comment #1

caslab says ...

I used to say the same thing about CDs, but I was wrong.

DVDs are a goner.

comment #2

travis b says ...

I don't know about DVD's going the way of CD's though. CD's have to compete with the new digital media and it's predecessor vinyl (which a lot of people feel is superior to any of the newer formats). DVD doesn't have any kind of predecessor that is on the same line as vinyl. The format won't last forever, but I don't see it completely disappearing so soon.

comment #3

Balthazar says ...

I don't know what makes me sadder:

1. That I once spent huge bucks to assemble a beautiful collection of DVDs -- Criterions, classics, documentaries, a couple box sets, Chaplins, Kurosawas, etc., etc.

2. That I have spent the past two years selling 95 percent of that collection, to help pay the mortgage and other bills.

3. That I will (probably) never again be able to re-assemble such a collection, for a variety of reasons beyond just the financial.

comment #4

mutinyco says ...

Physical media isn't going anywhere. Downloads don't offer a high enough quality. No special features. Too long to download. Too expensive.

DVD/Blu-ray will be around for a while to come.

comment #5

corey3rd says ...

CD isn't a dead format simply because you can upload all the music on your CD onto your computer/iPod system. You put it back on the shelf for storage. How many people have had hard drive crashes or iPods die? You want to rebuy that Led Zep collection?

DVD won't die as long as people can toss the discs into the BluRay player. My VHS collection is now in storage because I so rarely feel the need to break out a tape. And I don't feel like trashing it. My DVD-R recorder has taken over taping (I don't trust DVR harddrives).

I just don't think people want to spend too much cash on a download - the act of owning nothing

comment #6

Mark says ...

Physical media isn't going anywhere. Downloads don't offer a high enough quality. No special features. Too long to download. Too expensive.

True, physical media isn't going anywhere, but not for any reason given here. The quality will get high enough, there will be special features, and downloads will cost less. But as DVDs will continue to at least exist and be readily available as long as they continue to be much more gift-wrappable.

comment #7

mutinyco says ...

The quality will not be as good as physical media. It won't.

A 1.4 GB SD download will not equal the quality of a disk that can contain 8 GB.

As well, a 720p "HD" download at 4.3 GB will never equal a 25 GB disk that plays 1080p.

comment #8

Undercover Brother says ...

There's also the fact that the VAST majority of people walking around are technologically ignorant. We live in a country that promotes the idea that everyone is wired in every aspect. But the truth is that there is an enormous digital divide in this nation. To be as technologailly adept as many are portrayed as being would cost money and know how that many people just don't have. I work in a public library and I have to explain daily to numerous people what a caps lock button does. You think that same person will be downloading HD movies off a PC anytime soon? For a great many people, life peaked with VHS.

comment #9

nemo says ...

I feel like I'm dying a slow death waiting for a page to load up at the NY Times or the Wall Street Journal, even on broadband. And all of a sudden the entire world is going to be downloading entire movies?

Yeah, right. In another 10 or 15 years. Oh sure, it'll happen in the next year or two, but the experience will suck. Excruciating slow downloads, inferior picture quality, with no extras. It'll take at least a decade, maybe two before downloads are a generally acceptable replacement for DVDs.

There's a huge difference between downloading a few songs (even a few dozen songs) and downloading an entire movie.

I remember a decade ago, during the zenith of the dot com silliness, the marketplace was full of self-appointed prophets who were predicting the imminent death of the mouse, the keyboard, and the desktop GUI metaphor. Hasn't happened yet, won't happen in our lifetimes.

The DVD may die in our lifetimes, but you better plan on living a long time to see it.

comment #10

Richardson says ...

"I don't know about DVD's going the way of CD's though."

There's a big difference between CDs and DVDs. People have always wanted to listen to music as much as possible wherever they could. If you look at it, car stereos, Walkmen, Discmen, boom boxes, they all led directly to the iPod. More portable formats thrived. LPs couldn't kill 8-tracks because LPs weren't portable -- it took cassettes to kill 8-tracks, and CDs to kill LPs. Then CDs became portable and cassettes died. Then MP3 technology came along... and the iPod killed CDs.

Despite attempts by the industry, there has never been as much demand for portable movie watching. There are some people who do it, but even then, it's something else they do with their portable video game systems. I think studios will continue to market movies this way, because the people who are willing to watch movies portably on those tiny screens have a lot of disposable income, and rush out to buy all sorts of shitty movies on DVD on Tuesday morning. That crowd, I can see them shifting to downloads.

But "picture quality" means something to people in a way that "audio quality" never did. The people who buy DVDs because they're the best picture quality, who are now upgrading their TVs to 70" HD and buying Blu-Ray players... these people aren't going to want to download unless they can download something quickly and easily which will look as good as what they can buy in a store.

For some reason, "audio quality" never caught on. LPs sound better than CDs? Nobody cares. MP3s sound audibly compressed? Nobody cares. People just want to listen to their music, however they can.

comment #11

T. S. Idiot says ...

"For a great many people, life peaked with VHS." A week before Easy Living arrived on DVD, I realized I still had it on VHS and put it up for sale on Amazon, hoping to lure some sucker. Within 24 hrs, someone in Palm Springs bought it. VHS still matters to some. When will VCRs leave the market anyway?

Speaking of Amazon, as of today its dropdown menu no longer includes DVDs. You have to select Movies & TV, where the options are Blu-ray, HD DVD, VHS, and Unbox Video Downloads. Even the advanced search won't let you search for DVDs alone.

comment #12

Josh Massey says ...

T.S.: The "Movies & TV" section of Amazon is the DVD section. The Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, etc. is under "More Formats." As in, aside from DVD.

Richardson: Exactly what I was going to say, except you did it with more thought and insight. Thanks.

comment #13

nemo says ...

"For some reason, "audio quality" never caught on. LPs sound better than CDs? Nobody cares. MP3s sound audibly compressed? Nobody cares. People just want to listen to their music, however they can."

By the late sixties, the Rolling Stones kept a cheap AM car radio system in the recording studio while they were working. When they had a track they were reasonably satisfied with, they'd play it through the car radio a few times to make sure the song sounded good coming through a low-quality car system.

They knew that in those days a cheap-ass car radio was the way most of their audience would first hear a song, then decide to buy it. Unless you were alive and driving back in the 60s and 70s, you wouldn't believe how lousy the sound was back then.

Sound systems in cars improved tremendously by the 90s, but a car is still a poor listening environment for an audiophile, what with all the road noise. But even today most people listen to most music under less than ideal conditions while their attention is divided by other tasks -- driving, working, cooking, working out at the gym.

Unless you're listening to classical music, you don't really need top quality sound. Like the Stones in the days of yore, most popular music stands up to less-than-ideal listening conditions.

People are a hell of a lot more demanding of picture quality in a movie -- after all, they're usually relaxing on their couch giving their full attention to their nice new big flat-screen TV.

comment #14

pbjmahwah says ...

I think the saddest sentence in that post is: "The British Video Association (BVA), which last month celebrated the DVD's 10-year milestone at a gala dinner complete with metallic dress code. . . "
Really, now?! A freaking GALA dinner to celebrate a piece of metal w/ a hole in it?
Nice priorities. Who do you think the guest speak was for THAT celebration -- Ron Jeremy?

comment #15

Richardson says ...

"By the late sixties, the Rolling Stones kept a cheap AM car radio system in the recording studio while they were working. When they had a track they were reasonably satisfied with, they'd play it through the car radio a few times to make sure the song sounded good coming through a low-quality car system."

That's really interesting, nemo, thanks for the follow-up.

This may not actually be true, but I have long suspected that a lot of CGI is done in a similar way, because so much of it looks good [or good enough] on a 20" TV, but looks terribly fake on a theater screen, so fake you wonder how it ever passed muster.

comment #16

corey3rd says ...

Digital music didn't kill CDs. it killed the music industry. It became the first hardware upgrade that didn't require much effort for you to upgrade your music. You own an iPod and you want to listen to your Stones CDs on your player, you don't have to go to the iTunes store to blow hundreds of dollars for all new digital tracks. You just rip and transfer your Stones CDs. You couldn't do that with vinyl to CD. You couldn't make CDs out of your crummy low grade cassettes (until a decade later when CD-R hit).

the iPod is killing the entire music industry - not the CD.

comment #17

Roman says ...

People will always want to collect and put things on their shelf. Tangible things. Let's not underestimate that.

comment #18

Balthazar says ...

More thoughts:

1. Sure, I still have some of my VHS's, too. ... But how long will those tapes last before starting to truly deteriorate. ... And and it's only going to get harder to get VHS players in the future, because they'll stop mass-producing them when the economics stop making sense. Then you'll have to pay and arm and a leg to get a working used VHS machine on eBay. ...

2. The DVD boom --- when folks like me bought dozens of 'em --- came at the exact same time as our nation's last great run of prosperity and disposable income -- the late 1990s. ... If DVDs were just coming out today, they're a novelty I just could not afford, even at $18 a pop. And I certainly can't afford to add a Criterion to my collection any more than I can afford to eat a good piece of stake, hire someone to mow my lawn or get a spiffy new iPod. There's just no extra money any more. Folks are scraping by much more than they were in 1998.

comment #19

Balthazar says ...

Jesus, I know steak the food is spelled steak. Sorry.

comment #20

atticusrex says ...

I think the studios would be making a big mistake just relying on downloads. It will take at least 1 if not 2 generations to come along before we wipe out the 'I want to own it' need.

Sure you could download a movie. Burn it? Keep it on a harddrive that could go kablooey? Nope. Sure peeps are downloading on iTunes. Sure other sites offer it as well and it serves as another conduit to purchase said material.

But physical media has a big part period. Especially box sets and TV show collections. Besides physical media has one major thing over downloadable media. Physical means there is an intrinsic value to the item. It can be traded, resold, gifted.

If anything the next thing to displace DVD's is a physical media that doesn't need moving parts.

After all books are still being printed and selling and magazines keep getting published along with newspapers though I admit newspaper readers are shrinking.

comment #21

Jay T. says ...

It will ONLY happen when and if it becomes as easy to burn a DVD you own into a computer file as it is with a CD. If that doesn't happen, DVDs will be around for a long time. It's really that simple.

comment #22

Jay T. says ...

I should follow up to my post above with...

AND if and when it's as easy to transfer those movie files to your home entertainment system as it is to transfer a song to your ipod. Those two things must happen and anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn't get it.

comment #23

Edward Havens says ...

"There's just no extra money any more. Folks are scraping by much more than they were in 1998."

Yet, somehow, folks are still going to the movies. More than $835.25M in movie tickets were sold in just the past four weeks, on just seven movies (Iron Man, Made of Honor, Speed Racer, What Happens in Vegas, Prince Caspian, Indiana Jones, The Strangers and Sex & the City), and this year saw the box office cross the billion dollar mark quicker than in any time in history, although admittedly it has slowed since. But people are still going to the movies, and are still spending at the snack bar, so there is still some disposable income out there.

But to get back on topic... digital video disks will survive for a long while, simply because people still have a materialistic view about their media. It's even why LPs are making a small comeback. There's something about acquiring a library. Being able to share it with others. Being able to loan it out to others. Being able to take it somewhere else. I'm having some friends over for a movie night on Thursday, and we're going to watch a 1986 TV movie with Keanu Reeves which was shot at our high school the summer we graduated from that school. I don't own the DVD. My friend and contributing writer Dick owns it. He also has a small role in the film, which is why he owns it. But I don't own it, so he's lending it to me for the night. It's that sense of ownership that will keep physical media alive. Books have survived for hundreds of years, despite all the technological advances, because people want to turn the pages. It's not the same as reading a book online or on a Kindle.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to watch my DVD of Control that just arrived.

comment #24

corey3rd says ...

also the DVD boom was lessened with the rise of Netflix. People who would have bought the latest big film merely put it on their queue.

comment #25

Balthazar says ...

Edward Havens wrote: "Yet, somehow, folks are still going to the movies. More than $835.25M in movie tickets were sold in just the past four weeks, on just seven movies (Iron Man, Made of Honor, Speed Racer, What Happens in Vegas, Prince Caspian, Indiana Jones, The Strangers and Sex & the City)"

Yes, but keep in mind the soaring price of movie tickets, which makes it impossible to calculate how many PEOPLE are going to movies compared to 10 or 20 years ago.

I paid $10 per ticket for two tickets to the Indiana Jones matinee. Because my wife wanted to go. $20 to go to the matinee. And we skated buy purchasing just one drink at the counter for $4.75. ... So that's $24.75 for two people to go to one matinee. I didn't even bother looking to see what the single-ticket price was after 5 p.m.

That's the second movie we've been to in a theater this calendar year, putting us on track to go to about 4-5 movies total in 2008.

Meanwhile, for $4.95, we watched "Live Free or Die Harder" on Comcast on Demand the other night. ... That's cheaper than the theater, cheaper than the DVD, cheaper than a Netflix subscription and more convenient (and just about the same price) as going to Blockbuster for one rental.

I'm looking forward watching 3:10 to Yuma, The Savages, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and a couple other top films from 2007 for the very first time via this cheap Comcast on Demand method. Or the even cheaper (free) method of watching them when they eventually come on one of Comcast's many free movie channel.

I'll be surprised if I add more than one or two DVDs to my collection the rest of this year. (And I'll probably sell another half-dozen or more DVDs by the end of the year)

comment #26

nemo says ...

"More than $835.25M in movie tickets were sold in just the past four weeks, on just seven movies (Iron Man, Made of Honor, Speed Racer, What Happens in Vegas, Prince Caspian, Indiana Jones, The Strangers and Sex & the City) . . ."

At least 3 or 4 thousand of those dollars were spent on tickets to Speed Racer!

"It's that sense of ownership that will keep physical media alive. Books have survived for hundreds of years, despite all the technological advances, because people want to turn the pages. It's not the same as reading a book online or on a Kindle."

Absolutely. One thing you can sure of is that 200 years from now, our great-great-great-great grandchildren will still be buying books. A book is like a button or a shoelace -- it is already the perfect technology for the job it does.

The reason some technologies don't survive long-term, such as 78 records, tape cassettes and VHS, is that they're pretty crappy technology for the job they're supposed to do. But some technology is already terrific, which is why we still use a lot of technologies that are decades, centuries, and even millennia old.

comment #27

dixiedugan says ...

I would agree that people don't have the disposable income to just blind buy dvds anymore. I make it a policy to not blind buy with only a couple of exceptions - the water bill has to be paid first. But that's also why you'll find sites like Deep Discount having periodic 20% sales, Netflix doing booming business, and in my town a couple of resale shops that are pretty busy. However, there's still a thrill for me to open that shipped box and find the latest Gangster set inside, it's the feel of the case and the artwork. Of course...I only order that after I've eaten bologna sandwiches for lunch weeks on end.

comment #28

Richardson says ...

"I would agree that people don't have the disposable income to just blind buy dvds anymore."

I would agree that people don't have sufficient disposable income that they should be blind buying DVDs, but take a trip to a Best Buy or Circuit City on a Tuesday... if you dare!

Seriously, people who look like they ought not to be buying anything still buy new discs by the armloads, for some reason.

comment #29

Richardson says ...

"Meanwhile, for $4.95, we watched "Live Free or Die Harder" on Comcast on Demand the other night. ... That's cheaper than the theater, cheaper than the DVD, cheaper than a Netflix subscription and more convenient (and just about the same price) as going to Blockbuster for one rental.

"I'm looking forward watching 3:10 to Yuma, The Savages, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and a couple other top films from 2007 for the very first time via this cheap Comcast on Demand method."

For $20, you could get a month of Netflix with 3 discs at a time. It's much cheaper than Comcast On-Demand. (And you probably only need 2-at-a-time.)

comment #30

Balthazar says ...

Nah, I'd never pay to watch that many movies in a month on Comcast. ... I'll pay to watch 1 or 2, for a total cost of $5 or $10. .... That way I pay as I go for a modest price.

But yeah, if I ever again have the free time to watch 5+ new movies per month, Netflix would be the way to go.

comment #31

Bastman says ...

You are all equating ownership with having a physical disc that you can place on the shelf. This does not necessarily constitute ownership for the digital generation. If you look at the way Apple TV let's you browse and access the movies you've bought, you will notice that it emulates the experience of browsing someone's shelves to check out their taste.

The complaints about the quality of movie downloads are just shortsighted. 5 years ago it took a day to download a movie. Now, it takes two minutes before it begins streaming in a decent, if not HD, quality. Anybody who doesn't think we'll be downloading 1080p movies in less than 5 years is just plain wrong.

Hard disks are increasingly getting cheaper and with a little bit of ingenuity, it's not that hard to rip all your DVDs and create your own virtual library, accessible wirelessly throughout the house. That's today, guys, not 5 or 10 years from now.

The reality is that within the next 10-15 years, no one will buy movies and music in any "solid" format, except the oddballs who refuse to give up old habits. When turning on any screen will allow you instant access to any movie ever made, what would be the point?

comment #32

corey3rd says ...

Netflix does offer a one at a time with 2 rentals a month plan for $4.99 a month which makes it as cheap as your single comcast rental of Diehard 4.

comment #33

Dellos says ...

when you own the medium you pay one price and own it for the life of the medium. The problem of down loading is you will have to pay every time you want to see it and hope it is in demand enough to still be on-line or copy righted for your country .

comment #34

Gordie Lachance says ...

You are all missing the point. In 10 years since the advent of dvd's, the studios have not even scratched the surface in terms of releasing catalog content. What are there, 15,000 titles available out of 100,000 films produced?

Now they have to begin again with BR. There is no more room in warehouses, no more room on store shelves. Paramount discontinued hundreds of titles last month because it's just not profitable anymore.

Yes, dvd's will always be around, if only so they can release Die Hard for the 100th time, but as far as real variety goes, downloading and burn-on-demand dvd's will be the only way to go.

comment #35

Bastman says ...

Dello, you are stuck in an old-fashioned way of thinking: Of course models will evolve so you are not paying over and over again for the same product.

For instance, maybe when you watch a movie for the third time, the system will recognize it as a favorite of yours that you've now paid enough for to get a free digital copy to own or life-long free viewing rights. In whatever medium or resolution or whatever.

Currently, systems are geared towards owning. This may not be the case in the future. The Rhapsody subscription model in music that gives you all-you-can eat access to music would actually work better for movies, I think.

comment #36

corey3rd says ...

first off, off the 85,000 movies that supposedly haven't been released on DVD, even Leonard Maltin lists 17,000. There's a lot of movies that I don't ever want to see again.

When the talk turns to watching OnDemand, we enter the realm of Netflix's WatchNow set up. Which at its core, becomes a cable channel that you can program. If this is the case than the movie studios will get back to what they've always done - exhibition. Why do they need to sell their films with the knowledge that DVDs get passed around and they don't get a piece of the action everytime its viewed?

comment #37

dixiedugan says ...

Netflix is my go to place for serials as in The Six Wives of Henry VIII, House of Cards, various PBS or History docs. It's something I really want to see but don't need to own. We all have our own personal quirks, I love Powell & Pressburger but I don't feel the need to own every film of theirs. There's that Borzage/Murnau set that'll be out this fall - I'd love to have it but it's probably gonna be cost prohibitive. Usually I only buy if it's something I'm going to watch multiple times. Cheaper then to rent first and save for it later. Even so, my $$$ at DvdSpot shocks me.

"In 10 years since the advent of dvd's, the studios have not even scratched the surface in terms of releasing catalog content. What are there, 15,000 titles available out of 100,000 films produced?"

The studios aren't going to release what I myself might want, for example, because I'd be the only person buying it. Thank heavens for dvd recorders for that purpose. While it's frustrating, the studios aren't going to release a title that isn't going to make 'em a profit of some sort. You can see it at a whole bunch of classic boards, people bemoaning why such and such isn't released. While I have sympathy and a wish list of my own, it just ain't gonna happen.

comment #38

RDP says ...

I like to consider myself relatively technically savvy, and I wouldn't mind watching downloaded movies in lieu of a physical rental.

However, like a good many people I know, if I want to watch a downloaded movie, that means sitting in my home office, crowded around a 20" computer monitor.

Yes, there are options available to get the movies from my computer to my TV, but all of them have flaws large enough to keep me from making the plunge (including having so many competing devices. I might need an AppleTV to watch iTunes movies and a Netflix box to watch Netflix downloads, and so on.)

And even that only gets it onto one television. If I want to set it up so my kids can watch in their rooms or my wife and I can watch in our bedroom, then I need more boxes and cables and whatnot. And even then, if my mother-in-law wants to borrow a movie from me (which happens all the time), then I have to devise some solution for that. Seems a lot cheaper and easier to just spend $100 or so on DVD players for each room.

If I want to listen to downloaded music anywhere, I spend a couple of hundred dollars on an iPod. The iPod makes listening to my music significantly more convenient just by nature of its design (it's high capacity and it's portable. It easily plugs into my car stereo or my home stereo. And, it's relatively cheap). The iPod is a clear improvement over lugging a bunch of CDs and a portable CD player around.

The current movie downloading options make my life significantly more expensive and complicated just to attempt to recreate the experience I can easily achieve with DVDs.

It needs to become a lot easier and cheaper to match the experience (even forgetting about quality or DVD extras that I almost never watch) to make it worth my while to give up DVDs

comment #39

D.Z. says ...

corey: Actually, I think the music industry killed itself long before the iPod, when it chose the path of pre-manufactured acts. To be more precise, the record companies don't even bother creating groups to come up with songs any more; instead, the companies just wrote the music, came up with the gimmick to sell it, and then inserted vapid models to perform it. It's actually a step down from lip-synching, since there's no pretense of actually trying to create the right balance of tonality and presentation, which is why you get non-singers like Ashley Simpson.

Unfortunately, we're also getting that approach with film,
which is why the DVD market is on such a decline. So, what will really hurt downloads and Blu Ray are the lack of must-have product. Sure, people will buy Star Wars in any format (even though the last release was the worst-seller for George), but unless studios really invest in quality films in the future (tent-pole or otherwise), no one will make the leap, plain and simple. That's also why the theater chains which got screwed by the conversion to digital are so reluctant to upgrade to 3-d: They don't want to force consumers to pay more money for admission to a film which is only marginally better on the visual level, and significantly worse on the entertainment level.

comment #40

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