Let's (not) Get Physical
Are we quickly approaching another digital divide?
Industry News Item
This news is a couple weeks old at this point, but as first reported by The Digital Bits, retailer Best Buy will exit the physical media business in 2024, which everyone’s calendars will remind them is only a little over two months away. Best Buy was one of the few remaining physical retailers that still carried DVDs, Blu-Rays and 4k UHD discs, even offering exclusive steelbooks and other limited editions. I find this troubling in a number of ways.
What Is Lost May Never Be Found
As you might suspect, I have thoughts about this. First, let me say that my opinion on physical media has come full circle; I first started generating a large DVD collection in the late 1990s, when the format was still new and rapidly gaining traction over VHS. Our family had a fair amount of purchased VHS tapes, but I can point to one specific moment when the number of DVDs exploded in my household.
My job in high school was working for Borders Books, which also had an extensive selection of music and movies. Occasionally there would be employee appreciation weeks where we could get as much as 40% off items in the store, and I took the opportunity one of those weeks to spend well over $600 dollars on a variety of films and TV shows. In one fell swoop I jumpstarted my DVD collection, which continued to grow as I went off to college (I was a film major, after all, I needed movies to study!) and into my post-graduate life.
At some point in the late aughts/early teens, with the rise of movies and shows available to buy, rent, or via subscription services like Netflix, I made a decision to pare down my physical DVD collection, selling numerous titles to Amoeba in Hollywood, especially seldom-watched or titles I had digital copies of. For a time, whenever there was a new movie I wanted to own, I would only purchase it on iTunes. I had an Apple TV, I got back a fair amount of shelf storage, I figured the future was digital, baby! Any title I could ever want was just a few clicks away, right?
WRONG.
As I’ve mentioned numerous times already here on Set Your VCR, not everything is available digitally. The long-term economics of streaming services preclude there ever being “one streamer to rule them all”*, and over the last few years as more studios started their own streaming platforms I’ve noticed titles not making the transition. This prompted me to get back into purchasing physical media again, but by doing so it further highlighted the my main concern about the decline of physical media, which is not everything is going to make it.
In terms of the availability of individuals to own physical copies of films, each time there has been an advancement in technology there have been ‘digital divides’, that some films never crossed.
The ‘proto’-divide, if you will, was back before there was any kind of home entertainment formats. I’ll let the Library of Congress sum it up: “Fewer than 20% of American silent films exist in complete form; and for American films produced before 1950, half no longer exist**.” It also didn’t help that early film was silver nitrate, which has the nasty habit of catching fire.
When the home entertainment era of VHS and Betamax arrived, there were films that had been theatrically released that were subsequently never released on home video.
In the 1990s and the advent of the DVD, again some of the films that were available on VHS didn’t make the jump to disc.
Remember the format wars between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD of the late 2000s? You guessed it, some films on DVD didn’t make the jump to high definition.
And now we’re in the era of streaming, where again films and TV shows haven’t made the jump off physical media, if they were even released at all (looking at you, The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne).
With each jump, numerous films were left further and further behind, some inevitably now completely lost. Even award-winning and heralded television shows such as Northern Exposure (1990-95) and Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-99)*** are stuck on DVD, having never been made available on a streaming service. Look, there’s plenty of advantages to watching films and television via streaming or as digital copies, but if those perks come at the cost of losing access to even more shows and movies than we already have, we might be losing more than we’ve gained. At the very least it’s a wake-up call in favor of more preservation efforts.
So what happens next? I suspect 2024 will be the year we see other retailers like Target and perhaps Walmart begin to exit the physical media business. Amazon will likely become the only large retailer to still offer physical copies, but as the market shrinks studios will start to wind down the creation of discs entirely.
But all hope is not lost. There are boutique labels that specialize in locating, licensing, and distributing titles that, in some cases, never made the leap to disc at all. Although not every title will be to everyone’s liking, as a collector and film & TV enthusiast I am very grateful that these companies exist and I try to support them by purchasing titles, from favorites to ones I’ve never seen.
Go Watch This!
Anything on DVD or Blu-ray - if you haven’t watched something on physical media in a while, dust off and plug in that old player you have sitting around somewhere, dig up a physical copy of one of your favorite movies, put your smartphone in another room, and experience a movie or TV show the old-fashioned way. Unless it’s one of those old discs that didn’t allow you to skip the trailers before the movie, those discs can fuck right off.
Thanks for reading!
*Which, despite the MULTIPLE complaints I read about on the Internet, was never going to happen for $9.99 a month. Look at cable, it wasn’t and isn’t happening for $99.99 (or more) a month. Netflix was never going to have every title you would ever want to watch, that was pure fantasy no matter how hard early Netflix streaming marketing leaned into that concept. The keyboard gangsters were delusional, and all the ‘YO HO HO’ piracy talk isn’t the solution, either. RANT OVER.
**There’s a similar 1997 report from the Library of Congress about the preservation challenges and lost media for television, and surely it has gotten worse in the 26(!) years since this report was made.
***I have complete series DVD box sets of both shows, and I can’t recommend them highly enough. Do yourself a favor and buy yourselves copies.