Disney/Fox media is pointless on physical formats

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by Nailwraps

Valid opinion. But:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/11/...-are-thriving/

For better or worse, businesses are judged on revenue, earnings and return on investment. Especially if the business is publicly held, decisions are made based upon "shareholder value" which basically means getting the stock price to increase.

Some boutique distributors might be doing great stuff, but you cannot state that a business is thriving when it's half the size it was eight years ago. CEO's have to make a decision about where to invest. They don't invest in declining businesses. Would you be happy if your income was half what it was eight years ago?

This is similar to the hype about vinyl. Fans of vinyl (including myself) love their vinyl, but the reality is that (in the U.S.) only 17.2 million LPs were sold in 2016 and only 7.2 million LPs were sold in the first half of 2017.

Since back in the day, there were single LPs that sold over 10 million units each, that's not very good and the worse part is that unless the second half of 2017 has substantially increased sales, 2017 will come in lower than 2016. This shouldn't actually be surprising because who's buying vinyl? -- some hipsters and a small group of old men. And once those old men re-buy remastered versions of the albums they bought 40-50 years ago, they stop buying.

So vinyl is a niche format and video discs are also heading in that direction, in spite of the introduction of UHD. As I frequently say, "the numbers are the numbers". The author of that article is just using semantics to hide the problems in the industry. That's not to say that these boutique distributors aren't doing wonderful things.

Personally, I love my Blu-rays (especially Criterion and special editions/boxed sets) and when I watch (and hear) a film, I want to do it with the maximum quality, but even I will only buy a Blu if it's a film I think I'll watch more than once. For movies I don't really care about, I'll stream them.