Displaying items by tag: Support Physical Media!

Well, it’s been a big couple of weeks at The Bits, as detailed in Monday’s editorial here at the site. The response to that piece has been overwhelming—and overwhelmingly positive, I’m pleased to report. I’ve had a good number of people within the industry tell me they’ve been quietly (and no so quietly) cheering its message, hoping the powers that be at certain studios will listen.

One of the interesting side effects of the last couple of weeks is that it’s really highlighted some of the key challenges we face here at the site. The first is that so much of my time as editor of The Bits is dedicated to communicating with sources, researching stories, responding to everyone who wants to engage with us after we post major news or a big editorial, or simply dealing with behind-the-scenes issues, that it’s become hard for me to do all that effectively and still write Blu-ray and 4K reviews too. I have a stack of titles I keep trying to get to, but when a well-known filmmaker or high-level studio executive contacts me wanting to talk, you definitely can’t—and shouldn’t!—say no in my position.

The other problem was illustrated by what happened when we broke the news of Best Buy’s exit of the physical media business—the website simply couldn’t handle all the traffic we were getting! Off and on, from Thursday night (10/12) to the following Monday (10/16), the site simply wouldn’t load for some people or took a long time to load. That’s not a knock on our infrastructure, our server team, or our hosting company—99% of the time, there’s no problem at all. And they do an incredible job of managing all that in the face of ever more difficult cybersecurity challenges. It’s really rather shocking how difficult that problem has become—not just for The Bits but almost literally every website online. Frankly, it’s a wonder the Internet even still works at all. [Read on here...]

I’ve been thinking a lot, in recent days, about the future of physical media.

Frankly, I can’t recall a time in this industry that’s offered greater cognitive dissonance than this past week, which began with the news that Best Buy is exiting the disc business—and saw a Digital Bits headline on the subject appear in Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show monologue—but ended not only with the release of Barbie and The Exorcist in 4K, but also with the Ultra HD announcement of Titanic, The Color Purple, and Oppenheimer, to say nothing of the revelation (by Kino Lorber Studio Classics) that Stanley Kubrick’s earliest films are coming to the format!

What’s the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities again? “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.” Charlies Dickens was nothing if not a visionary.

This coming December, I’ll mark my twenty-sixth year as editor of The Digital Bits, and my thirty-fifth as a working professional in the business of media more generally. For most of that time, I’ve had a front row seat from which to view the ebbs and flows of the disc business—both its public-facing portion, as well a singularly-unique insider’s perspective. I launched The Bits website in 1997, at the height of LaserDisc and the dawn of DVD, to create a nexus between fans of these formats and the industry professionals who create them.

Soon afterwards, I gave the world its first look at Circuit City’s pay-per-view DIVX format, then led the crusade against it. I co-led a campaign that convinced George Lucas to begin releasing his beloved Star Wars films on DVD. I reported from the trenches on—and correctly predicted the outcome of—the high-definition format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD. And I’ve covered every minute of the Golden Age of Physical Media, the rise and stumbles of Digital and streaming, and the continuing adventures of our favorite little format that could… 4K Ultra HD. [Read on here...]

[10/13/23 Update: Variety and Media Play News have now confirmed my reporting that Best Buy is phasing out physical media in the new year, following the 2023 holiday shopping season. The company will apparently still continue to sell videogames. A Best Buy spokesperson provided this statement to Variety: “To state the obvious, the way we watch movies and TV shows is much different today than it was decades ago. Making this change gives us more space and opportunity to bring customers new and innovative tech for them to explore, discover and enjoy.” So... there you have it. Longtime readers of The Digital Bits can rest assured of two things: First, no this does not spell the end of physical media. And second, I’ll have a great deal more to say on this topic here at The Bits on Monday and all next week. See you back here then.]

All right, folks... we’ve got a little bit of a whopper for you today. And so as not to bury the lede, let’s get right to it...

The Digital Bits has learned from industry sources—and we’ve confirmed it with multiple sources now—that Best Buy plans to exit the physical media business for good next year, possibly as soon as the end of Q1 2024.

This includes not just their in-store Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD sales, which the retailer has been gradually phasing out for a couple of years now in their many store locations nationwide, but online sales as well. This means no more Best Buy-exclusive Steelbook titles, and no more titles from Best Buy period.

The fact that Best Buy is discontinuing physical media sales in their retail locations should come as no surprise; anyone who’s visited a Best Buy store location on a Tuesday recently will be all too aware that the retailer’s disc sections keep getting moved around and have gotten smaller and smaller. Our own experience here at The Bits is that some store locations don’t even bother to stock new-release titles on the sales floor anymore—even their exclusive ones. More than once, in their Southern California locations, I’ve had to ask for the titles and wait while a clerk checks the storeroom.

But the idea that Best Buy would discontinue online sales too comes as a bit of a surprise... though perhaps it shouldn’t. We’ve noted in recent months that Paramount has quietly shifted their Blu-ray and 4K Steelbook exclusive titles—titles that would normally have been released at Best Buy—to Amazon instead. And it seems very likely that other studios will follow Paramount’s lead in the months ahead. [Read on here...]