Physical & Digital EST: The Future of Home Video Discussion Thread

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by Wendell R. Breland

Never been a gamer but I will be interested in the other capabilities of the PS5.

I am excited to see all it can do when connected to that big honking TV that I recently bought.

I am still amazed by this TV five months after getting it.

[Boccaccio]

Originally Posted by Wendell R. Breland

Never been a gamer but I will be interested in the other capabilities of the PS5.

Not sure it will have many other capabilities besides gaming.
PS4 has a lot less capabilities compared to PS3.
PS4 went back to basic gaming. It doesn't even play CD's anymore.

[Steedeel]

Originally Posted by Wendell R. Breland

Never been a gamer but I will be interested in the other capabilities of the PS5.

Never too late to start.

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by Wendell R. Breland

You are the only person that I have come across that can not do simple arithmetic. Physical and EST sales numbers have been posted numerous time in this thread but you are the only one that does not get the meaning.

Physical revenue (US) still exceeds EST, it should not considering the number of devices capable of playing EST.

Physical revenue + EST revenue is in decline.

Apple accounts for 60% of EST, does not leave much for other vendors of EST.

EST did not perform as the studios thought it would and they closed down UV.

Physical revenue is still counted in the billions (US) and I would wager the global total is still quite a lucrative business.

You can't just compare physical to EST. You have to compare it to streaming as well. Get real. That's what physical competes against.

I don't yet have 2019 numbers, but in 2018, total home entertainment spending was $23.28 billion. Physical sell-through was only $4.03 billion of that:

Subscription streaming: $12.91b, up 30%
DVD/Blu-ray: $4.03b, down 15% (but according to Home Media Magazine was $4.122b)
EST: $2.36b, up 14%
VOD: $2.09b, up 6%
Kiosks: $1.1b, down 13%
DVD/Blu-ray subscriptions: $360m, down 20%
Brick and mortar rental: $320m, down 18%

In 2019, DVD/Blu-ray was $3.4b, down 17.67%
Don't have the other numbers yet, but I would venture to guess that subscription streaming made major gains.
And of course in 2020, DVD/Blu-ray is already down. I have to plug in the latest numbers, but as of 1/18, it was already down 10.5%.

[Steedeel]

Originally Posted by PenguinInfinity

If we're lumping everything together then we might as well include cable and satellite subscriptions. In 2018 total home entertainment spending was around $106 billion. Streaming was only $17.36 billion of that.

It's obvious that none of the studios are only interested in supporting the biggest market. They will continue to support all profitable markets.

ZoetMB has (in my opinion) been on a mission since 2011 to discredit Blu-ray. Funny though, never mentions that the single digit growth of Digital HD is nowhere near enough to be healthy. Constant negativity towards Blu-ray but nothing about Digital HD. I wonder why that is. Yet here we are seeing a whole range of rare, unexpected Blu-ray releases.

Vinegar Syndrome just released their first 4K disc and Batp****Y is available on Blu-ray for goodness sake!

12 years of Blu-ray releases and we are still getting major releases as well as a increasing number of rare, cult titles. You were wrong ZoetMB.

[cgpublic]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

You can't just compare physical to EST. You have to compare it to streaming as well. Get real. That's what physical competes against.

Yes. Streaming has the all of the momentum and future investment.

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

I don't yet have 2019 numbers, but in 2018, total home entertainment spending was $23.28 billion. Physical sell-through was only $4.03 billion of that:

Subscription streaming: $12.91b, up 30%
DVD/Blu-ray: $4.03b, down 15% (but according to Home Media Magazine was $4.122b)
EST: $2.36b, up 14%
VOD: $2.09b, up 6%
Kiosks: $1.1b, down 13%
DVD/Blu-ray subscriptions: $360m, down 20%
Brick and mortar rental: $320m, down 18%

Interesting that EST is up, but not a surprise considering the many titles which are now only available in 4K Dolby Vision or HDR and Atmos in that format.

For example, Parasite, Best Picture of the Year, is only available in EST with 4K HDR.

Many other titles, including recent releases such as Waves, and Little Women, another Oscar nominee, are also only available in 4K HDR and/or Atmos via digital.

Sad.

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

You can't just compare physical to EST. You have to In 2019, DVD/Blu-ray was $3.4b, down 17.67%
Don't have the other numbers yet, but I would venture to guess that subscription streaming made major gains.
And of course in 2020, DVD/Blu-ray is already down. I have to plug in the latest numbers, but as of 1/18, it was already down 10.5%.

The most recent numbers suggest Blu-ray was down 25% from 2019's already dismal total, and with Disney+ banging out subs like gangbusters and HBO Max hitting the market in weeks, this could be the year major brick and mortar outlets end physical media sales other than a few shippers. Without the demand for Disney physical media and related franchises, the format may no longer be sustainable as a mass-market commodity for Best Buy and others.

All of the above stated, I do believe physical media will continue as a niche platform, especially for older catalog and specialty titles, albeit in a much diminished state.

The number of titles released is irrelevant. It's the money that matters.

Potentially, we're looking at a sub-$1B market in just a few years.

[cgpublic]

Originally Posted by PenguinInfinity

If we're lumping everything together then we might as well include cable and satellite subscriptions. In 2018 total home entertainment spending was around $106 billion. Streaming was only $17.36 billion of that.

Cable is dying, as noted by the WSJ:

The pace at which people are abandoning traditional pay-TV packages accelerated by more than 70% last year, as prices continued to rise and consumers gravitated to more affordable streaming options.

Large cable and satellite companies lost about 5.5 million traditional pay-TV customers last year, a roughly 8% decline, according to public filings. The numbers—which exclude smaller providers that have yet to report results for the entirety of 2019—are much larger than the loss of 3.2 million subscribers in 2018.

Originally Posted by PenguinInfinity

It's obvious that none of the studios are only interested in supporting the biggest market. They will continue to support all profitable markets.

Not necessarily. Companies exit markets and end product lines if contraction is present and they believe there is no future growth to be attained in the near or long term.

Both cable and physical media are contracting and represent negative growth markets.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

You can't just compare physical to EST. You have to compare it to streaming as well. Get real. That's what physical competes against.

I don't yet have 2019 numbers, but in 2018, total home entertainment spending was $23.28 billion. Physical sell-through was only $4.03 billion of that:

Subscription streaming: $12.91b, up 30%
DVD/Blu-ray: $4.03b, down 15% (but according to Home Media Magazine was $4.122b)
EST: $2.36b, up 14%
VOD: $2.09b, up 6%
Kiosks: $1.1b, down 13%
DVD/Blu-ray subscriptions: $360m, down 20%
Brick and mortar rental: $320m, down 18%

In 2019, DVD/Blu-ray was $3.4b, down 17.67%
Don't have the other numbers yet, but I would venture to guess that subscription streaming made major gains.
And of course in 2020, DVD/Blu-ray is already down. I have to plug in the latest numbers, but as of 1/18, it was already down 10.5%.

If you are going to make a post full of statistics, don't be so lazy: provide your source for them.

Here is the 2019 Digital Entertainment Group's Report:




https://www.degonline.org/portfolio_...ment-report-2/

Physical media was down 18.29%, sales totaled $3.293 billion.
EST was up just 5.12%. barely a third of what it was in 2018.

Subscription streaming was up 23.73%, revenue was $15.898 billion.

To compare and contrast, here is 2018's report:



https://www.degonline.org/portfolio_...inment-report/

It is worth noticing that box office receipts were up 14.74% in 2018 while they were down 8.86% in 2019. Content sales, disc and digital, are closely tied to box office performance. When the box office is down, so are content sales.

When you look at the numbers for 2019 and 2018, you can see that the totals for "Sell thru including EST", disc and digital combined, declined as they have every year since 2011. People are buying less content in general and that 5.12% increase in digital sales and the approx. 15% increase in 4K disc sales did little to slow that decline.

See how easy it is to provide sources? I saved you the trouble.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by cgpublic

Yes. Streaming has the all of the momentum and future investment.

Interesting that EST is up, but not a surprise considering the many titles which are now only available in 4K Dolby Vision or HDR and Atmos in that format.

For example, Parasite, Best Picture of the Year, is only available in EST with 4K HDR.

Many other titles, including recent releases such as Waves, and Little Women, another Oscar nominee, are also only available in 4K HDR and/or Atmos via digital.

Sad.

The most recent numbers suggest Blu-ray was down 25% from 2019's already dismal total, and with Disney+ banging out subs like gangbusters and HBO Max hitting the market in weeks, this could be the year major brick and mortar outlets end physical media sales other than a few shippers. Without the demand for Disney physical media and related franchises, the format may no longer be sustainable as a mass-market commodity for Best Buy and others.

All of the above stated, I do believe physical media will continue as a niche platform, especially for older catalog and specialty titles, albeit in a much diminished state.

The number of titles released is irrelevant. It's the money that matters.

Potentially, we're looking at a sub-$1B market in just a few years.

You always like to point out the handful of titles that are only available on digital while ignoring the thousands of titles that are only available on disc. Your anti-physical media bias and your deliberate myopia could not be more obvious. The best selection by far has always been found on physical media.

By the end of 2019, there have been 253,621 titles released on disc. No digital provider offers anywhere even close to that selection. Netflix barely offers 6000 movies at any given time and Vudu's selection is just over 100,000 titles. Classic cinema in particular is very poorly represented with subscription streaming.

Of course the number of titles is relevant and of course the money matters. It is because of the fact that physical media is a profitable market that we are getting more titles released each year. We would not see more releases each year if physical media was not a profitable endeavor. No industry produces an ever wider selection of an unwanted product.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by cgpublic

Cable is dying, as noted by the WSJ:

Not necessarily. Companies exit markets and end product lines if contraction is present and they believe there is no future growth to be attained in the near or long term.

Both cable and physical media are contracting and represent negative growth markets.

Niche markets exist, as they always have, because they are profitable. Not every product offered is expected to be embraced by the masses. There are countless specialty, hobbyist, and luxury items offered to us in a multitude of niche markets and the reason for that is because they make money. No industry ignores a significant source of profit.

North American Pay TV revenue was $119.6 billion at the end of 2018 and was projected to hit $119.85 billion by the end of 2019. It is further projected to hit $120.56 billion in 2023.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ca-since-2006/

Your statement that Pay TV is dying is by far the stupidest comment you have made to date, but I have always recognized your potential here.

[Vilya]

As of the end of Q3 2018, all age groups still spent most of their viewing time watching traditional TV.



Note that "TV connected devices" also includes time spent viewing with disc players, not just time spent streaming.

https://www.marketingcharts.com/featured-105414

I was hoping to find something more recent, and I may yet, but this clearly shows that people are still watching traditional TV above all other sources.

[Vilya]

TVrevenue1.jpg

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ca-since-2006/

Pretty strong revenue totals and projections, and just from North America, for a "dying" industry.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by PenguinInfinity

So now people are not only using the term "dying" for the $4 billion dollar physical media business but also for the $80 billion dollar cable business? Even though cable is losing subscribers it's still the biggest money maker by a huge margin. If cable is dying than streaming is dead on arrival.

The hyperbole is strong with that one.

[Wendell R. Breland]

Originally Posted by Vilya

Pretty strong revenue totals and projections, and just from North America, for a "dying" industry.

Several recent post have proven me wrong, they can not do math either.

Thanks Vilya for doing the leg work and posting the facts here.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by Wendell R. Breland

Several recent post have proven me wrong, they can not do math either.

Thanks Vilya for doing the leg work and posting the facts here.

Happy to help.

I make it a point to provide sources for any statistics that I post. I also post statistics regardless of whether or not I like what they show.

Additionally, as regards Pay TV, the number of global subscribers is increasing and it more than compensates for the decline here in the U.S. Claiming that pay TV is "dying" is simply idiotic by both the measure of revenue and by the number of subscribers.

GlobalTVSubs1.jpg

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ers-worldwide/

"Advisory firm ABI Research says don't count the pay TV market out too soon, because it's still growing. ABI forecasts the industry will count over 1.1 billion subscribers by 2024."

https://www.streamingmedia.com/Artic...ticleID=133461

"Pay-TV home entertainment may be in decline in the United States and Europe, but surges in India and China will help the medium top more than 1 billion subscribers through 2024, according to new data from Digital TV Research."

https://www.mediaplaynews.com/report...pay-tv-market/

[cgpublic]

All of us recognize that streaming represents growth, that pay TV via cable and physical media are contracting and represent negative growth, and a million charts that present growth in the aggregate (all revenue including that from live entertainment including sports, news, SVOD and/or broadband services) from self-serving promotion companies can't mask the decline, as noted a few days ago in Variety:

The U.S. satellite and cable TV business declined at an unprecedented rate last year — with traditional pay-TV providers dropping a staggering 6 million customers, a 7% year-over-year decline.

In the fourth quarter of 2019 alone, traditional TV distributors lost around 1.5 million subs, dropping to about 83 million total at year-end, according to estimates from Wall Street analyst firm MoffettNathanson. The primary loser in Q4 was AT&T, which shed a whopping 1.16 million TV accounts in the period, but losses at Comcast (-149,000) and Charter (-101,000) were the primary reason for the acceleration in the rate of cord-cutting, analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson wrote in a Feb. 19 research note.

The numbers show that cable and satellite TV customers, whose main complaint continues to be steadily increasing prices of pay-television service, are increasingly satisfying their home-entertainment diets with streaming packages like those from Netflix, Hulu and others.

The trend reflects “the growing normalization” of pay-TV declines, according to the analysts, with operators no longer looking to offer discounts to keep would-be cord-cutters in the fold and some smaller cable companies exiting TV completely.

“Operators across the pay-TV distribution map are reassessing video strategies, and they are universally shifting, albeit to varying degrees, towards strategies that accommodate, or even encourage, cord-cutting,” Moffett and Nathanson wrote. “As video distributors change their pricing and marketing strategies, the media industry is finally facing that long-feared moment of accelerating cord-cutting.”

Even factoring in the growth of “virtual” internet TV providers like YouTube TV and Hulu With Live TV — whose subscriber rolls rose from an estimated 7.52 million at the end of 2018 to 9.96 million last year — the total U.S. pay-TV universe declined by some 3.6 million households (down 3.8%). Notably, after initially launching with attractive price points in a bid to grab market share, all the internet pay-TV service hiked prices last year while Sony has exited the business altogether, shutting down PlayStation Vue at the end of January 2020.

“The real change underfoot isn’t about technology. It is about decoupling live from non-live entertainment,” Moffett and Nathanson wrote.

Cable operators like Comcast actually stand to be more profitable by pushing over-the-top video through their high-margin broadband businesses, while satellite operators DirecTV and Dish have a much bigger risk from the rise of cord-cutting. On Wednesday, Dish reported a loss of 194,000 TV subscribers, including its first-ever loss for Sling TV (which dropped 94,000 accounts sequentially).

Amid this backdrop, media companies that own TV networks have two options: to “reassemble consumer spending in new digital products” — as Disney, WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal are doing — or own “the minimum number of must-have networks that have true pricing power to offset the falling volumes of video subscribers,” which is Fox Corp.’s strategy, Moffett and Nathanson wrote. Meanwhile, media companies Discovery, ViacomCBS, AMC Networks “are facing these headwinds with few long-term solutions,” the analysts wrote.

Pay-TV penetration hit an all-time high of 87.8% of U.S. households in 2009 — slipping over the past decade to 65.3% at the end of last year, per MoffettNathanson’s estimates.

[Wendell R. Breland]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

You can't just compare physical to EST. You have to compare it to streaming as well. Get real. That's what physical competes against.

I thought you would be at least a cut above alchav21 but you have proven me wrong. Physical and EST is all about ownership.

All the other is just pay TV in one form or another. Some some say AVOD and other ad based content is free. It is not, most pay to have ad based content delivered to them except OTA (terrestrial) and satellite (FTA). Every time you buy a box of soap you pay for a small part toward the cost of the add and to the content the add sponsors.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by cgpublic

All of us recognize that streaming represents growth, that pay TV via cable and physical media are contracting and represent negative growth, and a million charts that present growth in the aggregate (all revenue including that from live entertainment including sports, news, SVOD and/or broadband services) from self-serving promotion companies can't mask the decline, as noted a few days ago in Variety:

Pay TV is a global industry and global subscriber numbers are up. Pay TV revenue in North America alone is slightly up, but essentially flat. In no way, shape, or form is Pay TV "dying." North American Pay TV revenue, $119.6 billion, is 652.3% more than that of subscription streaming revenue.

Viewing time is mostly spent watching TV in every single age group.

None of the statistics that I offered, and provided links to, conflate any of these other home entertainment industry sectors. You are just making that up in a feeble attempt to discredit facts that you can not refute.

[cgpublic]

Originally Posted by Vilya

Pay TV is a global industry and global subscriber numbers are up...

Of course they are, of course, of course.

As long as you're not refuting the fact "...the U.S. satellite and cable TV business declined at an unprecedented rate last year," and given we both agree that physical media will transition to a niche business, we're in complete agreement.

[Vilya]

Originally Posted by cgpublic

Of course they are, of course, of course.

As long as you're not refuting the fact "...the U.S. satellite and cable TV business declined at an unprecedented rate last year," and given we both agree that physical media will transition to a niche business, we're in complete agreement.

U.S. Pay TV subscribers were down 14.4 million subscribers or 16%, but that is misleading by itself as "online TV" subscriptions are projected to increase by over 100 million subscribers by 2024. "Online TV" is just another way to deliver those same cable TV channels and sometimes by the very same telecoms that offered traditional Pay TV services in the first place.

"The lone silver lining is online TV. Spurred by standalone services such as Sling TV, AT&T TV, PlayStation Vue, Hulu with TV and YouTube TV, online TV will add more than 100 million subs through 2024, reaching a global sub count of 357 million and 20% market share — up from 15% in 2018."

https://www.mediaplaynews.com/report...pay-tv-market/

Physical media is already a niche business and I have said as much many, many times before now. It has been a niche business in the past as well.