News Best Buy Quits Physical Media Business: No More Blu-rays at Best Buy

[Co BIY]

I do miss the nearly limitless catalog that Netflix offered at it's DVD mailing peak. You could get basically any movie ever published in a couple days time.

Digital streaming is better overall but the availability of some things is worse.

 

[Co BIY]

I guess we can't ignore the risk of theft, however. Perhaps that's what pushed them over the edge.

Theft is killing a lot of retail. A lot of it is already weak and it doesn't take much theft to destroy a thin margin.

 

[bit_user]

I do miss the nearly limitless catalog that Netflix offered at it's DVD mailing peak. You could get basically any movie ever published in a couple days time.

Digital streaming is better overall but the availability of some things is worse.

This.

I was never a Netflix customer, but I can 100% see how a DVD rental business can basically rent anything without permission from the studio, while a streamer has to acquire the rights. Those streaming rights might be more expensive, plus now that basically every major studio has their own streaming service, many will want to restrict certain titles as exclusives.

Netflix had a pretty cool idea for getting rid of their DVD inventory. Basically, they said whatever you have in your possession, when the disc service ends, is yours to keep.

 

[dimar]

These days I only buy 4K Blu-Rays of older movies I grew up with. It's rare for me to buy a newer movie, which would have to be astronomically good. I'd like studios to start selling AV2 or VVC files, just like music is being sold in FLAC format.

 

[randyh121]

Yeah, who needs a historical reference?

Imagine if we had no film, vinyl records, tapes, or newsprint from the past 100 years. How would that change our understanding of those decades?

If some sort of civilization-ending cataclysm happens, as happened many times in the past, it won't take long for the bits to fade on all the SSDs, HDDs, and even tapes. Optical media currently has the best longevity. If those in the wake of such a disaster are unable to reconstruct the sequence of events leading up to it and understand the cultural context, what hope would they have not to repeat it?

None of that matters if we'd be dead by then. Who cares. Nobody.
Optical DVD/Blurays suffer the same rot as anything. I've seen half a dozen CD's come into a shop I used to work in suffering from data rot, and the senior citizens could not believe their precious pictures were gone forever.
Should have stored it in the cloud.

 

[Ogotai]

Digital streaming is better overall but the availability of some things is worse.

not really... lower quality. may not be availing if your connection goes down, not to mention the increasing costs of the subscriptions....

Should have stored it in the cloud.

yea ok sure... i sure cant see my parents, let alone my grand parents being able to save anything to the cloud. too complicated for them..

and, what happens if the cloud storage you are using, goes out of business, or has hdd fail ? then what ? sorry, but cloud storage isnt as safe or secure as any other type of storage....

 

[bit_user]

None of that matters if we'd be dead by then. Who cares. Nobody.

Civilizations have come and gone many times, throughout human history. The species never went extinct. I'm not talking about a human extinction, here.

If you don't care about anyone living after your own death, then I guess there's no point in continuing this exchange.

Optical DVD/Blurays suffer the same rot as anything. I've seen half a dozen CD's come into a shop I used to work in suffering from data rot, and the senior citizens could not believe their precious pictures were gone forever.
Should have stored it in the cloud.

First you really should refer people to a media recovery specialist. It's often the case that even degraded media isn't beyond hope.

All of my burned discs are still readable. Use quality media, don't burn at the highest speed, and maybe don't store them in the attic or a wet basement.

Finally, pressed media generally has far longer longevity. It's not the same for all pressed discs, but newer formats generally have better longevity than older ones.

 

[bit_user]

not really... lower quality. may not be availing if your connection goes down, not to mention the increasing costs of the subscriptions....

Quality is somewhat dependent. If you're watching an old movie from DVD, you might find that streaming services have a newer film-transfer that's been nicely cleaned up. I've seen a few ~50+ year old movies via Amazon Prime, in the past year, and all of them looked very good. Better, for instance, than my 25th anniversary blu-ray of Wall St (1987), which was grainy enough that I actually had to enable my TV's noise reduction feature.

and, what happens if the cloud storage you are using, goes out of business, or has hdd fail ? then what ? sorry, but cloud storage isnt as safe or secure as any other type of storage....

Yes, and there's my Hotmail example. That's Microsoft - not some dinky little cloud startup!