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The Resiliency of DVD and Blu-ray

21 Aug, 2015 By: Thomas K. Arnold

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Blu-ray Disc’s 10th birthday is less than a year away, and the resiliency of the disc came to mind the other day when I was reading the Futuresource Consulting report about the continued popularity, among consumers, of buying movies on disc.

In case you missed it, the survey, of 6,000 consumers in the United States, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Australia, found that more than 50% still regularly buy either Blu-ray Disc or DVD. And in the United States and the United Kingdom, the percentage of people buying discs has actually gone up from an earlier survey.

That supports the notion I’ve held that the primary reason we’re seeing such big drops in disc-sale revenues is a sharp drop in the average sales price.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not wearing blinders, by any stretch. The home entertainment industry has been disrupted by Netflix and subscription streaming, which continues to eat away at the transactional business because it plays right into the two primary drivers of consumer habits: the desire to get stuff cheap and easy. The Netflix model is focused on both, and that’s why we’re seeing continued gains in subscription streaming.

But let’s not count out the disc, not just yet. There are plenty of consumers who still prefer to buy and rent Blu-ray Discs and DVDs, maybe because they want new movies that won’t show up on Netflix for another, oh, eight or nine years; or there are bandwith problems in the area where they live; or they want a better picture and sound; or they’re simply coming down with what I call “Netflix fatigue,” a disenchantment with the tired catalog retreads that make up the bulk of Netflix’s movie library. Last April, PCWorld ran an article addressing precisely this issue, noting, “Netflix has a great roster of TV shows, but its movie catalog sucks, to put it bluntly” and suggesting viewers who want a better selection install a VPN and, in effect, “move to another country where Netflix offers its service. … The other day someone I know was in the mood for a baseball movie, but have you seen Netflix’s baseball movie selection right now? It's not great. The best choices were either The Bad News Bears or The Perfect Game. Fine movies, but not what he wanted. So he fired up a virtual private network provider, took a (virtual) trip over to Canada and lo and behold Netflix Canada was streaming Major League. Excellent.”

I’m also noticing a growing sense of optimism among industry insiders about a likely resurgence in popularity for the Blu-ray Disc, fueled by the advent of Ultra HD. Streaming services continue to have trouble transmitting true HD, so just imagine the clogged pipes that await a format with four times the clarity, four times the resolution, four times the pixels — and four times the data. With streaming, the focus is on getting the title to the viewer with as few buffering interruptions as possible. And while some streaming services now offer the same 1080p resolution as Blu-ray Disc, they use significantly more compression to deliver content over the Internet — which impacts image quality. As Forbes noted, “For cinephiles or even anyone inclined in that direction, HD content viewed on the finest Retina tablet display or LCD flat screen can’t come close to a Blu-ray.”

Ultra HD TVs are coming and will eventually become the standard. And if history repeats itself, the early adopters will be hungriest for content — which, at this point, is best delivered on disc. After finalizing the Ultra HD Blu-ray spec and logo back in May, the Blu-ray Disc Association is going to start licensing the technology on Aug. 24 — this coming Monday.

If the studios as well as independent content suppliers really get behind this — and I sincerely hope they will — we could see a significant lift in Blu-ray Disc sales.

I know I’m not the only one keeping my fingers crossed.

 

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