US Blu-ray Sales Decline In 2020
Over the past years physical media sales have continued to decline as reported by me here and confirmed by The Digital Entertainment Group’s quarterly Home Entertainment Reports and Media Play news in-house home entertainment market research.
For the last decade physical media sales, read plastic discs, have continued to decline. Ranging from -5% in 2012 to -18% in 2019. The even more startling news is that disc sales are down almost 23% relative to 2019 in the first quarter of 2020. Clearly one has to assume that with COVID severely impacting the production of any new movies and the on-going re-release on 4K of many older movies, that there are very few big new releases arriving on Blu-ray in Q1 & Q2 2020. Well actually any quarter this year!
According to Media Play News market research, it looks like for Q2 of 2020, the sales of all plastic media are down approximately 10% when compared to the same time period in 2019. With the decline in plastic disc sales in Q1 of 2020 being over 21%.
So to date overall plastic disc sales for Q1/Q2 for 2020 look to be about 15% lower than in the same period last year. This appears to be a continuing annual trend.
While we are discussing these wonderful shiny discs it looks like Netflix may be getting closer to stopping its DVD’s by mail!
Netflix grew its teeth from renting DVD’s either from its local stores or by mail. I was surprised to see just how well Netflix has performed over the years especially as it has now mostly transitioned over streaming together with its own very powerful film and shorts production company.
Netflix currently has approximately 183 million digital accounts with a shrinking 2.1 million DVD rental subscribers, managing to peak at approximately 20 million subscribers in 2010.
A decade ago Netflix’s main business was DVD rentals providing its streaming service for no additional cost. How things have changed. With its DVD rental business peaking in 2010 it has now plummeted by approximately 90%.
The Netflix streaming service continues to boom and it is clear that the DVD rental business is likely to be short lived. Generating $297.2 million dollars in revenue in 2019 it was less than 1.5% of the companies $20.2 billion in total revenue for that same year.
Image Credit: Netflix
There were 50 DVD distribution centers throughout the USA that have now been whittled down to 17. This is now causing a very slow turn around and fulfillment of DVD requests. According to a friend who uses Netflix rental for almost all of his DVD viewing, he is seeing up to a 4 weeks delay on the fulfillment of his rental requests and a thinning library selection.
I have to imagine that Netflix is on the brink of closing this rental service as they have now become very proactive in closing inactive streaming accounts. I also have to assume that Netflix would rather close the DVD rental arm rather than alienate renters with poor fulfillment, or will they hang on to it in order to fulfill the needs of the less tech savvy subscribers who may also have restricted home deliver bandwidths that cannot support home network streaming?
So while vinyl sales appear to be doing well during the first quarter of 2020, Blu-ray doesn’t. This general trend in the sales of physical media, read plastic discs, doesn’t bode well for the longevity of the format. Even Netflix maybe ending its shiny disc service! Let’s hope that things do not get too much worse. The loss of this high quality replay medium to lesser formats like streaming would, in my opinion, be the nail in the coffin for the videophiles unless formats like VCC H.266 can give us the image quality we want at the bit rates promised.
It’s very concerning news for the videophiles like myself indeed.
I hope at least a niche market will remain that will keep Bluray still afloat.
I am a big supporter of physical media and hope that at least the Bluray will be made in small quantities for the collector’s market like steel book editions from companies such as Best Buy in US and ZAVVI in the UK.
Tomasz,
I too am a big supporter of physical media, vinyl and plastic. As for 4K UHD Blu-ray, currently there are just no residential sources that can compete with its quality.
I have to assume that the 4K Blu-ray market will eventually end up going the way of the vinyl market. The problem is whether or not, and at what price, a movie house will allow small run pressings of a newly released movie unless they have full control of distribution.
I do not see another generation of (movie) physical media coming out now unless H.266 makes it worthwhile to re-release media in 8K, or let current streaming bit rates provide comparable quality.
For now 4K plastic will be with us for a while yet, but with COVID severely delaying movie productions and streaming now growing at a rapid pace I am not too sure how far away the event horizon is!
For me, I want to OWN my media, and not rely on some service to have what I want when I want it, with the power to take it away when they decide to.
Happy viewing.
Paul
for now i think dvds and blurays will stay very alive for atleast the next 25+ years game consoles and stuff will definetly help keeping blurays alive and tvs will continue to support HDM since game consoles and computer monitors still use HDM so you will still be able to connect bluray players to newer tvs and that will help keeping blu rays alive and in the future i have a feeling blurays will be a popular collectors item just like vinyl since you will still be able to plug the disc players into newer tvs and there will always be dvds and blurays around somewhere
Hi Victor,
I tend to agree with your comments but not too sure about 25+ years. I think the discs will be around for a very long time like vinyl is but I am not too sure if movie houses will keep producing them with the current move to release on streaming. Maybe the movie houses will act like record labels and eventually license their movies to smaller companies for production/pressing and distribution. Time will tell.
Thanks for popping by.
Paul
Vinyl, the biggest scam ever, is the one format where sales are strong. Idiotic.
Hi Tom,
Sorry, but I do not see vinyl as any type of scam. I have a large library (starting from the mid 60’s) of vinyl from direct to disc to 45RPM limited pressings together with almost a thousand CD,s DVDA,s and SACD,s. I have far more vinyl that provides the same level of live listening experience that I got when working in the control room than from plastic. I understand that vinyl is not convenient and offers a technically inferior performance to plastic, but in the end it is what I hear that matters, not what the specs say.
We are all entitled to our opinions but the more listening and reviews I do of both formats the more I gravitate towards vinyl.
Thank you for popping by and for your comment.
Paul