It seems to me like Blu-ray is still very much a niche product. Some of the stores I go to have a very large DVD section, but have one shelf of blu-rays in a corner. You can buy a portable DVD player at any electronics store, portable blu-ray is still quite hard to find. I get that with portable hard drives, there isn’t much use for expensive blu-ray burners in a computer. But it is a great format for movies. Why isn’t it more popular? The only time I ever see people actually buying movies on blu-ray is out of the $5 bin at Big Lots.
As a former Blockbuster employee who started in the video business in the pre-DVD days, I’d venture to guess it’s because DVD to Blu-ray isn’t the quantum leap that VHS to DVD was. No rewinding, bonus features, language options, less prone to wear and tear, thinner and easier to store, etc. DVD was superior to VHS in every conceivable fashion, while DVD and Blu-ray share those qualities.
Digital distribution
Honestly it looks to me in stores I visit (which admittedly is not often as I buy online more) like DVD is almost dead and Blu Ray is taking its rapidly shrinking space on shelves. The reason is it shrinking is people no longer care about owning physical copies. Streaming and downloads satisfy them just fine. This change is happening rapidly. I worked with a person who was in her 20s and when I mentioned a DVD, she looked at me like I was taking about a phonograph cylinder.
For me, it’s definitely because I’d rather stream. I have no interest in owning physical media.
Agreed.
I’m not against owning physical media as much as I am against ever going out in public to a store, and don’t wanna wait for the mail. (Also don’t wanna pay)
I have never owned a DVD or a Blu-Ray disc but I rent Blu-Rays from Netflix. They have lots of stuff that isn’t available on streaming. That said, I stream a lot and do so through my Blu-Ray player which I got for like $89 so it’s not that big of a deal.
Because the standard price for a BluRay was much more than the standard price for a DVD. In a word: greed.
Myself, I cannot grasp people who say they are happy with streaming. Every single time I’ve thought to myself “I want to watch X”, I searched Amazon and Netflix and it’s not there. Seriously, I have never been able to find any particular title. And the whole idea of “renting” a title for streaming for double to triple what I used to rent DVDs is even worse. “Buying” a title is even worse, as you “own” it only until they shut down that service.
Nope, I won’t pay for a specific movie via streaming until it costs less than a dollar.
Because streaming became a thing not long after blu-ray hit the scene, and now streaming is the thing.
I own hundreds of movies on DVD and 50 or so on blu-ray, and whenever I want to watch any of these movies, even though I have it in my physical collection, it is simply more convenient for me to pull it up online.
Physical media for home entertainment is all but dead at this point.
There are ways to stream every movie and TV show, even those not available on Netflix or Amazon Prime. You just have to know where to look.
Yes. Along with this, prices for blurays started too high, relative to their incremental value added, and sometimes still are. A few bluray releases have been carelessly done–no better than, or even worse than the DVDs. When the selling point is supposed to be ~amazing~ great picture and sound (relative to merely very, very good DVD), and bountiful excellent special features… it doesn’t take too many expensive lemons to leave a sour taste. Plenty of people have bluray players but still buy mostly DVDs (if they want physical media at all). And yes, DVDs still outsell blurays by several times over, though the margin has closed a little.
/ his
I found it amusing that for a while all the DVD’s we rented had hard-charging ads for Blu-ray aggressively purporting to show how much better the picture was than on DVD – only they were showing this on a DVD so how could it possibly show that? On the one or two Blu-rays I watched I didn’t notice a difference. It seemed to me like they were trying to sell the emperor’s new clothes, much ado about nothing
Much of the country still doesn’t have really robust high-speed internet.
I have some blu-ray discs. I haven’t noticed any difference between them and my DVDs. So why should I pay more?
Remember when the movie industry was charging $100 or more for a single vhs copy of a movie?
Hahahaha!
I thought the same thing. We live in the boonies, and can’t get decent Internet service, so no streaming for us. We own a Blu-ray player because it was the same price as the DVD players when I was looking, but only buy and rent DVDs. I don’t see any real improvement, so I’m not paying more.
It does seem weird to me how many of the same people who talk about how you have to be blind not to tell the difference between HD and SD are also the ones that say that going from DVD to Blu-ray was just an incremental upgrade–or that they can’t tell the difference.
Yes, I know streaming is now big (to my chagrin, as it has no commentary), but the stuff about Blu-ray has been said for a long time.
I was a big adopter of streaming Netflix but canceled it awhile back, the number of quality movies and TV shows available just wasn’t high enough any longer. The first couple of years I binge watched tons of new shows I’d never followed and older classic TV shows / movies, but after awhile I found I’d spend 20-30 minutes looking for something I hadn’t seen, and that wasn’t some obscure (and poorly reviewed) film. Eventually I just canceled it.
People look at me oddly when I mention that I have a Hulu+ subscription but not a Netflix one–but Hulu+ actually streams lots of currently running network shows sometimes the day after their original air date or sometimes a week later. I don’t watch a ton of current TV but most shows I do watch are available on Hulu+.
As for being worried about digital services going away, that’s not really a big concern. If you buy digital HD copies from iTunes you get an = to BluRay quality movie file. The “service” of the iTunes store doesn’t have to exist to play the file, you just need the file (which you can store locally) and a working copy of the iTunes player.