Boutique media distributors still exist for the limited audience still wanting physical media. For that I am grateful. Best Buy is cutting their losses, we live in a digital age, sad as it is for those who love collecting.
I’ll be really bummed when the next gen game consoles are 100% digital and that be that for game collecting. Alas, nothing lasts forever.
Really wish they created a new format based on nand technology like an nvme drive. Make it read only and just give us 1tb movies woth extremely high bit rates. I’d pay $50 a movie for that maybe even mote for certain movies.
You’d still want to make it easier for end users to use.
I’m thinking something the size of a fire TV box that accepts something the size of the Xbox series nvme cart. That way they cam still have art work and make it easy to switch the movies. For large file sizes like that it’s still better fir a lot of people to just buy the completed cart.
Nand prices continue to drop off a cliff. I just bought a 2tb nvme from microcenter for $65
The only advantage of disc is that it’s cheap. However we can look at the music industry and people willing to pay a premium on vinyl.
Bluray is limited by its transfer rate which is what 100-150 MB/s. While nand can go into the tens of GB/s. You also go from a 128GB of storage space into the terabytes of storage.
You couple an insane increase in transfer rate plus an insane increase in storage and then you have a videophile product. So sure Joe six pack won’t buy it at walmart but let’s be real they arent buying Blu rays anymore. Now is the time to go after collectors and those who want the best quality possible
I'm in the fairly niche group preferring digital ownership (although I also strongly feel we need legal revisions and consumer protections over things we digitally own, instead of the "well if this digital shop goes bankrupt, your stuff is just gone", DRM, HDCP hellscape, wild west we're in now) primarily because I'm against the huge amount of plastic and physical materials physical media creates. I am most heavily against the "subscribe to everything, give all the companies your money, and own NOTHING" extra super duper hellscape we're going towards now.
The parity of environmental impact of a physical disc versus streaming a movie is 4 play throughs. So, if you play your blu-ray / 4K disc 5 times, it is more environmentally conscious than streaming the movie from a data server.
I think what they’re talking about is buying online without physical media, but still owning what you bought, as in, the actual movie, as a file on your disk. Best of both worlds - no plastic, no servers necessary for playback after a one time download. That is how things should work.
I don’t think that group is as ‘niche’ as it seems. People who prefer digital just go buy digital. It’s harder to get nostalgic or evangelistic about digital goods, and the benefits are pretty obvious, so there’s not much point in trying to convince people of it.
OTOH, physical goods do tend to elicit nostalgia and some of the benefits are definitely in the eye of the beholder. People tend to talk a lot more about preferring physical things, perhaps because they feel the need to defend their choice. There’s often a lot of fear involved, like “What if they take my digital library away”, etc.
Digital “ownership” is often cheaper, takes less space, and is more convenient. Occasionally something stupid happens, but in general it’s pretty hard to lose your digital library.
And if you do lose it, I think most people would have no problem with using piracy to replace it. They bought it, and they deserve it.
I feel like this is a bad sign of things to come - like sooner rather than later, it’s going to be impossible to own physical copies of our media, and companies no longer want us to buy copies of things, just sign up for never-ending streaming services.
I'd say regular blu-rays are still relevant even. The jump in quality between regular blu rays to 4k ones just doesn't seem as substantial as the jump did between dvd and blu ray. or vhs and dvd. But maybe that is just my aging eyeballs that can barely tell the difference with this latest jump.
The picture quality isn’t as noticeable to me as the additional HDR and spatial sound that tends to be included. Even with that, any Blu-ray is significantly better than streaming.
Value for sure, but relevance? I challenge you to find one of your non tech obsessed friends (most of the population) that is still actively buying physical media or even still owns a disc player. I don’t even think I’ve heard my friends say the word blu ray in years.
Depends on age I think. All my 40+ year old friends have large DVD collections, as well as some in their 30s. I could see people younger than 30 not giving a shit about physical media. Personally I would go physical over digital.
I had DVD collection but already don’t watch or use/have a DVD player for longest time.(well I did have consoles that can play them. But I just never play them from disc.)
I just buy to support the film/anime/singer, download a high quality rip and play from my archive when I needed. (So if for any chance I got swatted I can show them I already bought the media already. I did the same for digital only purchase as well as I don’t like streaming quality.)
Like does it makes a lot difference between UHD vs a proper high bit-rate encoded rip? In my experience, if you never pause and compare side by side stepping frame, you probably won’t notice. (Yeah, bad encoding you can obviously notice, or some ultra wide with custom crop for easier encoding/smaller size).
If the hospital you send you employees to for workers comp says they want paperwork faxed, then you need a fax machine. Are there better ways to do it? Yea, but the hospital isn’t interested in that and you don’t get to argue so you have to use the fax like they said.
You could say that about any technology that isn’t cutting edge. The problem is when something is still standard in a particular industry, then yes you do “need” them.
Ideally we’d switch to better methods, but it takes time and organized effort.
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