The Future of Home Video

[zedz]

The other thing I have a hard time figuring is how much, if at all, consumers tend to care about the quality of what they're watching in terms of mastering. Physical is far more reliable, but by and large it seems to me that people don't give a solitary crap about macroblocking, bitrate, banding, or other tech specs as long as it looks reasonably good and plays consistently. I don't know. It's rough.

Sad but true: for most consumers convenience is more important than quality by an order of magnitude. One of the reasons BluRay never took off like DVD did is that it didn't offer the same improvements in convenience that DVD had offered over video tape (or CDs offered over LPs). Arguably, with increased loading times, region-locking that was harder to circumvent, and the need for firmware upgrades to avoid playback issues, the format was a step back for convenience-focussed consumers.

[Professor Wagstaff]

The other thing I have a hard time figuring is how much, if at all, consumers tend to care about the quality of what they're watching in terms of mastering. Physical is far more reliable, but by and large it seems to me that people don't give a solitary crap about macroblocking, bitrate, banding, or other tech specs as long as it looks reasonably good and plays consistently. I don't know. It's rough.

I think most consumers have almost no interest in mastering when it comes to the qualities of movies/television and probably don't know what it is. With so many consumers happy to watch programs in the wrong aspect ratio or with motion smoothing, I doubt they'd kick up a fuss for tech specs. I see this with my brother. He spends a lot of money building a great entertainment system, but feels content to watch It's a Wonderful Life stretched out so it fills the screen or The Godfather with motion smoothing because he likes the effect when watching sports so it should apply to films as well.

[tenia]

The other thing I have a hard time figuring is how much, if at all, consumers tend to care about the quality of what they're watching in terms of mastering. Physical is far more reliable, but by and large it seems to me that people don't give a solitary crap about macroblocking, bitrate, banding, or other tech specs as long as it looks reasonably good and plays consistently. I don't know. It's rough.

People don't give a crap. Even some label don't care about encoding at the proper speed the movie, and customers don't care either.
Otherwise, DVD would have become obsolete long ago, but actually, most viewers are happy enough with a DVD-quality.

Worse even : they wouldn't know what's good and what's not. My dad bought a UHD Samsung 55" TV to replace my Panny 50G20 I took with me when I moved out of there. He set it up so bad he thought the TV was malfunctioning and thought about sending it back to CS. I had to do the whole setup again to have something better and closer to what is should be (though without having a calibration kit, that’s about as much as I can do).
But I'd have a hard time blaming him : why would all these options be here if not to be used ? So all hail to cranking up altogether color saturation, contrast, brightness, DNR AND sharpness, and then turning on 500 Hz stuff.

But I think this says a lot about what the general public care : bigger and supposedly better TV, but the general public actually doesn’t even know what it means nor how to achieve it. The disparity in France between the penetration rate of HDTV (about 80-85%) and the one of BD players (17% + 18% through PS3 sales) (and then 15% of “HT”, whatever it means for Gfk) clearly shows that people like HD, like having a big HDTV, but they don’t really care what they’re watching on it. Actually, they might not even be able to say if PQ is good or not.

So IMO, the general public seems to see HDTV the same they see some extremely consumerist stuff like smartphones or connected-whatever : a good way to showing off. They’d put $1000 in a TV without knowing how to use it, or if what they watching has a good quality to being with. That’s how plasma slowly died, replaced for a long time by technologies perceived as better, but actually having a whole lot of deep flaws (including clouding and poor black levels to begin with).

And it also shows in the very poor care given to sound : while it’s very well known that sound is one of the biggest limitation of flat-panels, nobody seems to care within the public, even if studies have shown that pictures have a bigger impact on a viewer when the sound has a good quality.

It seems to be all a question of perception rather than a technical objective view. That’s very sad, especially in a era where internet and social networks allows ignorant people to spread wrong assessments of what’s good and what’s not, and that’s how you get people saying that The Wizard of Oz’ BD looks awful...

[djproject]

Personally, I cannot help but think of when compact discs first came into the market. By the 1990s, it was assumed that CDs were here to stay and the 12" LP and 7" single was dead. But it never really went away and there were labels who were still pressing vinyl records through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Then, the digital music file became a thing and succeeded the CD as the dominant format. But then vinyl was making a quiet comeback through a combination of nostalgia (Gen X, older Millennials) and curiosity (younger Millennials). Now in the 2010s, vinyl is in high demand as the digital music file is waning compared to streaming music. Thus, I get suspicious whenever someone announces a premature death of a physical media format.

Ultimately, I would like to see options still be available and not being forced to choose something either I don't particularly want or have interest in utilizing fully or exclusively. While I do appreciate the convenience of a VOD (or even digital copies a la Ultraviolet or iTunes), I do enjoy watching films through a physical medium. And I am technically savvy to know what good presentations are supposed to be. To eliminate completely that physical option, which I don't think is possible as you can't be 100% on most things, is a detriment to both choice and overall quality. I think of it as if the commercial music market twenty years ago eliminating both vinyl records and CDs and making everything cassette (hey! portability right?).

[tenia]

I believe the issue is more in oversplitting the market. The current issue of the physical market seems to come from the digital market having been pushed like hell by lots of people in the industry.

Consumers wallets certainly haven't grown bigger, but yet, you can now buy for lots of stuff either the DVD, the BD, the VOD file or subscribe to a streaming service.

I believe that's what happened in France for the music industry : while the industry was crying about the loss on CD sales, actually, the overall music revenue were growing due to the increase in sales of the other means to access the music.

[Feiereisel]

I agree with a lot of the above--this "death" reads as cloying clickbait more than studied prognostication, especially because the dates tend to be five-plus years away. Also, things only seem to be projected based on whatever the current release model or strategy is. It's possible for things to change between now and whatever predicted end date currently is, but because format death is inevitable (especially now that we outmode consumer electronics with tremendous pageantry on a yearly basis) these are, sadly, the easier articles to write.

Add to that people's seeming desire, in terms of content, for a buffet feast rather than one good meal. Streaming services allow that at acceptable quality, especially for TV shows that haven't been released on blu-ray like 30 Rock. Add to that things like The Wire's well meaning but aesthetically compromised blu-ray release...it stinks, and I wish it were better.

(Streaming services also preserve, to a large extent, compatibility between a wide variety and many generations of platforms, whereas physical media is yoked to one slot on one or two devices. A convenience that appeals to people despite it not really being that useful, like how sedans sometimes have racing accents.)

[tenia]

I agree with a lot of the above--this "death" reads as cloying clickbait more than studied prognostication, especially because the dates tend to be five-plus years away.

All past studies I've reviewed for an article on the Blu Ray French market showed a drastic difference between what was expected and the reality. That's the case on BD market shares and penetration rate of 3D TV. I also believe it was the same for BD-Audio.

And that wasn't even 5-years-in-the-future projections, but sometimes only 2 or 3.

Also, things only seem to be projected based on whatever the current release model or strategy is.

As it always is (hence many issues regarding the figures drawn from said-studies).


This beind said, The Dissolve article reminds an important thing : get your core consumers right should be a first and foremost thing to do to sustain sales, something that lots of BDs don't respect, using old dated masters, awful compressions and FUBAR filtering. Or splitting the extras between different sellers...

[Feiereisel]

This beind said, The Dissolve article reminds an important thing : get your core consumers right should be a first and foremost thing to do to sustain sales, something that lots of BDs don't respect, using old dated masters, awful compressions and FUBAR filtering. Or splitting the extras between different sellers...

Yeah--seems like common sense, especially from a technical standpoint, but that bends us back to "good enough" being good enough, which is equally frustrating.

Splitting extras is also ridiculous...something I'd extend to special collector's packaging in general.

[tenia]

that bends us back to "good enough" being good enough, which is equally frustrating.

But it shouldn't. The general public who doesn't give a solitary crap about the technical excellency of a BD just doesn't seem to be anymore the core of the video market.

Good enough is thus not enough anymore, which is clear when one says "do like Criterion". Criterion, 90% of the time, doesn't rely on stuff just being good enough. Arrow and co don't do so either.

So I do believe that while many titles should be available in "good enough" BDs but at a much lower price point, many titles should not be surprised to meet mixed sales if they're just sold in a "good enough" package. On this point, I think The Dissolve aims right when saying no blockbuster should have only 20min of EPK for extras.

But I also loathe a lot of stuff being sold at a fairly high price regarding their technical merits, and that includes some Criterion releases which just use old masters (see Sword of Doom, for instance). I don't understand how you can sell such comprehensive and beautiful packages like Autumn Sonata, Don't Look Now or Satyricon the same price than Sword of Doom.

That's the level of lack of excellency (or at least lack of care) that no movie should sustain, and no-one should be paying for.

Another clear example : Twilight Time released Lang's Man Hunt on BD in August 2014, and the technical presentation is very nice. In France, Sidonis released the movie as a quite expensive BD+DVD+80p book release in Oct 2013 (30€), and then in a more realistically priced (20€) but bookless release in Feb 2015. It wouldn’t cost me much more to try and get the TT release (for instance during their birthday sale, it would cost me about 23€), but I’m French, so I bought the French release.
While it has some interesting extras (a 54min documentary + a 61 min discussion on the movie between Patrick Brion & Bernard Eisenschitz, the technical presentation in miles away from the nice one TT used. It’s absolutely awful, being a dated master and not a good one, with poor contrast, poor details, and lots of filtering.

And I paid 20€ for this crap.

Again, it felt like a cash-release, made with poor elements and nobody really caring away, like “who care about how good it looks anyway ?”. But to be honest, I don’t have a lot of releases from Sidonis precisely because of this : the only few I have huge technical limitations, and I certainly wouldn’t advice paying 20€ for this, or even 15€.

So if at some point, Sidonis would come and cringe about poor sales, I’d answer they just deserve it. :-"

[Feiereisel]

But it shouldn't. The general public who doesn't give a solitary crap about the technical excellency of a BD just doesn't seem to be anymore the core of the video market.

Right--that's the problem. I suspect the studios think consumers' desire for content consumption supersedes their desire for depth of content--which is troubling for any number of reasons, not the least of which being it defines art in terms of pure product, which is ice cold.

So I do believe that while many titles should be available in "good enough" BDs but at a much lower price point, many titles should not be surprised to meet mixed sales if they're just sold in a "good enough" package. On this point, I think The Dissolve aims right when saying no blockbuster should have only 20min of EPK for extras.

I agree--scholarly content is always welcome, and based on the plethora of film and video discussion online, I don't think it would be too hard to put together a roundtable or something else in that vein for home video releases. That it's hard and time-consuming at all is probably what keeps companies from doing it, excepting anniversary or special editions, which isn't ideal. Rebuying the same thing over and over is not the way to court folks who aren't way into this stuff already.

But I also loathe a lot of stuff being sold at a fairly high price regarding their technical merits, and that includes some Criterion releases which just use old masters (see Sword of Doom, for instance). I don't understand how you can sell such comprehensive and beautiful packages like Autumn Sonata, Don't Look Now or Satyricon the same price than Sword of Doom.

That's the level of lack of excellency (or at least lack of care) that no movie should sustain, and no-one should be paying for.

True enough--clearly, Criterion isn't unaccustomed to getting people to pay a little extra for the prestige implied by their label. I'm not saying they don't do their best with every release and surely care is taken with everything, but not all editions are created equal. However, they are still putting out amazing releases, which balances the equation for me. They don't callously trade off of being the only game in town for some filmmakers in Region 1.

That said, isn't mentioning the technical merits of a Twilight Time disc at least somewhat problematic in this discussion? Their limited run model is anathema to (re)building the home video market. While a lot of their discs have very good tech-specs, their limited 3,000 per three years availability puts a hard limit on how many can be bought in the primary market. That's not a value judgement of their method, but is still worth mentioning in relation to other studios.

(Ultimately that question is mostly rhetorical--I'm just happy deep-catalog titles are being released at all, regardless of the company.)

[tenia]

Right--that's the problem. I suspect the studios think consumers' desire for content consumption supersedes their desire for depth of content--which is troubling for any number of reasons, not the least of which being it defines art in terms of pure product, which is ice cold.

I think there's just 2 markets : one for streaming shitloads of movie without any extra content, and one for Blood and Black Lace @ Arrow type releases.

That said, isn't mentioning the technical merits of a Twilight Time disc at least somewhat problematic in this discussion? Their limited run model is anathema to (re)building the home video market. While a lot of their discs have very good tech-specs, their limited 3,000 per three years availability puts a hard limit on how many can be bought in the primary market. That's not a value judgement of their method, but is still worth mentioning in relation to other studios.

Oh, I don't like TT business model either, because I don't like at all the idea of many people not being able to access a given release because it has sold out and will remain so for the next 2.5 years (and also their SAE-only selling place). It was more a question of not being happy with the French release rather than praising TT one.

[Feiereisel]

Oh, I don't like TT business model either, because I don't like at all the idea of many people not being able to access a given release because it has sold out and will remain so for the next 2.5 years (and also their SAE-only selling place). It was more a question of not being happy with the French release rather than praising TT one.

Ah, okay. It's interesting how non-standard some of the mastering situations seem in the different regions...studios and distributors may do well to start trying to standardize that. One of the reasons I've resisted going region-free (despite a ton of benefits) is that I don't want to keep buying everything all the time...which I'm doing some of already. That, of course speaks to another consumer issue--there is a saturation point that varies from person to person.

[Dylan]

feels content to watch It's a Wonderful Life stretched out so it fills the screen or The Godfather with motion smoothing

I was at my sister's house last year and Jumanji was on her widescreen TV with motion smoothing and it looked absolutely hideous, but her and her husband didn't seem to notice. I tried to change the settings (after simply saying to them that the image "could look better") but the menu was so complicated that I gave up after a few minutes (they no longer had their manual and I didn't want to make a bigger deal out of it). On the same trip I was at another family member's house and she was watching an episode of the 1950s TV show The Rifleman stretched out to 1.85 to fit the widescreen TV, and that too looked hideous. And you guessed it, I tried to change the settings but got lost as to where the options were and she no longer had the manual and I - again - didn't want to make a bigger deal about it. In both cases my family members seemed to believe that each setting (which may have been automatic and set since day one of their purchase) was the correct one and they were just flying with it.

In my opinion, both motion smoothing and stretched images do more to destroy a film's quality than pan/scan.

[zedz]

Personally, I cannot help but think of when compact discs first came into the market. By the 1990s, it was assumed that CDs were here to stay and the 12" LP and 7" single was dead. But it never really went away and there were labels who were still pressing vinyl records through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Then, the digital music file became a thing and succeeded the CD as the dominant format. But then vinyl was making a quiet comeback through a combination of nostalgia (Gen X, older Millennials) and curiosity (younger Millennials). Now in the 2010s, vinyl is in high demand as the digital music file is waning compared to streaming music. Thus, I get suspicious whenever someone announces a premature death of a physical media format.

This isn't really a reassuring analogy. Vinyl is indeed in high demand at the moment - but only in comparison to the years when most new releases weren't being issued in the format at all and second-hand vinyl was selling for 10c apiece. Vinyl album sales still only make up less than 4% of the total album market. And that's a figure that's already strongly skewed in favour of physical media, since a lot of digital sales are for individual tracks rather than complete albums.

[vsski]

What I miss being mentioned in the article are comments about the decisions made by the studios and how that influenced the market.
When DVDs first came around, studios realized that they had found a gold mine and printing a DVD was like printing money. Almost anything they put out was better than a videotape and more user friendly than a laser disc, not to speak of the cheaper price point, so everyone was buying.

When due to new technologies and shifting consumer demands, that gold mine started to trickle out, the mindset was to find the next one. Studios, except a few cinephiles and restorers, equally don't care about the quality as for them it is about making the most profits. So when digital downloads and streaming promised more money the marketing machine was put in motion to support and push these formats.

When the next technology comes around that allows you to wear a chip in your brain and stream the movies right into your retina, they will push that if it makes more money.
While some of this is of course driven by overhead and existing business models that they are loath to relinquish, it also is a mindset issue, namely that of money trumps quality.
So when it comes to "old" physical media few at the studios are willing to put the same time and effort into releasing their own discs and instead have opted to make transfers and license them out to smaller labels. And hence we are seeing licenses by the big studios given to small labels that 10 -15 years ago were unthinkable.

The Criterions, Arrows, MoCs, Kinos, TTs and other labels do cater primarily to a niche market like the people on this board, and here I do think the article makes a valid point, in so far as you do maintain a devoted base of followers, if you produce the best product possible, technically as well as in terms of contextualizing extras.
The challenge here of course is to make it a viable business proposition for these labels. First there are the licenses, and many license holders have simply unrealistic expectations, then there is authoring, packaging and distribution, which also comes at a price, especially for BDs, so each label has to gauge how to best make a return, whether it is through limited editions, special packaging like steelbooks, and numbering their releases to appeal to the collectors market, or through special sales events to reach the widest possible audience, etc.
And some, as in the case of Second Run, had to come to the conclusion that as much as they would love to put everything out on BD it simply isn't affordable for them.

But to me these labels and their business models are never going to reach a mass market, yet can exist for a long time to come, as long as the studios don't see them as a threat to their next money making push.
At the same time I fully expect price points for BDs to go up in order to continue to provide the same of amount of quality, extras and attention to detail, or as we are seeing more and more (Criterion and MoC being two examples) a decreasing amount of extras in order to keep existing price points.
After all the total addressable market of this niche isn't getting bigger, since last I checked none of us are getting any younger.

[tenia]

You're absolutely right : the state of the physical market is waht it is because the industry itself pushed the next best thing instead, spreading the jam over a much longer slice of bread.

[djproject]

Personally, I cannot help but think of when compact discs first came into the market. By the 1990s, it was assumed that CDs were here to stay and the 12" LP and 7" single was dead. But it never really went away and there were labels who were still pressing vinyl records through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Then, the digital music file became a thing and succeeded the CD as the dominant format. But then vinyl was making a quiet comeback through a combination of nostalgia (Gen X, older Millennials) and curiosity (younger Millennials). Now in the 2010s, vinyl is in high demand as the digital music file is waning compared to streaming music. Thus, I get suspicious whenever someone announces a premature death of a physical media format.

This isn't really a reassuring analogy. Vinyl is indeed in high demand at the moment - but only in comparison to the years when most new releases weren't being issued in the format at all and second-hand vinyl was selling for 10c apiece. Vinyl album sales still only make up less than 4% of the total album market. And that's a figure that's already strongly skewed in favour of physical media, since a lot of digital sales are for individual tracks rather than complete albums.

The reason for making the comparison in the first place was just making a point that just because something is waning does not always mean inevitable extinction.

[Drucker]

Some recent thoughts from Steve Albini.

...if you want your music to play at the push of a button, convenience is going to trump sound quality 100 percent of the time.

[manicsounds]

Lionsgate has been pricing their new releases at $24 or $19. Only big releases like The Hunger Games has been $39 on release date.

[Numero Trois]

The movie industry today faces a genuine threat to its existence. Thanks to a decade of willful blindness, the studios have failed to create a coordinated response to the transformation of almost every aspect of its century-old way of doing business imposed by digital technology

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/a-sp ... -hollywood" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Streaming services allow that at acceptable quality

Acceptable only for the general consumer perhaps. Like Colin said earlier, the streaming experience overall so far has been decidedly not optimal. And the rate of improvement to web infrastructure (in the US at least) is far from inspiring. I'd rather experience jumpcuts as intended by the director, not randomly inserted by monopolistic ISPs.

[Feiereisel]

No kidding--a very disdainful "acceptable", there. I'm not anti-steamingl, but view it as a supplementary to physical home video. I prefer physical media in almost every form, but do like to interrogate and maybe tease out what or why people prefer about different platforms.

Perhaps worth noting--I tend to think of streaming services in terms of their brand (as is their intent), while I think of physical media in terms of single films (or albums, or comics, or books), and I wonder if that's not affecting how I go about evaluate them. Like how what makes for a good library is different than a what makes for a good book.

This is all very loose in my head at the moment, but these two fields of content are potentially selling very different things, which people may value in very different ways, etc, etc.

[mfunk9786]

4K Blu-ray has been approved, will be called UltraHD Blu-ray with 66 GB [dual layer] and 100 GB [trial layer] disc sizes. A new player will be required, and manufacturers are required to include back-compatibility with regular Blu-ray discs.

[swo17]

4K Blu-ray has been approved, will be called UltraHD Blu-ray with 66 GB [dual layer] and 100 GB [trial layer] disc sizes. A new player will be required, and manufacturers are required to include back-compatibility with regular Blu-ray discs.

That's all well and good, as long as everything still fills up my TV screen.

[Gregory]

Consumers will get so excited about this that they forget about the convenience of streaming their movies and watching them on small screens, and they'll rush out to buy the new disc players. Everyone will be talking about the "unparalleled, consistent and repeatable UHD experience" and rejoicing that there is a new format to free them from the shackles of 1080p.

[tenia]

I'll watch the figures for sales in 3-4 years, where people will have bought UHD TVs like they bought Full HD TV, but the discs won't have even 10% of market shares, on a market split between DVD, BD and UHD-BD (+ streaming, obviously).

That'll be the time where regular people will start trying to watch their 25 years old DVD upscaled in 4K and their eyes will start bleeding.

Oh what a joy it will be.