For a long time, DVD ruled the roost of the home theatre market. After VHS eventually beat out the BETAMAX format to become the kings of home-video, DVD brought the biggest change to home video thanks to it pushing the industry into the digital era and instantly allowing for things such as bonus features. However, it seemed DVD was finally going to be usurped by Sony’s Blu-Ray technology when its superior technology allowed for even higher resolutions and more disk space to be made available.
Only as superior as Blu-Ray was to all other technologies before it, it seems its dominance is not likely to last long. Thanks to streaming, the Blu-Ray era is likely to come to end in the near future.
The comments were directed mostly to US markets, but it would not be surprising if this is a bigger strategy for Samsung. A recent Nielsen report from 2018 highlighted the fast declining usage of DVD/Blu-Ray players as people prefer to stream their movies and entertainment instead. A drop of almost 72
While Blu-Ray could still remain a feature in consoles for a while, with technology and the development of streaming services for games also rapidly being developed, I think the Blu-Ray and DVD market could fast be coming to an end.
It’s something I have mixed feeling about. While I spend most of my watching hours streaming content rather than using physical media, there is something nice about having a box set of movies or series to watch at your disposal without fear of them no longer being available on your choice of streaming service. Still, you can choose to buy movies and save them digitally and if they find a way of allowing people to do this for free with DVDs/Blu-Rays they own, then that problem could be solved and we could be free of having to store these unnecessary boxes and disks in our houses.
Last Updated: February 18, 2019
jimz0r
February 18, 2019 at 13:22
“A drop of almost 72 percent that repeatedly sees the average American spend only 5 minutes a day watching content on these technologies, per day”
Day after day per day during the day.
Guz
February 18, 2019 at 14:31
Its all in the cloud now xD
G8crasha
February 18, 2019 at 14:40
I also have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, without a doubt, physical media is losing ground to streaming and download services, but not everybody has access to the underlying infrastructure to take advantage of this progress. Take for example myself. I live in a Medium to High Income area in Durban, but I still do not have fibre – hell, my exchange maxes out at 4Mb. If I was to download a 4k movie that I legally purchased, it would cost be a damn side more with LTE (which is my only high speed source of Internet connectivity) data than it would cost to purchase a physical blu-ray copy of the movie. I can assure you, I am not the only one that is frustrated by slow roll out of high speed fibre networks. Then there is the matter of FUP. Once again, I would hit my FUP far sooner if I was to download/stream 4k movies. I can go on and on about the challenges, and while I always try to embrace progress, sometimes, when you feel you are being left behind not by any fault of yours, you tend to resist the progress!
G8crasha
February 18, 2019 at 14:58
Did some quick research:
1. Limited choice for online purchases of movie
2. Except for Apple, with Google Play and Amazon you can’t download and watch the movies offline (and even with Apple, you need a PC or an Apple ecosystem) – plus Apple, as of 11/2018, don’t have 4k/UHD movies. VUDU (new to me) does allow offline downloading and viewing.
Matthew Holliday
February 18, 2019 at 15:06
In the past 5 years, I watched my scott pilgrim bluray once while we were waiting for our internet to be activated.
On a playstation.
Never owned any other kind of bluray player.
FUP are much more reasonable since fibre, I remember permanently being on that 1 star rating when I was on 2mb ADSL, so much so that I switched to a capped account.
Switched to uncapped fibre recently and havent had to worry about my usage yet.
But yeah, legal access to movies outside of the usual streaming services is pretty limited.
Most options are hidden behind pay walls or require a level of tech saviness that Im not prepared to learn or try teach my parents.
Problematic
CodeDisQus
March 2, 2019 at 13:43
hahahahahaha I had the same issue, I remember one month getting throttled on the 10th for excessive use, (that was before I knew about FUP)
Pariah
February 18, 2019 at 13:37
Awww, has this news left you feeling a little blue? 😛