Best Buy Ending Blu Ray & DVD Sales Soon

[Terry Monohan]

Best Buy is making a big mistake in not selling DVD's anymore. At least they need to keep on selling new releases.

Many of us will see a movie in a large theatre with a big screen and good stereo surround sound then will buy a copy If we like the film on Blu Ray when It hits our local Best Buy.

So many times while in a Best Buy store looking for a new or old DVD I will look around and purchase something else.

Now with no movie disk sales soon I probably won't even step foot in a Best Buy store anymore. Will just have to go online and wait for It to be mailed.

Don't care to watch streaming movies much rather have my own copy to watch even though we have a large screen. Someday Best Buy stores will be gone, they don't seem to want to make a few dollars on DVD's.. Now they can save money and fire the guy that stocked the Blu Ray shelves.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I do think physical media is a declining market. Of course, Netflix recently shut down their DVD by mail service. I still think that everything ever done should be online with pay per view. None of this here today gone tomorrow stuff. Content owners could put up their catalog along with a method of paying for the viewing. Then let Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, or whomever index it. Search for the title, find it, pay for it, and start it playing.

[Martin Brooks]

This is no surprise. The physical media market has crashed. I used to track it for several clients, but I don't anymore as the clients no longer want the data. But in 2009, DVD/Blu-ray was an $11 billion business in the U.S. In 2021, it was down to $2.2 billion. I only tracked the first 10 weeks of 2022, but it was on track for just $780 million.
It's no different in the recorded music market. Streaming now constitutes 86.4% of industry revenue (in the U.S.). Physical media is 10.8% and digital downloads comprise 2.8% (for the first half of 2023). In 2022, 74.7 million LP's and CD's were sold. Between 1994 and 2000, except for 1997 when it slightly under, over a billion albums were sold each year. That's why we don't have very many record stores anymore.

Physical retail is evaluated on sales per square foot. If they reach below a certain hurdle, something else will go into that space and that's what is happening. And in the case of physical media, the markup was meager. For years, physical media was used to get customers into the store with the hope that they'd buy something else that was more profitable.

Having said that, Blu-ray is a hit driven business (DVD is as well, but I don't have the specifics for that). In 2020, the top 100 Blu-ray titles took 62% of all units sold and 74% of the revenue. The top 200 titles probably fulfilled at least 85% of consumer demand. Once you got to the 22nd best selling title, you were below 500,000 units. So a retailer could stock just the top 100 to 200 titles, which wouldn't take up very much room and still be able to satisfy something like 90% of the customer base, all but the esoteric collectors.

Personally, I'll only buy a Blu-ray if it's a title that I think I'm going to want to watch at least three times. And as such, I haven't bought any in several years, even though I have a few hundred.

[Steve Guttag]

I very rarely buy media in stores. I still buy physical media but it is normally on-line. I normally know what I want. What stores provided was a way to peruse media and see something you hadn't considered before (books, music, movies...you name it). I rarely do that anymore. I think the younger generations are just acclimated to looking via the interwebs for things. I do find it interesting how many people are wanting vinyl records. I see from even small artists that are releasing their stuff independently having to explain the complexities and cost of putting their stuff on vinyl and that they are "trying" but it will take time and expense. That said, they seem to be doing it! Many/most require a deposit for a pre-order due to the expense of it all.

[Ed Gordon]

I very rarely buy media in stores. I still buy physical media but it is normally on-line. I normally know what I want. What stores provided was a way to peruse media and see something you hadn't considered before (books, music, movies...you name it). I rarely do that anymore...

I think this is true for the majority of us. I rarely buy music or movies on disc, and probably buy more used from Ebay. I suspect the discs will become rare as more are offered as a digital download. From what I have seen, the minute a movie is available to stream, it is available to download from the internet. Most movies are not worth a second viewing, so streaming makes sense financially, I think sales of digital downloads will replace disc sales. Yes, you can download media illegally, but if you can buy a high definition digital version for 15 bucks or less, why would you bother?

[Steve Guttag]

I definitely still buy media. I do, normally, watch the stuff I buy numerous times. If it is a 1-off then no. I'd say that a sizable part of the media I buy are TV series from the era I grew up and even into my 20s. The problem with stream is that it is too flaky. It's there...it isn't. You can't depend on it if you have hankerin' to watch some piece of content. I love documentaries they come and go too. With physical media...you have what you have and you can certainly transfer it to whatever form of digital storage for ease of playback. However, if that storage fails or technology changes, I still have the discs or whatever media it is. Another issue with streaming of classic content is the transfer. Some streaming just stretch the crap out of 4:3 stuff.

It's kinda fun too to show my son some of the movies that I've liked...especially the ones that are not as well known. Just recently, we watched "Prince of the City." That's a movie I've seen well over a dozen times. I still like it quite a lot.

[Leo Enticknap]

Physical media is going the way of vinyl records. There exists a long term and slightly growing market for the latter. Those who are willing to pay $30-50 for a new release album on vinyl consist either of hi-fi enthusiasts, or people who want the physical media as a collection artifact rather than a medium from which to listen to the music (apparently you can buy a recent Taylor Swift album ready framed to put on your wall, if you are so inclined, meaning that the record inside will likely never touch a turntable platter: it also comes with a download code for the MP3 version).

BDs will therefore likely survive as a niche medium for classic/arthouse titles, e.g. Criterion (in the same way that iconic classical and jazz recordings are regularly re-released on LP), and for a small number of mainstream blockbusters, the purchasers of whom want better pix than low bitrate streaming can provide. But the price of them is likely to go up from here on in.

[Ed Gordon]

...
BDs will therefore likely survive as a niche medium for classic/arthouse titles, e.g. Criterion (in the same way that iconic classical and jazz recordings are regularly re-released on LP), and for a small number of mainstream blockbusters, the purchasers of whom want better pix than low bitrate streaming can provide. But the price of them is likely to go up from here on in.

Another development that may kill off all physical media is screen recording. The are 4k captures of streams out there already. I would hope that producers realize that the minute they pull their content out of theatres and release it to streaming, their product will be out there in the wild.