Best Buy to End DVD, Blu-ray Disc Sales
Best Buy plans to phase out sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs both in-store and online by early 2024, the company said.
I feel like this is a bad sign of things to come - like sooner rather than later, it’s going to be impossible to own physical copies of our media, and companies no longer want us to buy copies of things, just sign up for never-ending streaming services.
Call us and rent for life ..today!!
🏴☠️
Big doubt. Boutique Blurays are still very popular but sold themselves.
UHD Blu-rays still have value and relevance. This is unfortunate.
I'd say regular blu-rays are still relevant even. The jump in quality between regular blu rays to 4k ones just doesn't seem as substantial as the jump did between dvd and blu ray. or vhs and dvd. But maybe that is just my aging eyeballs that can barely tell the difference with this latest jump.
Value for sure, but relevance? I challenge you to find one of your non tech obsessed friends (most of the population) that is still actively buying physical media or even still owns a disc player. I don't even think I've heard my friends say the word blu ray in years.
I'm in the fairly niche group preferring digital ownership (although I also strongly feel we need legal revisions and consumer protections over things we digitally own, instead of the "well if this digital shop goes bankrupt, your stuff is just gone", DRM, HDCP hellscape, wild west we're in now) primarily because I'm against the huge amount of plastic and physical materials physical media creates. I am most heavily against the "subscribe to everything, give all the companies your money, and own NOTHING" extra super duper hellscape we're going towards now.
The parity of environmental impact of a physical disc versus streaming a movie is 4 play throughs. So, if you play your blu-ray / 4K disc 5 times, it is more environmentally conscious than streaming the movie from a data server.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/discs-vs-data-are-we-helping-the-environment-by-streaming/
I think what they're talking about is buying online without physical media, but still owning what you bought, as in, the actual movie, as a file on your disk. Best of both worlds - no plastic, no servers necessary for playback after a one time download. That is how things should work.
I don't think that group is as 'niche' as it seems. People who prefer digital just go buy digital. It's harder to get nostalgic or evangelistic about digital goods, and the benefits are pretty obvious, so there's not much point in trying to convince people of it.
OTOH, physical goods do tend to elicit nostalgia and some of the benefits are definitely in the eye of the beholder. People tend to talk a lot more about preferring physical things, perhaps because they feel the need to defend their choice. There's often a lot of fear involved, like "What if they take my digital library away", etc.
Digital "ownership" is often cheaper, takes less space, and is more convenient. Occasionally something stupid happens, but in general it's pretty hard to lose your digital library.
And if you do lose it, I think most people would have no problem with using piracy to replace it. They bought it, and they deserve it.
I wonder if they sell fax machines.
Yup, about a dozen unique results in their app.
Their analytics staff: HOLY SHIT WE GOT A HIT ON 'FAX MACHINES' WE ARE GOING TO FINALLY UNLOAD THESE THINGS
an hour later
Analytics: they didn't actually purchase any
A lot of them are printer/scanner combo machines that have fax functionality, rather than a dedicated fax machine.
Which makes sense, I assume it's not that much more expensive to produce it with the required parts (if any). Rest is software
Fax machines are still very much used in the health industry (unfortunately)
I'm pretty sure Japan loves them too
And banking. I send at least ten faxes a day.
I was in the used video game store today and they had a huge bin of Blu-ray’s, including really good movies, for $3 each.
It’s dead
Boutique media distributors still exist for the limited audience still wanting physical media. For that I am grateful. Best Buy is cutting their losses, we live in a digital age, sad as it is for those who love collecting.
I'll be really bummed when the next gen game consoles are 100% digital and that be that for game collecting. Alas, nothing lasts forever.
Meh 🤷
They've been implementing this for the past 2 years. So stupid
Huh. Figured this happened years ago
Really wish they created a new format based on nand technology like an nvme drive. Make it read only and just give us 1tb movies woth extremely high bit rates. I'd pay $50 a movie for that maybe even mote for certain movies.
At that point why not just sell the file as-is. The drive would come this ungodly amounts of DRM anyway.
You'd still want to make it easier for end users to use.
I'm thinking something the size of a fire TV box that accepts something the size of the Xbox series nvme cart. That way they cam still have art work and make it easy to switch the movies. For large file sizes like that it's still better fir a lot of people to just buy the completed cart.
