The bottom seems to have fallen out of the DVD market according to a startling report out this week from SNL Kagan. The research firm says that studio shipments of DVDs fell 43.8% to 226 million discs last year. Wholesale revenues fell about the same amount, 43.9%, to $4.47 billion. The study compared 415 titles released in 2010 to 352 in 2009. Helped by Avatar, Fox accounted for 13.6% of the 2010 wholesale revenues. That barely beat Warner, which had 13.5% of the market, closely followed by Disney with 13.4%. “Consumers are now opting to sign up for streaming and-or rental services such as Netflix,” analyst Wade Holden wrote. “They are using video-on-demand services more and more as they discover these services can be cost-effective.” His study did not look at sales of Blu-ray discs. It also doesn’t appear to square with the home video industry’s year-end data. DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group said that studios shipped “more than 1 billion DVD units” in 2010 as well as in 2009. DEG pegged total U.S. spending on DVD sales and rentals at $14 billion last year, down 11.4%. But with Blu-ray and digital, total home video spending was down 3.1% to $18.8%, it said.
DVD Disaster? Study Says Sales Plummeted In 2010, Contrary To Industry Report
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We’re seeing more and more that the future will be on demand, streaming etc. and we’re realizing that we don’t often watch the dvds we’ve been buying all these years. We also don’t have room for all these things. Having copied and sold our cds now it’s time to limit the dvd collection to a treasured few. The industry is playing catch up.
WE? You say. Well WE are still purchasing discs in the billions although down from previous years and WE look forward to new technologies for purchasing media like ULTRAVIOLET.
Wow, YOU must have a really big house. WE live in an apartment and would like to leave rooms for other things. I predict that individual hard copies of movies in whatever form will continue to decline as population increases and personal space decreases.
Prices of Blu-ray are coming down, plus their quality is far better for those with quality TV’s. I believe Blu-ray sales were actually up last year in comparison with DVD’s.
I was an avid DVD buyer. Not anymore. I have Netflix and get one blu ray at a time. In the past year, I’ve watched a lot of movies, none of which I would even think of buying. Bad movies don’t play a second time often. Aside from buying a blu ray cartoon for my kids, I am unsure I’d buy another DVD again!
I own hundreds of DVDs and never watch any of them. The days of storing movies on these little disks are over (Blu-ray will never reach widespread adoption, either).
Yawn stop with the US = world, most of us in the world don’t even have DSL I do but can’t even stream 240P youtube videos unless I wait about 5 mins for 1 min of non breaking up streaming.
With every TV, BluRay player out there and even more in the future coming out with apps for streaming or at least some alternative…well maybe the tide is turning. Some new TV’s and BluDRay players are even coming out with Netflix buttons.
This is all coming down to
metered internet
yay
Any report that didn’t include Blu-Ray and VOD is seriously flawed.
And where can we get a report on the combined DVDs,Blu-Ray and VOD sales, outside of North America? If International sales of DVDs,Blu-Rays and VOD were UP, that could mean there was no decline in overall DVD, Blu-Ray and VOD sales worldwide.
VOD…is it becoming clear that this is the way it will go once the proper distribution, schedule and pricing is eventually resolved…, and, of course, Jeff Bewkes figures it all out.
DVD went really big like 11 years ago and since then, probably everyone has binged on buying tons of dvds and probably haven’t watched many of them more than once.
I recently inventoried my dvd (and vhs) collection and did the math: if I was somehow able to quit my job and devote 18 hours a day to watching every single movie and TV series it would take me about 5 months to do it. And I probably have a relatively small collection compared to some people.
Blu-ray was intended as a stopgap measure for the on-demand streaming feature in the first place. At best it delivered HD and archival quality resolutions and some interactive media but nothing more.
Ultraviolet, the sequel to blu-ray, promises to be more of the same.
But since so many of these studios also have vested interests in cable and telco companies, and so many of these have every reason to block streaming, you are not going to see providers like Netflix or even the studios’ own baby, Hulu, take off as much as they could with the proper infrastructure.
It will probably be 10 more years before streaming is as common place as it is predicted to be in 2014. Thank the studios for this backasswards strategy.
This study is utterly useless without Blu Rays factored in. Look at the numbers on a genre hit like Clash of the Titans. Fully 50% of its sales on Blu Rays, meaning maybe 60% of revenue.
I don’t even buy DVDs or Blu-rays. It’s easier to get something like Netflix or pay for the movie channels on cable/satellite than deal with some discs that end up being obsolete a few years later.
The way to sell more DVDs is to make better movies, and they sure didn’t do that the first 3 quarters of 2010.
It doesn’t include blu rays — which a lot of people had switched to. Why don’t studios give out sales/rental info like they do for box office results?
you can’t get all the cool extras with on-demand that you can get with DVDs !
Sorry, nobody cares about the extras. I don’t know anyone that watches that crap.
Speak for yourself buddy. Extras are sometimes more interesting than the film itself.
I agree with one poster who said that the key to selling more dvds is making better movies. I own hundreds of dvds but all of them are films produced between 1930-1990. The only film that was made in the last 10 years that I own is Somewhere by Sofia Coppola and I’d buy Black Swan. The reason? Movies suck nowadays.
And fyi nobody used Netflix here in Europe or Lovefilm (or whatever) so I would like to see an international study.
I do. I usually watch the movie, then the extras, the watch the movie again with any commentary
I watch the extras. Not all of them and only the interesting ones!
First the music biz, next the movie. It’s inevitable – as bandwidth increases – the convience factor outweighs the concerns about quality. Blu-ray will join sacd and DVD-a as a niche format because it was priced too high to start with, and by the time they finally began to get the prices down the audience found a cheaper and easier wat to get the content they wanted.
Top of the line Bluray will allow you to be able to stream off wireless internet and get your netflix, you can also play DVD, Bluray disc, and music CD on the Bluray. I think they should continue to make discs because unless you’re a couch potato with no life, you can sit there and watch unlimited movies for $ 8.00 or whatever per month. I still prefer to pay and get only what I want to watch, what’s the point of Netflix and the unlimited concept if you don’t have time to watch them….
Do the math!
With Netflix, paying $8.00 a month to have unlimited choices is better than spending $19.99 or whatever the studios are charging these days for just one DVD or bluray. And just because it’s unlimited, doesn’t mean you have to act like a couch potato and watch everything.
I can watch one movie every weekend for $8.00 total a month compared to going to a new movie every weekend for about $60 + food and parking, or $80 for four weekends worth of DVDs.
Plus, if you buy a DVD and it’s crappy, you’re stuck with it. With Netflix, you can just send it back and get something else, or download something better.
Netflix’s HD streaming is a bust compared to Blu Ray. When it’s not dropping the signal on you several times (and during peak hours if you can even catch an HD signal), the image feels 720p at best, and jerky during the frenetic scenes of a film. Netflix has a long way to go before I’m going to choose streaming over Blu Ray rentals or purchases. Blu Ray is the only consumer medium that offers quality and consistent 1080p picture quality. Even DirecTV 1080p rentals don’t look of appropriate quality and are victim to hiccups and glitches all the time. Blu Ray 3D is also a beautiful thing to behold. ALSO, Netflix streaming titles are changing all the time. It’s not like you can go back to a perennial anytime you want. I’ve had titles disappear out of my queue if I’m not watching them in a timely manner. You can get a lot of the Bonds on Netflix HD streaming right now, but for how long?
Netflix is nice, but severely overrated. And these statistics don’t take into account Bluray. Sure, Netflix streaming is convenient SOMETIMES. But Bluray far surpasses Netflix in image quality. Can’t speak for anyone else, but I didn’t plop down over $1500 for a 50″ plasma for so so image quality. I wanted the best quality available, and Bluray provides just that.
Streaming has its place, but as far as I’m concerned, it will never be a replacement for an actual disc.
Furthermore, Bluray sales were up 67% for all of 2009, and another 70% for the first Quarter of 2010.
Filesonic or Megauplad account + google or a gnarly forum = and DVD/Blu-ray on ur comp in minutes, WAY b4 they hit the stores.
Good luck stopping that…
“Thor” was out in TS form (Tele Sync — good cam visual, mainline audio) 4 days b4 it come out in theaters in US. And when I saw it in IMAX 3D — wished I just stuck with the TS!
That’s why the industry’s fucked…
I have to call BS on this report as well, considering the box office was down last year as well. Bad movies don’t drive DVD sales, and it seems like new movies and TV series on DVD and bluray are getting less and less extra features, which is really the only reason I buy them to begin with.
In the past decade DVD sales were crazy because the studios were pouring out library titles like it was going out of style. People who were buying DVDs [myself included] could not get enough, even though we knew that the pricing was highway robbery, because we were getting a hold of movies we hadn’t thought of or seen in decades.
So after we gorged ourselves we stopped to take a breather…and found that other than the older, good stuff, most of the movies coming out these days were not worth the $14.99. Not even close. So we moved to Netflix and the DVD market dried up.
It’s not brain surgery; to everything there’s a season. It’s the studio that had a moment of common sense to look five years beyond their windfall that could have seen it coming and prepared for the leveling out of the market.
But no, now we have to hear all kinds of theories as to why “the bottom has fallen out” of the DVD market. But then again what am I talking about, if I had to justify myself to corporate I’d make some shit up as well. Especially if the numbers make it appear so.
I stopped collecting VHS tapes in the mid-1990s, and ended DVD buying in the mid-2000s. It’s a lot of money just sitting on the shelf doing nothing most of the time.
Streaming movies are not an option in my country (bandwidth issues), so rentals are still the way to go. But my rentals are Blu-ray now. Why have a big TV and not have the best quality picture?
It seems that every media format has its life cycle–rising, succeeding and eventually falling. 78s, LPs, cassettes, CDs, VHS and now DVD. (With flops scattered in, such as 8 track, Beta, Laserdisc, Toshiba’s HD.) Blu Ray’s trajectory is yet to be defined. But I’m skeptical about VOD conquering all. I don’t mind watching stuff on Hulu and Netflix sitting at my iMac. On my TV, not so much. The low rez quality would be a drag if that’s all there was. I would need HD. And do you think the providers of bandwidth, out of the goodness of their hearts, are going to give it away so we can all watch dazzling HD on the cheap whenever we feel like it? I don’t think so. There will indeed be no free lunch. Owning or renting Blu Rays (heck, even upscaled ordinary DVDs) will not seem like such a bad deal then.