Best Buy is currently going through what Fry's Electronics went through about 10 years ago, and I don't expect their outcome to be any different/better than Fry's.
It's a shame that consumer demand for physical media has largely melted away, because streaming is not a true substitute for owning a DVD.
There's obviously issues with selection. I can't find Friday the 13th on any of the four streaming services I have access to during the month of October, for example. But more than that, the new trend of editing old content to make it comply with "modern values" or simply discontinuing publication of certain movies and books should have woken up the general populace to the value and actually owning your own copy, but it probably didn't.
True I like being able to watch my copy of The French Connection complete with Gene Hackman saying "Never trust a nigger".
Beyond that there's the simple matter that bit rates and audio/video quality of a Blu Ray are way higher than you'd get from a streaming service. Earlier this year I ripped all my Blu Rays to my media server, and even a 1080p Blu Ray movie is on the order of 30 Mbit/sec and takes about 30 GB of storage. Because the incentives on the Blu Ray ("we have the space on the disc; might as well use it") are completely different than that of a streaming service ("we're paying for all this bandwidth, so it just has to be 'good enough'")
Honestly, a large part of that is the industry's fault for the prices they charge.
Like, the dollar value of a movie is absurd to buy it. One of the worst dollar per hour ratios for entertainment you can ask for, often higher than even the theater which has "the experience" on top of just the movie.
And if you want to buy boxsets of shows, well good luck because a random season of a long running show will still charge you a number that makes it impossible to "collect" all of the seasons. Even if you try, by the time you get close they will change styles and it won't match and will drive you insane.
I'd outright have wall to wall collections of physical media, but that would basically eat my entire income just to own the handful of seasons of Family Guy or Tosh.0 I care to watch.
Best Buy is currently going through what Fry's Electronics went through about 10 years ago, and I don't expect their outcome to be any different/better than Fry's.
It's a shame that consumer demand for physical media has largely melted away, because streaming is not a true substitute for owning a DVD.
There's obviously issues with selection. I can't find Friday the 13th on any of the four streaming services I have access to during the month of October, for example. But more than that, the new trend of editing old content to make it comply with "modern values" or simply discontinuing publication of certain movies and books should have woken up the general populace to the value and actually owning your own copy, but it probably didn't.
True I like being able to watch my copy of The French Connection complete with Gene Hackman saying "Never trust a nigger".
Beyond that there's the simple matter that bit rates and audio/video quality of a Blu Ray are way higher than you'd get from a streaming service. Earlier this year I ripped all my Blu Rays to my media server, and even a 1080p Blu Ray movie is on the order of 30 Mbit/sec and takes about 30 GB of storage. Because the incentives on the Blu Ray ("we have the space on the disc; might as well use it") are completely different than that of a streaming service ("we're paying for all this bandwidth, so it just has to be 'good enough'")
Honestly, a large part of that is the industry's fault for the prices they charge.
Like, the dollar value of a movie is absurd to buy it. One of the worst dollar per hour ratios for entertainment you can ask for, often higher than even the theater which has "the experience" on top of just the movie.
And if you want to buy boxsets of shows, well good luck because a random season of a long running show will still charge you a number that makes it impossible to "collect" all of the seasons. Even if you try, by the time you get close they will change styles and it won't match and will drive you insane.
I'd outright have wall to wall collections of physical media, but that would basically eat my entire income just to own the handful of seasons of Family Guy or Tosh.0 I care to watch.