Digital shifting

[Ruined]

Originally Posted by mlabonte21

It's because the Studios forgot to pass the shipping/manufacturing cost savings down to the consumer for digital.

$20-$25 for a new movie? Which I cannot hold in my hand or re-sell? PASS

$10-$15 is really the sweet spot for impulse purchases for 2-hour digital movies. I can buy a 100 hour+ digital video game for $10 on sale.

It's a shame too, as the VIDEO quality is really really close compared to Physical (if you use iTunes). Audio is still not up to snuff, but I expect that to get improved as time goes on.

Right, the problem is, not passing on the shipping/manufacturing cost was where digital was supposed to be superior to physical for the studios to increase their profits. If you aren't going to make that money, then it really doesn't make a difference whether physical or digital is popular. In fact, in that case physical might even be better because after you ship the disc you don't need to continue paying ongoing bandwidth costs as is the case after a digital purchase. Also, with the way digital is setup when a new master is released digital just gets it for free, while they can squeak another purchase out of physical.

Digital purchases are always a bad deal compared to physical purchases. But for many other mediums like music and video games, its worth the bad deal for the convenience of being able to hop from one track to the next, or one game to the next, without having to change discs - plus being able to use in car easily. For a 2-hour movie that you aren't going to be flipping back and forth to other movies, and that you can't watch in the car, that functionality improvement doesn't carry over. Even for a commuter, digital movie purchases often don't work because the files are too large to store more than a few movies on a phone, and the signals are often unreliable on mass transit so you can't reliably stream purchases either.

Also, IMO people shouldn't be buying on itunes (or google play etc) but instead movies anywhere or VUDU. Reason why, cause if Movies Anywhere ever goes belly up those itunes purchases are now all locked to a single brand of digital device, which sucks. People should support the multiplatform services for their own good!