanced at the case and realized it was a DVD I was watching, not a blu-ray. The difference really isn't that great.

I have done that a couple of times and became so engrossed in whatever film I was watching that I didn't notice until the layer change -- my Panny BD player does not handle them smoothly like my Oppo DVD player, which I usually use for SD-DVD playback I did notice recently on one title just as I started it up, since it loaded to the main menu so quickly and I couldn't find a high-res audio track to select.

 

[Paul_Warren]

Physical media is going nowhere fast anytime soon! Most of the world needs many more years to have 4K streaming capable internet so in the meantime discs will still be sold if anything the disc market will expand a little as more and more people realise streaming is garbage quality wise. As you view streams on a 4K monitor the difference is so obvious & as the internet speeds are just not going to be anywhere near fast enough for most of the biggest markets you can see discs still have a place for some time to come.

One thing which may expand is the studios all start their own MOD programs via the internet so you can order a title then perhaps have the ability to burn the disc at home. I could see something like that starting if it truly is too much hassle for the studios to keep pressing these pesky (to them!) discs!!!

 

[DaveF]

I'd love to hear from some Millennials and younger on the topic. Talking with friends with kids and also my 20-something co-workers, what I hear is:
* Kids don't watch TV. It's all Youtube. Maybe shows streamed
* 20-somethings increasingly don't own TVs and don't want to pay for cable. They stream. They never buy TV shows on disc.

Just anecdotal. But in my little bubble, I see a wave of adults coming who won't be interested in buy physical media.

 

[atfree]

I'd love to hear from some Millennials and younger on the topic. Talking with friends with kids and also my 20-something co-workers, what I hear is:
* Kids don't watch TV. It's all Youtube. Maybe shows streamed
* 20-somethings increasingly don't own TVs and don't want to pay for cable. They stream. They never buy TV shows on disc.

Just anecdotal. But in my little bubble, I see a wave of adults coming who won't be interested in buy physical media.

I have a 24 year old and a 20 year old (and 2 teens still at home). None of them watch TV except for Game of Thrones, American Horror Story, and sports. Certainly not the way my wife and I do.

They stream (some illegally I'm sure), watch stuff on phones, tablets, etc. YouTube and the Internet is TV to them And they have no interest in physical media at all. They've become accustomed to "HD" but no idea about compression, lossless audio, etc. To them HD is HD. They find my 900+ BD/DVD collection charming....and not in a good way.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I'd love to hear from some Millennials and younger on the topic. Talking with friends with kids and also my 20-something co-workers, what I hear is:
* Kids don't watch TV. It's all Youtube. Maybe shows streamed
* 20-somethings increasingly don't own TVs and don't want to pay for cable. They stream. They never buy TV shows on disc.

Just anecdotal. But in my little bubble, I see a wave of adults coming who won't be interested in buy physical media.

I have three stepsisters in three different states ranging from 22-28. All three have roommates and share common living rooms, so their TV situation is somewhat shared. My oldest stepsister is the 28 year old and she's living in Austin, Texas. She doesn't own a television set, and instead streams content on sites like Hulu and YouTube on her laptop. When my brothers went away to college, I got them some of what I'd consider to be "essential dorm movies" on DVD to enjoy. When my oldest stepsister went away, instead of getting her discs of those movies, I put them on a hard drive instead.

The stepsister in the middle lives near me in New York. She and her roommates share a television and they have a Roku and share accounts for things like Netflix and Hulu, but don't subscribe to cable service, or have an optical disc player. When she went away to college, I had gotten her a Blu-ray player and some discs, and I think they're still in their shrinkwrap.

My youngest stepsister is in college in Maryland and I'm not 100% sure but I think she and the roommates have a communal TV with cable. I'm not sure what their disc situation is, but I know she wasn't a disc crazy teenage so I can't imagine that's changed much in a few short years.

At various points, I've been under the same roof at least briefly with all of them, and they were all respectful of my collection and intrigued by at least some of the titles. We've watched movies together before. My stepsister who lives near me will come by to watch a movie once a month, and she's really enjoyed watching some of the classics I grew up with that she never saw (like the Indiana Jones movies).

Going back to what I said on an earlier post in this thread, and on some other threads before, my stepsisters kinda prove my idea that ownership of movies has never really been the norm for the vast majority of people. When there was that brief window where purchasing a DVD was both the cheapest and most convenient way to see a movie, they might have grabbed one or two here or there (for instance, watching to watch "Twilight" at a sleepover party, it was easier for them to buy the DVD for less than $10 at Target than it was to wait for it to show up in the mail from Netflix back when it was a disc service). It's not that my collection is bad thing to them, but collecting movies simply isn't their hobby. They enjoy a movie with friends in the same casual way that people flip through the radio while they drive - for them, it's not about finding The Best Thing Ever, it's about being reasonably amused or entertained for 90 minutes while hanging with friends. I think that's the kind of movie watcher that most people are most of the time. I can understand why ownership just doesn't make sense if that's what you're looking for out of your moviewatching, and I can completely understand why a Netflix subscription combined with the occasional $5 rental from Vudu, iTunes or your cable's PPV is more than enough to satisfy that habit.

Taking it back to present day movies - I think discs, and digital purchases (not rentals), will continue to sell for big franchise movies that people like to rewatch, and especially for kids movies. Finding Dory and Moana are movies that will have a lot more rewatch value for a lot more people than Manchester By The Sea and Moonlight will. I think ten years ago, movies like Manchester and Moonlight would have sold more on disc than today because streaming wasn't yet practical for most people, video stores didn't carry tons of copies of more indie titles like those, and buying them was usually pretty cheap and less hassle than trying to find that rental copy. Today, you can easily rent it at the touch of a button without leaving your house, and be done with it after that. Or, to take last year's BP winner as an example - Spotlight wasn't a big box office hit and it hadn't been widely seen before its win. The day after it won the Academy Award, it spiked to being the top digital rental. Ten years earlier, before streaming, the spike would have been in number of DVDs sold. Streaming's easier and more convenient now, so that's how people sought it out.

 

[Ed Lachmann]

One thing which may expand is the studios all start their own MOD programs via the internet so you can order a title then perhaps have the ability to burn the disc at home. I could see something like that starting if it truly is too much hassle for the studios to keep pressing these pesky (to them!) discs!!!

That is the very essence of my disappointment with "buying" titles from Amazon or iTunes, much less streaming them. When they do create some way for the consumer to burn to disc, even a one-time-only situation and especially to BD-R, they will have me as a faithful customer. Without it...NO DEAL. I will be done with the whole thing.

 

[jcroy]

That is the very essence of my disappointment with "buying" titles from Amazon or iTunes, much less streaming them. When they do create some way for the consumer to burn to disc, even a one-time-only situation and especially to BD-R, they will have me as a faithful customer. Without it...NO DEAL. I will be done with the whole thing.

Even if such a burning solution is viable and easily available, nowadays I believe it is too little too late.

Apparently the best manufacturer of "Made In Japan" blank dvdr discs JVC/TaiyoYuden, has already sold their operation to the worst manufacturer of blank dvdr discs: CMC. (CMC blank discs are sold under the brand name "Verbatim" with varying degrees of quality, but generally on the crappy side). This happened around a year ago or so.

In the recent past, I generally didn't trust non-TaiyoYuden blank discs for burning discs as a form of long term data storage. Nowadays I don't even trust the TaiyoYuden branded discs anymore, especially TaiyoYuden discs manufactured by CMC in 2016 and later.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

That is the very essence of my disappointment with "buying" titles from Amazon or iTunes, much less streaming them. When they do create some way for the consumer to burn to disc, even a one-time-only situation and especially to BD-R, they will have me as a faithful customer. Without it...NO DEAL. I will be done with the whole thing.

The thing for me isn't necessarily the superiority of the physical disc itself (though I appreciate the general durability of the disc, the bonus features often included, nice packaging and having something tangible to hold and put on display). Right now, the biggest thing holding me to discs over streaming for purchases is quality. The file on a BD disc for a two hour movie probably ends up being about 30gb (give or take depending on the movie and the encoding). The file size on a streaming copy is about 3gb, give or take. Even taking into account that streaming may use different and more efficient codecs than what's on the disc version, those two things aren't of the same quality. Get me downloads or streams that are actually offering the same resolution at the same quality, and I'll be less precious about having the physical thing to hold.

 

[Angelo Colombus]

Speaking of blank dvdr discs I noticed the disappearance of the stand alone dvd recorder. A few years ago brands like Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, Magnavox, sold dvd recorders and now all of them stopped making them.

 

[TJPC]

Speaking of blank dvdr discs I noticed the disappearance of the stand alone dvd recorder. A few years ago brands like Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, Magnavox, sold dvd recorders and now all of them stopped making them.

Look on Amazon.com. You will find several Magnavox DVD recorders still available. I see the writing on the wall however and have purchased two. One I still use daily, the other I am keeping in reserve.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Look on Amazon.com. You will find several Magnavox DVD recorders still available. I see the writing on the wall however and have purchased two. One I still use daily, the other I am keeping in reserve.

I have a question about those - last time I checked into one of those, it appeared that they could only record in 4x3 SD - so for instance, if there was a movie being shown in 16x9 on TV, instead of recording it as 16x9, it would record as 4x3 letterboxed. That was the dealbreaker for me.

Has that changed? Is it possible to get 16x9 (anamorphic) recordings of content that's shown on TV in 16x9, or is that always going to come out as 4x3 letterboxed?

 

[TJPC]

They make good standard recordings, but all 16X9 recordings are letterboxed.
I make a lot of recordings of movies from 1900-1950 from the TCM standard channel. These turn out fine.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

They make good standard recordings, but all 16X9 recordings are letterboxed.
I make a lot of recordings of movies from 1900-1950 from the TCM standard channel. These turn out fine.

Unfortunately that wouldn't work for me - my cable company provides TCM as an HD feed, and even when they're showing older SD masters of 4x3 content, that content is displayed within a 16x9 HD frame. Since I have a 16x9 TV, it looks just fine, but if I were to record those, they'd end up with black bars on all four sides of the image. There is no option from my cable provider to watch an SD version of the channel.

If they had come up with a recorder that could record in 16x9, I'd buy one in a heartbeat. But I don't think I'd get much use for one that would end up recording everything formatted weird. I'm guessing that's at least part of why they haven't caught on more widely - the recording quality is far inferior to what a standard DVR will record.

 

[Edwin-S]

I'm not really looking forward to the return of the business model that streaming represents. It is just the old network model of delivering what a company committee decides you should see. Even when there is a film that you like, you will be unable to own a copy of it and will be at the mercy of some company drone deciding that the film isn't getting enough eyeballs so it disappears from the rotation. Then you sit for years waiting for the film to be put back in rotation or, in a lot of cases, it never plays again.

Edit: For example, I remember one time, years ago, when the film "Rock and Rule" was scheduled to run on CBC. I had been waiting to see the film for a number of years before that, because it had such poor box office performance that it was pulled from theaters early. Finally, I was going to be able to see it. I turn on the the TV and a bloody Stanley Cup playoff game had preempted the film. I was so f***ing pissed off, I actually phoned the station and started yelling at them about it.

Thanks to that preemption it was another 8 years before the film came out on DVD and I was finally able to see it. I'm worried that streaming just represents a return to that shitty distribution model.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I'm not really looking forward to the return of the business model that streaming represents. It is just the old network model of delivering what a company committee decides you should see. Even when there is a film that you like, you will be unable to own a copy of it and will be at the mercy of some company drone deciding that the film isn't getting enough eyeballs so it disappears from the rotation. Then you sit for years waiting for the film to be put back in rotation or, in a lot of cases, it never plays again.

I think there are two kinds of streaming, and the scenario you're describing really only applies to one kind.

There's subscription service streaming, which is what Netflix offers. They're really no different than having a subscription to a premium cable channel like HBO - you get a selection of movies and shows that someone else has curated for you, that's in rotation indefinitely but not forever, with the selection constantly in flux. I agree that this is a poor substitute for owning DVDs/Blu-rays.

But there's digital purchases, which can be downloaded for offline storage or streamed for online viewing, and when you purchase it, it's yours. This is what services like iTunes and Vudu offer, and what Ultraviolet and Disney Movies Anywhere were designed for. This is the equivalent to purchasing a physical disc. The movies you've purchased stay in your library, regardless of current availability. For example, I have some titles in my Vudu library that are no longer available on Vudu for new purchases - but my existing copy still plays just fine. A new customer wouldn't be able to buy it themselves today (much like when a physical disc goes out of print), but that doesn't affect the availability of my purchase. Ultraviolet and Disney Movies Anywhere basically serve to guarantee your purchases, so that if the specific app/digital store you frequent goes out of business, your purchase of the license to view the movie remains active and can be used at different digital stores.

In theory, it's possible for movies to disappear from the services after being purchased, but in practice, if that happened frequently it would shake confidence in the system, and people wouldn't trust their purchases so they'd stop making them. The studios and storefronts have an incentive not to allow this to happen. As far as we know, there are only two examples of this happening in the history of digital movie purchases, and they suck, but they're examples from one specific studio. In one reported instance, Disney silently replaced an extended version of "Bedknobs & Broomsticks" with the original theatrical version, even for people who had specifically purchased the extended version. The digital storefronts were not able to get Disney to restore the version people originally purchased, but customers were able to get full refunds. (Apparently Disney kinda pulled one over on the storefronts, as they may have thought they were just getting a new remastered version of the digital file, and may have been caught by surprise to discover it was a different version of the movie. Based on the feedback they got from customers, I suspect they will be more careful about allowing these kinds of switches in the future.) The other instance, again Disney, was when Maleficent was released - Vudu apparently mispriced the 3D version lower than their contractual agreement with Disney allowed, and purchases were refunded and removed from the account after the fact. There was also some outcry over this - if you walk into a brick & mortar store, and innocently buy a disc that had the wrong price tag on it, and the store sells it to you without realizing it was mispriced, the store does not have the right to break into your house a week later to take back the disc. For what it's worth, both of those incidents involved the same studio, and both happened around 2014. I think it says something that we haven't heard of any similar incidents since then.

Is digital perfect? No. Might it one day be? Possibly. Are there legitimate reasons to prefer one format to the other? Absolutely. Do digital purchases allow for building a collection and ownership similar to owning physical discs? Definitely.

 

[Edwin-S]

Those are some good points. I wish Crunchyroll was more like your Vudu example than Netflix or was a combination of the two models; although, a purchase model may be problematic as most of their stuff is TV series rather done-in-one films. However, there are a couple of series on their service that I would like to have the option of purchasing as I am concerned that they will eventually be pulled from rotation due to license expiration or lack of popularity from the demographic that uses that service.

 

[TJPC]

Unfortunately that wouldn't work for me - my cable company provides TCM as an HD feed, and even when they're showing older SD masters of 4x3 content, that content is displayed within a 16x9 HD frame. Since I have a 16x9 TV, it looks just fine, but if I were to record those, they'd end up with black bars on all four sides of the image. There is no option from my cable provider to watch an SD version of the channel.

If they had come up with a recorder that could record in 16x9, I'd buy one in a heartbeat. But I don't think I'd get much use for one that would end up recording everything formatted weird. I'm guessing that's at least part of why they haven't caught on more widely - the recording quality is far inferior to what a standard DVR will record.

Apparently there is some sort of regulation in North America that input from cable etc. to a video recorder can't use a HDMI cable but only video in RCA cables. This causes the letterbox effect when input is from HD sources. Output to TV is HDMI however. This is having the desired effect of discouraging such machines.

 

[Edwin-S]

Yes, they don't want people to have the ability to make near blu-ray quality copies of films and TV content, so they force the use of component cables which I'm pretty sure causes the content to be down scaled to 480p via the token, hence the black bars on HD content.