Quote:
Originally Posted by ZoetMB
My pizza consumption was up 300% this year. Last year I had one slice. When you start from a very small base, percentages can be deceiving.
The benefits of disc are not the point. The benefits are clear. The market doesn't always choose correctly and it has always chosen convenience over quality.
In 2018, the average share of the UHD titles with the largest share each week was 31.49%. The average share of the top 20 UHD titles with the largest shares was just 10.64%. The UHD shares of the top-50 titles typically average 5 to 7%. UHD is not exactly blowing it away.
In 2018, Blu-ray sales weren't terrible as compared to 2017. Revenue was down 1.94% and units were down 3.2%. But Blu still only has a 30% overall unit share and a 45% revenue share. And the total North American disc business was $4.1 billion in 2018 as compared to almost $11 billion in 2009. In no way can that be considered healthy.
It doesn't mean that discs disappear. But it does mean fewer releases, fewer restorations, fewer fancy boxed sets, etc. Just as in music audio, the world is moving to streaming for better or worse.
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Your myopia seems rather deliberate. Your pizza analogy only serves to make me hungry and unlike that analogy, we have actual sales data and dollar amounts to measure the true performance of discs. A multi-billion dollar physical media industry and its market performance is a tad more significant than fluctuations in your pizza consumption.
4K UHD is still a young format that nearly doubles from one year to the next. While it will likely never be a mainstream format, it has shown sustained and robust growth. Such meteoric growth more than proves that the format has strong support.
As someone who bought 362 titles on disc last year and who monitors each week's releases, I can tell you that there have not been fewer releases nor fewer restorations. I seldom pay attention to the collector box sets as I do not particularly desire all of the trinkets they contain. Most weeks see over 60 titles released on blu-ray and 4K, even more when you add in DVDs. Some weeks last year had over 90 titles come out in a single week. All of this indicates that the market for disc is more than healthy enough to sustain itself.
No one refutes the growth of streaming, but the vast, vast majority of that lies with all you can eat buffet subscription streaming, not with digital purchases.
When it comes to purchases, physical media still outsells digital. The reverse may happen someday, but that day has not yet arrived. After 3 quarters of 2018, disc sales have brought in $2.79 billion. No industry is going to abandon that much money.
Digital purchases brought in considerably less at $1.8 billion, so those who purchase still buy disc more than they buy digital. Spin that anyway you like, but the numbers do not lie.
Contrasting 2011 disc sales to 2018 is an inapt comparison. There are more options for consumers now and that naturally dilutes the market share that disc purchases hold today. In 2011, discs had little competition so of course they had higher sales numbers then. The real barometer for purchases is the year over year data and that data still shows discs outselling digital copies every single year that both have been available. Digital purchases may overtake discs someday, but even if it does, it does not automatically spell trouble for discs. The purchase market isn't the movie
Highlander, there can be more than one.
All purchases across all formats are down over that time period due to that same buggaboo creature that is subscription streaming. Thanks to it, many former purchasers of video content no longer do so, or not as frequently, but it would be absurd to suggest that purchases are mortally wounded. The market has changed since 2011, but it is more than large enough to accommodate every type of consumer.
Digital music has not been able to kill either the nearly 37 year-old compact disc nor the vinyl record, and digital streamed video content will not kill discs. I have been reading these predictions year after year that discs are doomed and yet they remain AND with an exciting and explosively growing new format on top of it. Does it not get tiring for these self-imagined clairvoyants to be perennially wrong? I guess if they predict the end of something long enough, they may be right eventually, but if it takes a decade or longer for their annually renewed predictions to come to pass, you'll have to excuse me for not taking them seriously.
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