It’s Christmas. Stocking fillers are being… well, filled. If you didn’t want a physical present, you might have received a gift voucher. Maybe you even got some cash for Christmas.
Whatever form your Christmas pressies have taken, if you’re a fan of physical media, I’d say you better start stocking up on your favourite titles.
I’m not one for casting gloomy aspersions about the fate of physical media. Many in the past few years have heralded its demise but it’s still alive and kicking.
My personal belief is that I don’t think physical media will ever go away – vinyl, CD, even the cassette tape are still loitering – but similarly to those media, when it comes to 4K Blu-ray, I believe it’s about to become more expensive and exclusive.
The spectre of streaming
Streaming has constantly emitted the message that it’s more convenient, but in doing so, it’s helped to turn films and TV shows into ‘content’, something that’s easily digestible and forgotten about once ingested.
What I liked about physical media is that it gave these films and TV series staying power. They didn’t appear on a homepage for a few days before being whisked away to disappear into a bottomless library.
You went to a store, you could see them, hold them in your hand and make a choice. Even if you’re buying online, you searched for something – you weren’t presented with a series of titles to choose from – there was intent behind the purchasing decision.
But that’s less the case now. People tune in and tune out. There’s no real sense of appointment viewing with the release of TV series that you can binge in a day, though it would seem there’s a pushback against this. Netflix has realised it’s not the best idea to drop all episodes at once if you want people to keep talking about it for more than a weekend.
Tech companies that have risen to the top of the tree and bought film and TV studios. And they don’t seem as interested in physical media.
Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount Studios has put physical on the back-burner, with reports the home entertainment division has been gutted.
Netflix’s seat at the front of the queue for Warner Bros. might not change anything in the next couple of years, but even if Netflix were to put films into theatres worldwide for the next ten, the theatrical windows would shrink, and you can imagine that if Netflix were to continue with Warner Bros. existing distribution model for home entertainment, that’d be more than an afterthought with its streaming operation.
With some titles seemingly streaming only – or as I learned to my horror recently – only hitting home entertainment on DVD (The White Lotus!), media companies are injecting their streaming services with as many titles as they can. And most of us aren’t even aware of all that’s available on these services to watch.
And I think it’s unhealthy for the entertainment industry. Streaming subscriptions are only going to get higher, of that I’m certain.
It doesn’t help that with multiple streaming services, a film or TV series can stay and disappear from one to another; which if you don’t have a subscription to that service, locks you off from watching that title.
It’s not particularly helpful – the convenience that streaming touts doesn’t look so convenient. It’s not helped by the quality of streaming shows being rather ho-hum.
Netflix’s quality has dipped on the TV side (it’s never been great with films), but the last few years have seen promising shows that could have found a fanbase, but were cancelled after a season. Others hit the service with little to no impact, their cultural footprint practically non-existent.
So I’ll be investing in 4K Blu-ray for the foreseeable future. I’ve bought many in the last few months, from Sinners to The Mask, Malcolm X, Heathers, Ballerina, La Haine. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and plenty more.
Yes, there are problems – the glitching and incompatibility of discs is not particularly convenient, and it is expensive, comparatively.
But I believe in ownership. I believe in your money also having a say on what’s popular and what might get made – a popular title is popular because people have bought it, not because they watched two minutes that count as ‘view’, or people putting the TV on the background and not paying attention.
Here’s hoping 4K Blu-ray sticks around for many years to come, but its best years might already have been behind it.
