State of the business of (1 Viewer)

[SeanAx]

[The headline should read: State of the business of home video rentals: disc vs. digital

I hit post before I realized it was incomplete.]

I just wrote a piece on a study by the NPD Group on the state of home video rentals for Videodrone at MSN. The results surprised me a bit considering the way the media discuss streaming video and digital downloads as not just the future but the present of home video rentals. In fact, well over half of the home video movie rentals are still via disc (DVD and Blu-ray), mostly from the Netflix rent-by-mail service. Here's the opening of the piece published on Videodrone at MSN, which presents the basic report:

http://social.entertainment.msn.com/movies/blogs/videodrone-blogpost.aspx?post=37733e95-df29-44f2-9059-76714bac5b05

Video rental stores are still closing, disc rentals overall are falling, and streaming video is growing, but according to a study by the NPD Group (reported by, among other sources, Home Media Magazine), discs still dominate the movie rental market.



Nearly 62% of all home video film rentals in the first half of 2012 were on disc, the study found, compared to 38% through all digital rental sources (streaming subscription services like Netflix Instant and Hulu, video-on-demand services on cable and satellite dish, and other web-based streaming sources).



The study found that digital rentals increased 5% from the previous period, due largely to Netflix, which accounted for two-thirds of the digital market. On the disc side, Red Box kiosks and the Netflix rent-by-mail service dominate the rental market.



So while the streaming and VOD services are growing, they are not yet the juggernaut that we imagine them to be. In other words, the reports of the death of DVD and Blu-ray have been greatly exaggerated.



*****



I go on to compare and contrast home video to music and sales market versus the rentals.



It's almost assured that web- and cable-based digital rentals will eventually (and probably sooner than later) supplant physical media as the dominant form of home movie rentals, but it's still a necessary reminder that it hasn't happened yet.



What the article doesn't address is ownership. The sales in discs are falling, for sure, and a lot of that is the slipping rental market, which drove sales of new films on DVD and a lot of catalog titles. But people still want to own their favorite movies and I don't see digital downloads supplanting discs anytime soon.



But I could be wrong. This is a board filled with people who love movies enough that they want to own them and view them in the possible versions. Anyone here seriously considering moving their collection to digital files on a hard drive? If so, what's your back-up plan for hard drive crashes? Does a digital file offer the same video and audio quality as a high-end Blu-ray on a good system?

 

[mdnitoil]

Well, since you ask, yes I'm moving my discs to a home server. In my particular case, it's more about the convenience and storage and not the format. I'm taking all my existing discs and doing full ISO rips to the server, which retains the complete menu structure of the original disc. I still want the bonus features to be available so this way works best for me. I'm currently running Windows Home Server which has some data redundancy built in, but expect to be migrating to a Drobo-type solution over the long haul. This will provide something like RAID 5 level protection of the data.
Now, all that being said, I have no intention to stop purchasing discs anytime soon. This is merely a storage/organization method for me. I still prefer having original media to go back to and all the extras that go with that. If the studios wanted to sell me a high bit-rate, non DRM file for a few bucks less, I would certainly be interested in that as an alternative to The Warner Archives or any other MOD release, but otherwise I'll take actual discs. I only mention the MODs because the paper sleeve and dodgy media wouldn't be worth paying extra for if I could save a couple of bucks.
In the long run, it seems the obvious overall trend is moving towards digital distribution and away from physical media. It's not surprising that the mountain that is physical discs is going to take considerable time to overcome, but the fact that the rental market is even close to 50/50 at this point in time concerns me far more than it reassures about the longevity of physical media.

 

[Bradskey]

I have been working on a project to convert my DVD collection to digital for years. I have not made as much progress with movies, but have converted massive amounts of my larger DVD collection. I don't do the ISO/folder structure thing, because it wastes gobs of space. I convert individual program titles and even bonus features to h.264 video to achieve greater compression while maintaining quality, and store all the meta-info about each individual video file in a custom database. Video is stored on a vanilla home NAS device running consumer-grade hard disks in a simple RAID-5 configuration. I also make efforts to store backup copies of all my converted videos to BD-R discs. I wrote my own custom software to maintain the database and to browse and play back my movies and videos, sort of like my own private Netflix with more/better selection.
Having said that, I have no use whatsoever for digital video purchases. I will occasionally do a streaming rental from Amazon, but I will not buy a digital copy. I have been burned by the freakin' awful Windows-based DRM used for digital downloads and those "digital copies" they include now, and I refuse to accept it any more. UltraViolet seems to be an improvement but I'm still not interested. I am only interested in buying physical discs, from which I can easily make my own digital copies and do as I please with them unencumbered. I don't have to login to jack squat or activate anything or wonder which content will suddenly stop working if I dare to upgrade a processor or a graphics card. To me digital video purchases should be no different from music, which is completely DRM-free now.

 

[SeanAx]

I would love to see a study on disc versus digital *purchases*. I understand the move to digital and streaming rentals - home video rentals were always a matter of convenience - but purchases are permanent and watching movies is a different animal than listening to music.

The folks on this board care deeply about movies and quality, more so than the general public, and I imagine that we will keep discs alive for a long time if only as a niche product. But whenever I search Amazon for a disc, I invariably find digital versions for sale along with DVD and Blu-ray, and would be very interested to know if this is a growing market or still just an idea that the studios would like to push for their own convenience.