The Future of Home Video

[bearcuborg]

So you guys aren't encountering issues with disc rot in your collection?

[Matt]

There are reports about dead discs in other threads: Warner Bros. Dead Disc Problem, How Now Brown Blu-rays, maybe others.

I so rarely go back and watch discs I've collected anymore, especially DVDs, but it's probably guaranteed I have a bunch of those Warner Bros. dead discs.

[Grand Wazoo]

A few months ago I did a test of all my potentially-affected Warner discs where if they played I'd chapter skip until they froze, and out of roughly 40 from the big list I only had four from the Clark Gable Signature box and two other discs I'm blanking on which were truly dead. Maybe I was lucky overall, but the point being there is hope!

[Jonathan S]

My Canadian pressings of the affected Warner DVD titles have survived much better than the US pressings - though two Canadian-pressed discs in the 100th Anniversary Katharine Hepburn Collection were among the first to rot. I'm still finding newly rotted Warner DVDs that played okay a few years ago. Sometimes the bonus shorts go first.

[The Curious Sofa]

I've finally got into 4K/UHD, which is rather an expensive hobby in Germany, discs often cost around 30 euros, often more. Then I checked out Amazon.fr and found that many of these same titles cost under 20 euros, often around 15 euros, so I went on a bit of an upgrade binge, ordering from there.

[FrauBlucher]

The very successful one year Anniversary of Night Owl Video

[Gregory]

I wasn't sure where to put this but my local public library (Minneapolis) is ending access to Kanopy streaming because they can't afford the cost. They're encouraging people to use DVDs instead, but the majority of the films on Kanopy are not in circulation on DVD. They have five Wiseman documentaries on DVD, for example.

[Lowry_Sam]

My local library apparently changed its subscription service to Kanopy. About 2-3 years ago All the Wiseman titles disappeared & I assumed that was because Zipporah pulled them for the restorations, but many here said they still had them available. So the Wiseman titles are apparently part of a more expensive service. My local library has no Wiseman on dvd. Maybe you can ask if your library is just reducing its service rather than completely eliminating it.

[Gregory]

It's a complete goner in four weeks. I'll have to spend my allotted points wisely in these coming weeks.

The library's DVD collection could definitely be stronger in certain areas, especially because they've sat out the Blu-ray format. They prioritize the DVD budget on getting 40 copies each of the new-release widely popular movies.
I've given up trying to keep expanding my own "library" on physical media due to financial priorities and storage constraints.

[dwk]

Disney layoffs include their entire home video department

Among those let go are 20 people from the company’s publicity departments, as well as the entire home entertainment team, led by executive director of global publicity and marketing communications Chris Bess. Also gone is the EPK team, including director of creative content Natalie Clunis.

[pistolwink]

How wonderful that Disney managed to gobble up one of the great archives of cinema history (in the form of the 20th Century Fox catalog) and then promptly committed itself to doing almost nothing with it apart from Star Wars.

[domino harvey]

It’s disgusting, and no one was complaining like they are with Paramount, even though that company has never wavered from sub licensing

[Maltic]

The Fox vault fire of takeovers.

[hearthesilence]

The Disney layoffs in general are brutal. In one instance, they fired an artist, Wesley Burt, in a conference room that was covered with Burt's own artwork.

[FrauBlucher]

Don't they have a distribution deal with Sony. Maybe Sony has decision making rights, especially for the Fox catalogue, which includes licensing deals. One can only hope

[Lowry_Sam]

Don't they have a distribution deal with Sony. Maybe Sony has decision making rights, especially for the Fox catalogue, which includes licensing deals. One can only hope

And maybe Tom Rothman discussed more than just Sony titles before he was recently let loose in the closet?
One can do more than hope, one can also start conspiracy theories!

[dwk]

Don't they have a distribution deal with Sony. Maybe Sony has decision making rights, especially for the Fox catalogue, which includes licensing deals. One can only hope

Sony did take over their home video distribution, so, yeah, most of the people let go were probably redundant, but i think Disney was still responsible for deciding what was going to get released.

[eerik]

Don't they have a distribution deal with Sony. Maybe Sony has decision making rights, especially for the Fox catalogue, which includes licensing deals. One can only hope

Distribution, as in making sure the product gets from factories to warehouses to retailers, yes. They don't decide what the product itself is. Same kind of deal as they had with Criterion.

[Maltic]

Hopefully, they'll still release the remaining animated features on UHD.

[rrenault]

I know this has been discussed before, but what's the reason people feel digital and physical media can't peacefully coexist, in the sense you use services like the Criterion Channel or VOD to check things out before buying your favorites on disc?

Some people have this attitude you're "letting the team down" if you deign to watch a film at home via anything other than a hardcopy. Such an attitude frankly feels elitist to me, since you're ultimately prohibiting democratic access to film culture.

Maybe there's something I'm missing though.

That said, the peak of the DVD era wasn't exactly roses if you consider large swathes of world cinema now easily available on blu-ray were impossible to see back then unless you lived in NYC or Paris and could hold out for rep screenings.

P.S. I'd be all for a return to physical rentals, provided blu-ray and UHD are included, although "death to digital/streaming" can quickly become a slippery "be careful what you wish for" slope.

I understand and sympathize with all the arguments about ownership and corporations having too much control over media when digital/streaming are the main methods of delivery. My main gripe is I don't see how a world of "either you drop 30 quid on LEs or choose to live in NYC or Paris" is any better.

Lastly, I don't mean to target any specific argument recently posted in this thread. I'm just responding to various anti-digital arguments I frequently encounter online and asking for people's thoughts here.

[Peacock]

Digital and physical can and do live in co-harmony for film collectors like us. I don’t personally stream anything at all, but I’m aware that shuts me out from a great number of arthouse titles that are only available to stream.

I don’t stream because my kevyip is insanely high, but if it ever reached zero I wouldn’t be against it.

But there is something to be said in the anti-streaming argument in that the vast majority of people no longer collect physical media and instead rely on streaming platforms for their home entertainment. So by whole heartedly supporting streaming it makes physical releases less urgent for the rightsholders.

And then Disney thinks there’s little point in spending time catering to a small audience through physical releases if that same audience are happy to stream those same titles.

So I’ll always personally support a physical title over a streamed one, I want to help keep up that demand in my own small way. But the idea of obscure foreign films that no one is willing to spend money on releasing on Blu-ray right now are there on a streaming platform for everyone to see, that’s not a bad thing.

[MichaelB]

Since Poland is pretty much phasing out physical media (it's now vanishingly rare for a new Polish production to come out on Blu-ray, and even DVDs are becoming scarcer), I have no choice but to resort to streaming to keep up with the country's output, which I have to do for professional reasons.

But these films are never going to come out in UHD, and quite often the streaming presentation is in UHD, so...

[FrauBlucher]

The issue with streaming is you’re at the mercy of the streaming companies. Especially the ones that own Hollywood catalogs. That’s why my link above about Night Owl Video is a breath of fresh

[MichaelB]

If something's only available via streaming, I'm certainly not going to repudiate it on those grounds.

In fact, I'm impressed by the fact that some specialist streamers like Klassiki lean leavily towards feature films that you can't get on physical media, either at all or anywhere close to the quality of the Klassiki presentation—their recent revival of Andrzej Wajda's ultra-rare Siberian Lady Macbeth being a case in point, as I'd only previously been able to see it via a truly Godawful non-anamorphic NTSC DVD.

[FrauBlucher]

I don’t have anything against streaming. Both are viable mediums. In terms of having a library of films, physical is a safer way to go