DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/dvds-are-dying-right-as-streaming-has-made-them-appealing-again/

by rntn • 2 years ago

97 58 2 years ago

Spivak• 2 years ago

Whatever your thoughts about piracy ethically it's hard to argue it's going to soon be the only viewing experience where you actually own the media.

Torrenting has for some media become the only way of acquiring it at all.

asdff2• 2 years ago

At the end of the day its the pirates who are maintaining the library of Alexandria of our times. The pirates we insist on vilifying and speaking little of in technical forums even. What does that make those people who stand against those who seek to spread information? No different than the book burners, in my eyes. A shame so many engineers spend their precious time and efforts fighting on what future generations will no doubt see as the wrong side of history, all for a dollar they could easily make elsewhere on less unsavory work.

sanitycheck2• 2 years ago

Alternatively, it's just entertainment and movie DRM is at worst annoying and counterproductive.

In X years time when humanity is struggling to rebuild civilisation in a radioactive wasteland I don't think the main problem will be the inability to find a copy of "Dumb And Dumber To". The real heroes will turn out to have been the contributors to Open Source and Open Access projects - Linux, Wikipedia, etc.

There are better things (often unpaid) developers could be doing than implementing DRM but also much much worse things.

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

What does that make those people who stand against those who seek to spread information? No different than the book burners, in my eyes.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but it is factually incorrect to state that willful destruction is the same as hindering someone from making another copy of a work.

iamacyborg• 2 years ago

The UX of piracy tools is now much better than that of the big streamers too.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

Now? Xbox Media Centre nailed it like 15 years ago.

When the user is in control you can't push anti-features like e.g. Chromecast or Samsung TVs are full of.

stevekemp• 2 years ago

Over the past few months I've actually gone back to buying DVDs. Sure their quality isn't amazing, but they're so practical and dependable.

The local charity shops sell movies for €1 each, and boxed-sets of TV-series are typically no more than €5 each. I even managed to pick up a decent DVD player to sit under my TV for €25, used.

Before this I used to stream to a chromecast, with VLC, but it was always a bit of a pain. Now I can pop in a disk, or tell my child to do the same, and hit play and everything just works.

Streaming services are pretty, but you can't rely on them for keeping content available, and it's risky to get sucked into a new show that might get cancelled after one, or two, series. Much better, for me, to watch all those other shows that are complete, or nostalgic.

thinkingemote• 2 years ago

The other benefits of DVD are the extra features and directors commentary. I'm not sure I've ever seen these on streaming services or torrents. They extend the use of a movie to many hours. I'm still working through the extended versions of Lotr and I've just become aware that the commentary on the normal versions were different!

kolinko• 2 years ago

Yes, this. Apple TV has dvd-style extras for some films upon purchase (not rental)

7jjjjjjj2• 2 years ago

I run into torrents with the featurettes & commentary included fairly often.

lifestyleguru• 2 years ago

I'm not going back to DVD because of unskippable fear inducing anti-piracy and "FBI" warnings. Every time you launch a movie they violate your brain with this nonsense. If I have to rip and tweak the DVD, it's easier to torrent it.

chung8123• 2 years ago

Buy the disc and torrent the file?

add-sub-mul-div2• 2 years ago

You can't just look away from your TV for 5-10 seconds?

mrguyorama• 2 years ago

You should be ripping the DVD anyway, so that you have easier access to it. My collection of movie files have no FBI warnings. The point of the physical DVD is the legal rights it grants me, like being able to rip it, or sell it, or loan it out.

jacobgorm• 2 years ago

My kid is doing the same thing, usually is able to get a handful of used DVDs for 1-2 EUR. He rips them and throws away the covers to save space.

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

Streaming has been the producer dream all along so we need a ‘video recorder’ to tape what we watch to watch it again and again. I am not in favour of piracy and I pay for some streaming, however, when I get ads even though I pay, I get geo restrictions even though I pay or they remove things I like an make them paid, even though I pay, I will download illegally. We really need to move to a legal way of paying the people who actually made the stuff directly and making that a valid and legal option. We need global legal options as internet and binaries are global, and I am not waiting for season 3 of blah to become available ‘in my region’ when you got me hooked on 1 & 2.

Edit; I don’t think I mean ‘producer’ here but I do not know what the word is; for books I guess publisher?

CafeRacer2• 2 years ago

I dont mind paying for content, but the current state of streaming makes it easier to get movies from torrents.

Like the Alien for example, some parts are on Netflix, some are not. Meaning i have to buy like 5 different subscriptions to be able to watch everything i want.

Or even better one, Dr House. I don't think we had it streamed in our country, so the only way to watch it was to pirate.

Its bad how the platforms are right now.

yourusername• 2 years ago

I also don't mind paying for content but i want the content as it was originally broadcast. With streaming if you "buy" something they might eventually replace the background music or cut scenes that are deemed insensitive or clash with the director's new vision. Or they decide you need to view 4:3 content with the top and bottom cut off in 16:9. Or in some cases you might lose access to the content entirely because the license expired. Or they discontinue the app and roll your purchases into some different app with a horrible interface (youtube music).

account424• 2 years ago

I also don't mind paying for content in theory but besides your concerns I also want to be able to play that content on whatever devices using whatever software I want, without needing a constant internet connection. The Music industry has survived the switch to DRM-free content, the Movie and TV industry can too.

tracker1• 2 years ago

It's actually bugged me a lot with (HBO) Max's streaming service that so much WB content isn't available on the service... or pieces are missing in movie collections. My hope would be that more would congregate to the service over time now it's simply less. I want to support the ongoing shows that I like, but it's hard to justify in that the couple shows a year are all I watch on any given service.

fnordpiglet2• 2 years ago

I see this gripe throughout but the streaming subscription service is more like HBO in the old cable days. They had a licensed set of content that rotates every month. You don’t get to own any of it because their whole illusion of catalog depth is based on the rotation semantic. This is less about streaming and more about royalties and licensing.

Although still imperfect as an ownership mechanism the analogy to DVDs is purchasing the content from say Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV. You can “own” a much broader catalog, the ownership rights aren’t super clear or stable over time, but the DVD / streaming video is licensed to you permanently and sits in your library.

Using contemporaneous language Netflix is to HBO as Amazon Prime Video ownership is to a DVD.

rchaud2• 2 years ago

Didn't most people subscribe to HBO for its original series? In the 2000s they had Entourage, Sopranos and Six Feet Under and probably many more I can't remember.

Agoras• 2 years ago

We finally need this Postdigital revolution now. Where are ya Gen Z 90‘s revival kids?

Using physical media is so heavily alternative, that you can almost feel being superior to poor streaming people. Especially with 4k blurays.

Buttons840• 2 years ago

DVD rentals via mail seem like an easy business to get into. Few customers, but little overhead. Anyone in the nation can be a customer, though few will be, and shipping is easier than ever these days. Is anybody doing this?

But ultimately the publisher will stop selling new movies on DVD or Blu-ray, etc, so it wont save us.

jtsnow• 2 years ago

Netflix shipped DVDs from 1997 to 2023, predating Redbox by 5 years. This is essentially how we got to streaming. GameFly still ships movie and game discs as a service.

oliwarner• 2 years ago

easy business to get into

Good luck getting rental rights.

The very reason modern streaming sucks so much is that every other production company wants to be a streaming distributor; pulling rights from other streaming services.

Just holding a DVD does not give you the rights to lease it out. At least, that's if you believe the legal spiel on the disc.

titusjohnson• 2 years ago

You can. The Right of First Sale gives you the ability to do anything you want to your DVD. You can loan it, rent it, mortgage it, whatever. You cannot copy it, so you'll need to buy enough copies to sustain your rental model, but you can certainly rent out DVDs you own. That's how Netflix started.

toast0• 2 years ago

Discs don't survive too many mailings. I used a niche rental by mail service before I moved to Netflix, and they were more open about their logistics.

I don't recall if they said how many mailings a disc would typically survive, but they also had a lot of back and forth with the postal service to get a mailer that qualified for lower price postage, but they had to drop their cardboard insert that helped with longevity of the discs.

There were some series where the early discs tended to be broken, which made it harder to stock, especially if the sets were out of print.

Then you've got things like recent shows may not even get a release on disc at all.

anorangecat• 2 years ago

I like buying DVD and BR because I can choose to use the physical medium or create a digital version and use that; when no player is available.

It's not always about piracy, especially when buying used discs has become so cheap.

wazoox• 2 years ago

DVDs are fine. You can find many things at pawn shops for 1€, you can buy most new movies for 7 to 20€ at most, and you can resell those you don't want to watch anymore. I'm only subscribed to Amazon Prime but actually don't use their streaming service at all.

sanitycheck2• 2 years ago

I always found the DVD experience to be pretty horrible, with all the region-locking, menu garbage and unskippable nonsense. I never felt like a DVD was something I completely owned.

At least I could (thanks to DeCSS etc) rip the content off and write it to a blank disc to improve the experience... There are probably ways to do the same with Netflix content these days though, I guess.

account424• 2 years ago

There are probably ways to do the same with Netflix content these days

There are but it's not something most end user will be able to do - because the DRM is something that can be realtively easily updated pirates tend to keep their hacks private. Ripping Blu-Rays on the other hand is quite available to anyone interested and gives you better quality than overcompressed streaming sites - but of course the discs are more expensive.

ls612• 2 years ago

I thought the main way of doing it today was exploiting the terrible HDCP spec to downgrade it to 1.4 which is irrecoverably broken, then rip it from that.

sneak• 2 years ago

You couldn’t pay me to watch movies in 480p.

account424• 2 years ago

Worse, 480i. The resolution would be something I could accept with for old content, but I am not going to deal with fucking interlacing ever again.

7jjjjjjj2• 2 years ago

DVDs can be any of 60i, 30p, or 24p. Competently made (not all are!) DVDs will be progressive if the source was.

add-sub-mul-div2• 2 years ago

"DVDs" in the title is shorthand for DVDs and Blu-rays, physical media in general.

galdosdi2• 2 years ago

I don't know if not everyone knows about this, but Amazon and YouTube offer $3 movie rentals and seem to have a really extensive catalogue, as in I've never failed to find a movie there that would have been available in the old DVD Netflix with its huge selection. I guess they managed to get the rights from all the big IP companies, much as Spotify and Apple before them did for music.

It's honestly the best way to watch things today, and probably the best way to watch things in all history (although Netflix DVD was cheaper if you watched more than 3 movies a month). It's cheaper than video rental stores used to be and no more expensive than RedBox, but you don't have to go anywhere.

That's why RedBox is dead. Of course RedBox wasn't killed by Netflix -- Netflix doesn't compete with them at all. It's Amazon/YT Payperview that killed them, I assume.

Yeah, streaming sucks, but a la carte pay per view is amazing and underrated. And I emphasize again, it's cheap -- it only seems expensive compared to streaming, but it's cheaper than rentals used to be in video stores, which IIRC also cost $3, but that was 25 years of inflation ago.

capitainenemo• 2 years ago

I've been giving CafeDVD a try since I loved the variety available on NetflixDVD. Their catalog is definitely smaller, but it does work. We'll see how it goes.

mock-possum• 2 years ago

DVDs have never been appealing to me - having to manage a physical collection of fragile storage media, each of which comes with a bunch of unwanted fluff in one form or another - I never understood the appeal of that kind of thing, when you could just have a nice neat directory full of video files on your hard drive (and, of course, a backup.)

No need to fiddle with buying additional devices to hook up to your tv - anything with an hdmi cable will play an mp4 directly on your display of choice. You already have a desktop, or a laptop, or a tablet, or something. No worrying about scratched discs. No worrying about regions or whatever.

DVDs were a stopgap and they deserve to die, in my book. “DVDs vs streaming” is a false dichotomy when “local file playback versus streaming” already exists.

smarklefunf• 2 years ago

yar the 7 seas be thar

wait_a_minute• 2 years ago

When I have a new place, I'm building a nice blu ray collection. Can't go wrong with physical media.

DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

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