I was just shopping at my local supermarket today, and as I was walking out I passed by the defunct Redbox kiosk/ You may recall from this past summer that Redbox ceased operations after their parent company changed its bankruptcy filing from Chapter 11 to Chapter 7 (the company is dead, and is being liquidated).
This had reminded me that last December I had bought a Blu-Ray player and had planned to build a library of DVDs. That project ended up not going anywhere because I didn’t really like watching DVDs. Sure, I will binge watch a whole tv series or stream a movie, but not on DVDs.
I have a huge stack of DVDs in a cabinet, and I can buy more for $2 a pop at my local used bookstore, but I have no desire to do so.
I got to thinking about that on the way home from the supermarket, and I realized exactly why I didn’t like DVDs, and that helped me understand why streaming killed DVDs.
It’s pretty simple:
Watching DVDs Kinda Sucks
… (when compared to streaming)
I know this is kinda silly, but the truth is the DVD viewing experience is full of petty annoyances which simply do not exist with streaming.
I’m not talking about putting the DVD in the tray and pressing close; the petty annoyances start when you first play the movie and goes from there:
- Having to sit through the FBI warning,
- Watching the (usually unskippable) previews,
- Waiting for the menu to load, and
- Waiting for the movie to play.
And that’s just the beginning. There’s also the clunky way you have to jump around the movie, the peril of pressing the stop button instead of pause (you usually have to restart the DVD from the initial FBI warning), and the nuisance of trying to continue watching a DVD from where you left off the night before.
None of those problems exist with streaming videos. Sure, my tablet is and smartphone are a lot smaller than my 40” TV, but the tablet’s touchscreen is so much easier to use, and it’s really easy to jump around in the movie or episode, pick up where I left off, or jump from one TV episode to the next.
EDIT: Plus, let’s not forget all the services such as Hulu and Youtube which really started to get popular in the late aughts, and continued to grow after 2010.
And yes, it can be hard to find something you like in a streaming catalog, and we eventually were inundated by ads, and yes, sometimes the movies you paid for stop being available because the rights expired, but all in all streaming is still the better experience.
And that, in a nutshell, is:
Why Streaming Killed DVDs
The streaming experience is just better. It’s that simple. The movie you want to stream might not be available, but the one you find will be a more pleasant experience than if you were watching a DVD.
I suppose it’s rather obvious now that I’ve mentioned, but honestly I would have thought that given the access issues with streaming (licenses getting pulled, internet connection, etc), DVDs would still have a market because there is security in owning a physical copy which (unlike digital copies) can’t be taken away from you.
Instead, I checked and found that the DVD market started to die around 2008, and it went through at least a decade of decline before streaming eclipsed it.
Hmmm, I wonder if anyone tried to see if they could improve the experience, and maybe win back consumers?
I’d have to say probably not, because I have DVDs made in the past 5-10 years, and they still have many of the same annoyances as older DVDs.
EDIT: I am possibly a bit dim in not seeing the Blu-ray and HD DVDs (both introduced in 2006) as new hardware upgrades from DVDs, but then again they had the exact same problems as regular DVDs, only with higher density discs.
On the other hand, if someone had investigated the viewing experience, they probably realized that the DVD itself was part of the problem. The disc being played like a record instead of loaded as a file is the cause of at least half of the complaints I listed above, and really the best solution to this problem would be to switch to a new physical media – such as a card you could buy and then insert into a media player.
Unfortunately, that would have required a whole new set of hardware, and related industries. I don’t know that the movie industry would have invested in this after around 2014 or so, I seriously doubt that it could have been (successfully) sold to the public.
And that’s a shame, because the death of the DVD means that the movies I used to love are no longer being made in Hollywood.
Or at least that is my take – what do you think?
P.S. You might be thinking Netflix’s DVD by mail service killed DVD sales, but you would be wrong. That service had a userbase which declined almost as fast as DVD sales. People just didn’t like using DVDs, not when they could stream a movie instead.
image via DepositPhoto
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