Yes, if I pay $20, it's for a disc. However, if I only pay $5, it's rare that Amazon (or anyone else) will send me a disc. I have set personal price ceilings for discs and streaming versions of films. Right now, I almost always wait until a disc drops under $18 for a single film before I will buy it. I used to have a $10 ceiling for 4K streams, but I've lowered it to around $7. For HD streams, I am willing to pay no more than $5.
We seem to have this same discussion ad nausem around here. Both discs and streaming have their pros and cons, and we still seem to battle the same misconceptions about streaming, too (purchases will disappear, video quality can only be good if you have a 1Gb Internet connection, etc.).
Two big, BIG problems in communication kept Digital VOD artificially alive with tech-illiterate studios for literally years longer than its profits suggested it should:
1) Nobody knew the difference between Digital VOD (ie. Vudu) and Streaming (Netflix/Amazon), and literally didn't know which one they were talking about--Especially since you watched one of your bought movies on a stream. Key point, though, was that there was a difference between paying $12 for a month of free watching on Netflix and paying $10-20 for
everything you wanted to watch. When one turned out to be more sellable, industry articles cried "Digital is popular!...Just look at Netflix's profits!"
2) Digital rental actually did catch on, and bury Redbox, because it
worked: If you cut the cord, you didn't need your cable's On-Demand to watch last-summer's recent movie you missed, you could rent it from Amazon for $5 (which was still cheaper than Blockbuster's old disk rentals), and if you didn't want to keep it, well, it was going to disappear in 48 hours anyway. While not a better idea than Netflix's old disk-by-mail, where you could just drop your disk in the front-door mailbox when finished, at least you didn't have to wait days for it to arrive.
...Did that mean we Loved Digital? No.
It just meant that customers tweaked the market of what the studios were selling into what the public wanted to
buy, and it made money there.
