Why *NO* 2021 big Oscar winners on UHDBD???

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Originally Posted by RBBrittain

How come NONE of this year's "top six" Oscar winners are going to UHDBD? Nomadland is BD-only this week; Judas and the Black Messiah & Minari have also been announced for BD only. Only The Father has the excuse of not even being announced yet. Yet all four of them are available as UHD streams on Vudu (presumably elsewhere), though only Nomadland is available for purchase there (the others are PVOD, $19.99 rental only).

Its still early. All of these films are still in "release" and are in open theaters. But as others have stated, UHD is a niche market and the overall physical market gets smaller every year. The physical disc business in the U.S. was almost $11 billion in 2009. In 2020, it was $2.5 billion.

So far this year (as of 4/3), Blu-ray is down 29% in units and 45% in revenue. The average weekly share of UHD (for the top 20 titles with the greatest share) is just 9.63%. For the top 50 titles, I don't have an exact average number, but it's about 5%. If I'm an exec of an independent film that doesn't really have mass appeal, I've got to think, "why bother?" especially when streaming and VOD is going to be my primary revenue sources for that film and I don't have to invest in manufacturing to support those distribution channels.

Originally, I thought that as streaming came on board, it would be DVD consumers who would move to streaming. But because year-over-year Blu numbers are falling faster than DVD, it's apparently more Blu-ray consumers who have moved to streaming.

I used to come on here and say that if Blu-ray didn't pick up in share, that the studios would eventually lose interest because executives have to make choices as to what to invest in. I said there would be fewer restorations, special features, boxed sets, special packaging, etc. And I would get heavily bad-mouthed and so I stopped posting business analysis. But that's exactly what's happened.

In spite of the fact that most TV's sold today are UHD, most consumers don't seem to give a crap about viewing UHD content. And streaming is cheap and convenient: why spend $25-$50 for a disc when you get streaming content of hundreds of films for $7-$10 month. Even if streaming was a stupid decision, it's the decision that consumers have made. Consumers always opt for convenience over quality and even 1080p quality is already so good, even streaming, there aren't too many people who desire more.

If consumers don't support something it dies. So record stores, bookstores, movie theaters and...physical media. It doesn't mean there's none. It just means it's no longer ubiquitous and largely irrelevant.