▌Ye Lang’s daily reading: Disney shuts down DVD and Blu-ray distribution business in Australia. Is physical media finally going to be RIPed? ▌
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It’s been a tumultuous year in the history of entertainment: The streaming arms race has finally hit the emergency brakes, Peak TV has officially reached the finish line, movie theaters are making a long-overdue revival, and writers and actors’ strikes are bringing Hollywood to a standstill… ..
But one small but potentially significant change almost escaped our attention—
Disney is preparing to completely close its DVD and Blu-ray disc distribution business across the Australian continent, so that Australians will no longer be able to buy physical discs of Disney Group (including Fox) movies and TV shows.
While Disney has no word of a full rollout, one must be wary of the fact that this kind of testing the waters has become prevalent among media conglomerates in recent years. When Netflix started enforcing a no-credential sharing policy in South America, we knew for a long time that they would one day fully implement it. When the basic Netflix plan in Canada was cancelled, we took for granted that it would be our turn soon.
Compared with the drastic reorganization of the entire Disney group, the end of the physical media business is a matter of course. While the streaming wars have put the brakes on the conglomerates this year, Disney CEO Bob Iger is all too aware that streaming will be the only way to go. A few days ago, he announced that the traditional media business that may be divested and sold includes the declining wireless TV and cable TV, and even ESPN, which is still very profitable, is included in the list because of the very high capital demand for investment in a comprehensive streaming transformation. listed for sale.
Disney knows all too well that it’s been a long time since the last time you bought a DVD or Blu-ray.
In addition to the news from the Australian mainland, another gossip from the more niche soundtrack fan community is that the soundtrack to “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Indiana Jones: Roulette” sold out at a very alarming rate. . It’s not that the master John Williams’ possible close-up work is so popular, but Disney didn’t talk about limited release, but it did only release a very, very small number of physical CDs into the market. Soundtrack physical albums don’t constitute a business anymore.
With the death of these discs is the precious experience of owning a movie and an album.
Before the advent of videotape in 1975, fans around the world could not really legally own a movie. That’s exactly why 1997’s high-definition, affordable DVD. After the listing, we bought like crazy.
Soon this owned right will be left only with the emptiness of digital retail. Digital retail websites all have a very vague proviso, which means that what consumers buy is not a permanent and unlimited right to use it. One day their content license expires, and what you bought may be nothing.
More importantly, physical media has a “sharing” function that cannot be replaced by digital retail files. Nick Pino, author of the technology review website Tom’s Guild, lamented this disappearing “sharing” experience in an article today:
“The thing about physical media is that it can be shared. I love letting my friends and family borrow my film collection. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is a masterpiece, so when I know a friend of mine hasn’t seen it, I immediately ran to my Blu-ray rack and gave him my disc. I still haven’t got my Blu-ray back, but that doesn’t change my mind. Movies are a shared experience for me.”
As someone wrote in the book “Once upon a Time There Was a Video Store”, “sharing” is also the reason why Hollywood is absolutely unwilling to give it, so it has mobilized all resources to contain videotapes from entering the US market. Now they want to take back this power again.
The reality that neither Indiana Jones himself nor fantasy devices such as Archimedes’ wheel of fortune can be reversed is that physical media is no longer an economic model that can support itself, and media groups with limited resources have gradually lost support. Interest in economic models. Another company that is about to shed its physical media business is Netflix. At the end of next month, Netflix will end its 25-year-old mail-in DVD rental business.
The CD is like the old Indiana Jones, no matter how he refuses to admit his age, he still has to ride a horse to face his own sunset like all heroes.
