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Tuesday, June 3, 2008
DVDs - Are they staying or going?
You may notice that I haven’t been running much in the way of DVD reviews lately in this piece of cyberspace. There’s a reason for that. Pickings are slimmer than ticket sales for Speed Racer.
Quite frankly, there are some titles out there right now that I don’t feel inclined to alert people to. If you really want to know what’s around, click here and peruse the list. Beyond that, I leave the responsibility of DVD selection to you.
As it happens, good movies aren’t the only things scarce in the DVD world. There’s been buzz lately that DVDs themselves might be go the way of VHS even sooner than expected.
I have talked before on this blog about downloading eventually taking the place of DVDs, and this report from The Guardian in the UK says “DVD industry insiders admit the format may eventually die out.” Netflix itself predicted that their DVD by mail model may start to fall off in only 5-10 years.
Not so fast …
Here’s what makes me curious: Are people really ready to give up physical media when it comes to movies? I myself have pointed at how downloads continually erode CD sales and predicted the same would happen with DVDs. But, as has been pointed out, music and movies aren’t enjoyed the same way.
A commenter on Hollywood Elsewhere named Richardson made this interesting observation: “There’s a big difference between CDs and DVDs. People have always wanted to listen to music as much as possible wherever they could. If you look at it, car stereos, Walkmen, Discmen, boom boxes, they all led directly to the iPod. More portable formats thrived. LPs couldn’t kill 8-tracks because LPs weren’t portable — it took cassettes to kill 8-tracks, and CDs to kill LPs. Then CDs became portable and cassettes died. Then MP3 technology came along… and the iPod killed CDs.
“Despite attempts by the industry, there has never been as much demand for portable movie watching ….”
He also points out: “‘picture quality’ means something to people in a way that “audio quality” never did. The people who buy DVDs because they’re the best picture quality, who are now upgrading their TVs to 70” HD and buying Blu-Ray players… these people aren’t going to want to download unless they can download something quickly and easily which will look as good as what they can buy in a store.
“For some reason, “audio quality” never caught on. LPs sound better than CDs? Nobody cares. MP3s sound audibly compressed? Nobody cares. People just want to listen to their music, however they can.”
He makes a very compelling point that DVDs and music have a very different set of demands than iPods and music. So maybe the DVD won’t die as fast as some say it will.
So what’s your forecast? Should we be deciding how many trips we need to make to the recycling place to get rid of DVDs? Or will you hang on to them indefinitely?
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