Physical Media might not be dead, but Physical Media in Retail Stores are accelerating the death (1 Viewer)

[TJPC]

I was passionate about (still am) movies of the 1930s and would circle any one that appeared in the TV guide. I had a very old TV in my room and would stay up or set an alarm to get up all hours of the morning. I absolutely devoured classic comedies and musicals.

Of course we could not video tape yet, but I would connect my cassette player to the speaker with alligator clips and record all the musical numbers. I had a huge collection at one time.

 

[zoetmb]

When channels such as these phased out classic TV programming, in favor of infomercials, talk shows and endless reruns of Friends and Seinfeld, subsequent generations lost the opportunity to be exposed to older shows and movies, and so had no chance to gain any appreciation for them.

Friends and Seinfeld are older shows. Friends originally aired from 1994 (24 years ago!) to 2004 and Seinfeld originally aired July of 1989 (29 years ago!) to 1998. And many older shows are available on various cable stations. In NYC, one of the local OTA stations STILL broadcasts "The Honeymooners".

 

[Bobby Henderson]

It's not the retailers who are the problem. It's consumers. Get over it. It doesn't mean that physical media completely disappears. It just means that they'll be fewer physical releases, fewer examples of special packaging, fewer restorations and generally just a single pressing unless something turns out to be a surprise hit in physical media. With the big chains dropping media, maybe some independent retailers will pop up.

Consumers definitely deserve their share of blame for the decline of physical media. No question about it. Between freeloading via multiple forms of piracy to shopping as much as possible online, consumers have done their part to affect this negative trend.

However, the content creators/distributors have done their own part to sabotage sales of their product on physical media. 15-20 years ago DVDs often contained a great deal of value-added content. Not anymore. Many movie discs are bare bones affairs. I don't really feel like I'm missing much by watching a movie on Netflix versus buying or renting a Blu-ray of it.

Music CDs have traditionally not contained a lot of goodies inside the jewel case, but most major releases had audio that was mastered to some reasonably decent levels of quality. I don't know the specific year when the "make it loud" policy of dynamics compression took hold, but once it became standard it ruined much of the quality advantage of buying a Music CD versus buying songs one at a time in lossy data compressed audio formats.

Content creators/distributors also have contributed to their own business misfortunes. The music industry has been on a long downward slide for over 25 years. It's mostly a self-inflicted problem. Widespread consolidation of record labels, ownership of radio stations and other outlets of music has suffocated innovation. Prior to 1990 the music industry went through cycles of style upheaval every few years. A style of pop music would start to get bland and something new would come along to annihilate it -kind of like the death of Disco and birth of 80's music. Now it's just one long, slow, very corporate controlled (and very bland) transition of style. Nothing ground breaking. Artists routinely get hosed by the labels. But I can't be entirely sympathetic since the performers do things to abuse concert-goers (price gouging, letting mass scalping operations buy out the floor seats, etc). Pretty depressing situation.

The movie industry has been copying the music industry's moves of industry consolidation and tight fisted control over the kind of movies distributed to the public.

 

[Jeff Flugel]

Friends and Seinfeld are older shows. Friends originally aired from 1994 (24 years ago!) to 2004 and Seinfeld originally aired July of 1989 (29 years ago!) to 1998. And many older shows are available on various cable stations. In NYC, one of the local OTA stations STILL broadcasts "The Honeymooners".

I think you missed my point (about a generation lacking access to shows from the 1950s -70s). Friends and Seinfeld are old shows now...I'm talking about back in the late 90s / early 2000s, when it was hard to find a pre-1980s TV show on OTA channels, and on most cable channels, unless it was the staple oldies like Star Trek, I Love Lucy or The Andy Griffith Show. And yes (as I mentioned in my post), a greater variety of pre-80s TV shows are readily accessible again, thanks to digital subchannels like Me-TV, etc. I'm talking about that fallow period in between now and the pre-90s "Golden Age" of syndication outlined in Andrew Crosset's post. I do think there was a comparative dearth of classic shows for kids growing up then (in the 90s and early 2000s) to tune into. It was much easier to watch re-runs of recent shows. Availability and ease of access does make a big difference in gaining an appreciation of previous generations' entertainment, IMO.

 

[bmasters9]

I think you have some good points but there is a major one that is missed. Many younger people flat out refuse to watch older movies/tv shows, particularly ones in black and white. If it is not in color or the special effects are not current it does not exist (with a select few exceptions). There is no desire at all for anything “old.”

That's my nephew Montana-- again, his choice, so not my place to really judge him: one of his favorites is HBO's Game of Thrones, something that I have never cared for and will never purchase any of the releases of.

 

[Jeff Flugel]

That's my nephew Montana-- again, his choice, so not my place to really judge him: one of his favorites is HBO's Game of Thrones, something that I have never cared for and will never purchase any of the releases of.

I like Game of Thrones myself, but I can see how it would not be to everyone's taste. And I can see why many classic era TV shows wouldn't be to young people's taste now, either. It would be nice to see less of a blanket consideration of everything that wasn't made within the past five years as "old" and passe, though.

 

[bmasters9]

I like Game of Thrones myself, but I can see how it would not be to everyone's taste.

Didn't realize that! How many seasons' worth have you seen?

 

[Jeff Flugel]

Didn't realize that! How many seasons' worth have you seen?

Up through the most recent one (season 7). I watch a lot of current TV shows (though it must be said, most of them are cable shows, or streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime (like Stranger Things, some Marvel shows like Daredevil and The Punisher, Bosch and The Grand Tour, etc.)...and many of them are British or European (I just finished watching an excellent 2017 Swedish detective series called Rebecka Martinsson, for example).

I think there's much to value in today's entertainment as well as in the classic era. I usually prefer discussing older shows, though, especially here, where there are a lot of nice folks who share a similar interest in them.

 

[atfree]

Convenience maybe, but given the number of damaged discs I've gottne from Amazon I'm not even sure about that.

Price at worst is the same since BBY matches Amazon and most of the time Amazon is matching BBY anyway,
Plus BBY offers me easier returns, pickup discounts, RZ discounts, and a 45 day return/price protection guarantee. Amazon makes me pay
for returns (for non-damaged merchandise) and gives me zero day price protection for non pre-orders. .

I have never received a damaged disc from Amazon. Out of my 1000 or so, I've probably ordered 900 from Amazon. I don't really return much, plus never having to deal with the Blue Shirts trying to sell me a $100 HDMI cable makes Amazon a no-brainer for me.

 

[Mr. Handley]

I think that the media companies did themselves no favors by pricing CDs and DVDs way too high. They were caught napping when the internet came along and people started sharing for free. They eventually got it right by shutting down the sharing sites (where they could) and jumping on board with iTunes and streaming and charging more reasonable prices. I remember when single seasons of TV shows routinely cost $30 or much more. Now we can buy entire series sets for the same price. May be too little, too late. Also doesn't help that the younger generations are not into collecting physical items as us older folks were/are.

 

[bmasters9]

I think that the media companies did themselves no favors by pricing CDs and DVDs way too high.

You better believe it-- especially on that one-and-done Fall Guy release; I should have waited for Amazon for that one!

 

[AndrewCrossett]

I think you have some good points but there is a major one that is missed. Many younger people flat out refuse to watch older movies/tv shows, particularly ones in black and white. If it is not in color or the special effects are not current it does not exist (with a select few exceptions). There is no desire at all for anything “old.” It is not just a limited exposure starting in the second half of the 90s (there were plenty of channels showing old movies and tv shows for me anyway in the first half of the 90s) but also there is literally no desire for any of this by some younger millennials and those younger than that.

As a Baby Boomer, my recollection is a bit different, unless I'm misunderstanding you. When I was growing up, a lot of my friends and I, esp. in college, were intensely interested in our parents' pop culture, mainly 1930s and '40s movies, but also the music--big band, jazz, vocalists like Billie Holliday, etc.--and novelists like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. I remember when CASABLANCA came on TV, my siblings and I all watched it, eager to see our mother's favorite movie. And I would sit up at night watching old movies with my father often, one of the few things I enjoyed doing with him, because he was actually calm during these sessions.

I'm sure many Baby Boomers were interested in their parents' pop culture, but it was also the generation that put aside big band jazz in favor of rock & roll, and black-and-white film noir in favor of "new wave" cinema, and the family-friendly, often rural TV shows of the 50's and 60's in favor of gritty urban dramas and "relevant" sitcoms like those of Norman Lear.

Something similar is happening now. To my view the difference is the replacement now is much worse than it was then, but that's what I would expect. They say you know you've become part of the Older Generation when the current music starts to sound ridiculous to you. It's supposed to be that way.

It's not that kids today aren't open to their parents' pop culture. TV shows like Glee got very popular by featuring not just contemporary music but stuff from earlier decades... the show's signature song was "Don't Stop Believin" by Journey. And if you watch any old music videos on YouTube, you'll see lots of comments by younger people talking about how great this stuff is. Unlike us, they are growing up with the entire history of pop music at their fingertips for free, if they're willing to go look for it.

But the same isn't true with television. Digital sub-channels like Me-TV are very difficult to find and many providers don't carry them (frankly I have no idea where I'd find it on my television... I don't think my cable provider has it). If it's not on one of the streaming services, then people have no way to see it.

 

[TJPC]

We Baby Boomers had 2 “advantages”.
1). We had only 5 or 6 channels, so if we wanted to watch TV we had to watch what was offered. This exposed us to a lot of stuff we may not have picked at first but we found we actually liked.

2). Afternoons weekends and after 11:30 p.m. were filled with hundreds of old movies of every kind. Since sets were black and white anyway, they blended right in.

 

[Vic Pardo]

We Baby Boomers had 2 “advantages”.
1). We had only 5 or 6 channels, so if we wanted to watch TV we had to watch what was offered. This exposed us to a lot of stuff we may not have picked at first but we found we actually liked.

2). Afternoons weekends and after 11:30 p.m. were filled with hundreds of old movies of every kind. Since sets were black and white anyway, they blended right in.

I recently went through some old files and found TV listings from the 1960s and '70s. Between the six commercial broadcast stations there were old movies on practically all day, much like watching TCM today, except that TCM doesn't run some of the more obscure sci-fi/horror/monster movies we used to get a lot of back then.

 

[TravisR]

We Baby Boomers had 2 “advantages”.
1). We had only 5 or 6 channels, so if we wanted to watch TV we had to watch what was offered. This exposed us to a lot of stuff we may not have picked at first but we found we actually liked.

I was a kid in the 80's and early 90's and feel that that early 'cable era' was the best time to watch TV because there was options to watch a good amount of new and old TV shows/movies but not so many that you could never keep up with everything. It was also a time when black and white shows were still common enough that kids didn't automatically turn them off. Needless to say, nostalgia blinds me to some degree but I do think that having 30 or 40 channels to choose from gave people the ability to see a wide range of the old and current without overloading them.

 

[AndrewCrossett]

We Baby Boomers had 2 “advantages”.
1). We had only 5 or 6 channels, so if we wanted to watch TV we had to watch what was offered. This exposed us to a lot of stuff we may not have picked at first but we found we actually liked.

2). Afternoons weekends and after 11:30 p.m. were filled with hundreds of old movies of every kind. Since sets were black and white anyway, they blended right in.

That was my experience growing up as a Gen-Xer in the 70's and 80's too. I also grew up within the NYC media sphere, so we got the three "superstations" from there as well. I saw so much local NYC programming and commercials growing up that I almost felt like I lived there.

We had "cable" since me earliest childhood memories, but of course back then "cable" meant you got the three networks, PBS, and any available regional superstations over cable instead of at the mercy of an antenna, and you could get HBO if you subscribed.

I really, really miss all the great syndicated TV shows and movies we used to get back then. Daytime TV is unimaginably bad now. Infomercials, endless reruns of Cops, and those horrible "judge" shows. If I was a kid today I'd beg my mother to let me go to school if I was sick.

 

[Regulus]

I was like a child on Christmas morning when Cable TV came to my town in 1980. Twenty new channels, all MINE!!! 26 bucks a month got you these channels, along with HBO, Showtime and The Movie Channel (If you subscribed to two of them they tossed in the third for no cost). If I only knew what would happen 26 years later. After seeing an ad for a sex pill aired during a children,s show I responded by "cutting the cord" and went totally home video. I have many 1950's Sci-Fi Movies that used to be staples of late night TV. I like to say I grew dissatisfied with the networks, so I made my own Network! There is no such thing as bad TV in my house!

 

[BobO'Link]

We Baby Boomers had 2 “advantages”.
1). We had only 5 or 6 channels, so if we wanted to watch TV we had to watch what was offered. This exposed us to a lot of stuff we may not have picked at first but we found we actually liked.

2). Afternoons weekends and after 11:30 p.m. were filled with hundreds of old movies of every kind. Since sets were black and white anyway, they blended right in.

I recently went through some old files and found TV listings from the 1960s and '70s. Between the six commercial broadcast stations there were old movies on practically all day, much like watching TCM today, except that TCM doesn't run some of the more obscure sci-fi/horror/monster movies we used to get a lot of back then.

It's those experiences that made me the fan of older films and classic horror that I am today! A year or so after I graduated college I was unemployed for a few months and living with a good friend. We'd get up, make breakfast, turn on the TV to watch the daily morning war movie, have lunch, play some cards while watching whatever was offered as the afternoon movie and then head off to "town" to hang out and party with other friends. There was one channel that stayed on all night playing old movies - commercial free(!) so when we got in, we might turn on the set and watch another movie or two before nodding off (he had two couches and we'd usually just sleep there).

Like Terry, I'd set my alarm to get up in the middle of the night to see an old movie. As young marrieds my wife and I also did that, especially if it was a Charlie Chan or Thin Man movie, but also for old TV shows like "Burns & Allen" and "The Jack Benny Show."

Those experiences are also why I have a huge movie and TV show library on physical media.

I've been collecting music via vinyl records since I was ~13. The radio stations never played what I wanted to hear when I wanted to her it so my collection provided that option. As soon as a few select albums became available on CD I jumped to that format and never looked back. It's now exactly the same thing with my movies and TV shows on disc collection. Streaming never has and likely never will duplicate the variety of my physical collections, audio or video.

 

[Rob_Ray]

One of my most vivid childhood memories was at age nine. My dad and older brother were away on a Boy Scout camping trip, and my mom and my younger brother set the alarm for midnight to get up and watch KING KONG on Houston's Channel 13 (the movie program was a weekly horror offering called WEIRD). I had always wanted to see it and my mom regaled us with stories of seeing it in 1933 and not being able to sleep for days afterward.

Watching old movies on TV and getting especially hooked on the Marx Bros, W.C. Fields and Mae West comedies got me hooked on all things from the 1930s and 1940s. And because of physical media, this love will carry me to the end.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

I think we need to re-name this threat The Nostalgia Channel, but I have enjoyed tuning in to it. Sigh.