In his second piece for Dark Horizons, our correspondent Adam Yeend reflects on the slow demise of the physical media industry in which he has worked for over a decade, and what we’re all losing in the transition to streaming.
It’s movie time. I get on my couch and launch the Netflix app and the barrage of thumbnails appears on my screen. I scroll for a few minutes and see a title and thumbnail that grabs my attention, but I need more information. So, I hit ‘enter’ and up comes the synopsis and info while in the background the movie starts playing automatically.
Did I decide I was going to watch this yet? Do I want to watch the opening of a movie with the synopsis, run time and cast text written all over it? I hit the return button without reading the synopsis feeling somewhat annoyed by the over-zealous nature of the streaming platform.
What I am looking for is a particular Fox movie, but it is rated R so it is not on Disney+ (who acquired Fox in 2019). I launch Hulu because that is where Disney said all their adult content goes. The film I want is not on Hulu… or Netflix, or Amazon Prime.
Turns out the R rated Fox film is on the Warner platform, HBO Max. I want to watch “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” it is a Paramount movie but is not on Paramount+ – rather I found it on Amazon Prime 15 minutes later.
No, this is not a serious problem considering the state of the world, it is just movies. But I happen to love movies and since I was a child of the 80s and 90s, Home Entertainment is a big part of that experience.
But let’s be honest, it is not a film anymore – it’s ‘content’. I know this because I work in this business and that is what we call it. Films are no longer special, their shelf life is shorter – stream it, discard it and move on to the next binge.
The multi-billion-dollar business of Home Entertainment for movies has gone through several evolutions over the last four decades. Starting with the days of videocassette, consumers could buy their favorite films to watch over and over.
Longer films like “Titanic” were broken up onto two separate video cassettes in the US, and the Disney Home Video releases of “The Lion King” and “Aladdin” were almost a staple in every household. Visiting my local video store as a teen – Video Ezy in Australia, for my American friends it was probably Blockbuster or Family Video – the stores packed on a Friday night with young couples and even entire families perusing the New Release section, picking up a video cover and reading the back – is this the movie for tonight?
I believe there is something to be said for that experience; picking up a tactile object, actually having to make the effort to go a store to rent and return a movie – it was a decided choice and when you got home to watch it, you were invested in giving the film your time because of that commitment.
When DVD came on to the market in the late 90s, the physical media market hit its apex – DVD was cool – bonus features, better picture quality, widescreen aspect ratios. Even my brother, a football and motor racing enthusiast had his own DVD movie collection.
Me? I replaced my VHS tapes with DVD – filmmaker commentaries, deleted scenes, even the trailers, I watched it all. Did anyone enjoy Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of “Psycho”? Not that I know of, but watching the film with the director and cast commenting on the making of the film, I felt like I was in my own private film school.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2008, Blu-Ray came on to the market and won a format battle over HD-DVD – now with high-definition picture, films never looked this good at home. My local Blockbuster on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood was always busy; a vastly different clientele to what I experienced growing up in Australia’s Blue Mountains. Famous filmmakers, producers, actors – before smartphones and social media forced them into hiding – all grabbing the latest releases, the staff talking about film as if it were a religion.
For me, it was heaven, along with my first day job – working at a movie trailer house’s Home Entertainment division on the Warner Bros. account. I was surrounded by graphic designers working on the animated Blu-Ray menus for films like “Avatar,” “Harry Potter,” “Moulin Rouge!,” and the “Alien” anthology.
What a difference a few years makes. By the time I started working for 20th Century Fox’s Home Entertainment division in 2015, Blockbuster stores had closed down in L.A. and streaming had quickly become the common format for watching movies.
Even though we were still working on Blu-Ray box sets for series like “The X-Files” and “Homeland,” buying movies and storing loads of discs? For consumers, why bother? Streaming platforms like Netflix or your iTunes digital movie collection is much more practical; it is more convenient and has a wide selection of content.
But I would argue that we have lost something. The experience of watching a film no longer feels so special. And when it comes to digital libraries and streaming, you are not getting the best possible presentation, no matter how good your 4K TV is.
In terms of disc sales, the business has been in steady decline over the last decade, dropping as much as 9% each year since 2011. What was worth $9 billion in the US then is now sitting at around $5 billion in 2020 according to The Digital Entertainment Group (DEG).
The introduction of 4K UHD Blu-Ray in 2016 was perhaps the final effort to give consumers and film enthusiasts a chance to watch their favorite movies, new releases, and classics in the best possible format. I remember the first 4K UHD release at Fox – Ridley Scott’s “The Martian”; it looked and sounded incredible. But producing a 4K disc also came with a hefty price tag – it was almost double the cost of making a standard HD Blu-ray.
Then there are the classics going through film restoration – a 4K scan of the original camera negative provided a level of detail that only film could provide. While new films are mostly shot with digital cameras on a 2K digital intermediate and then upscaled to 4K in post, movies that were shot on film, the 4K scan provides viewers with a “true 4K” film experience. The first 4K title I worked on from the Fox catalog was “Die Hard”. It was that title that gave me an appreciation for the format and got me buying discs again.
Studios have seen decent sales of back catalog titles like the “Back to the Future” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogies in this 4K format – but even still, 4K UHD sales only account for about 3% of all disc sales with DVD and Blu-ray making up the majority of the market. Clearly the 4K UHD disc format is not resonating with the mainstream.
For those with their 4K TVs streaming Netflix, Disney+ and iTunes in 4K, having worked in both physical and now the digital space, I can say you are not getting your value for money when it comes to movies on digital streaming. The level of compression on a 4K stream both in terms of sound and picture quality does not compare to the bit rate of a UHD disc and in many cases even an HD Blu-Ray.
Then there is the viewing experience of scrolling through hundreds of thumbnails on a streaming platform to decide what to watch. The new term of ‘subscription fatigue’ appeared in the 13th edition of Deloitte’s Digital Media Trends survey. That study found that 43% of consumers give up on making a selection if they cannot find what they want to watch within a few minutes.
Bill Hunt, editor of long-running disc news and reviews site The Digital Bits, believes the future of the format is for collectors not so different to that of vinyl these days: “physical media is going to become the niche market for collectors over the next ten years or so. It’s already well on the way to that now”.
Boutique labels like Shout Factory, Arrow, Kino Lorber and Umbrella Entertainment have been steadily releasing studio catalog titles on their own label for collectors as many new release films seem to have adopted a one time “consume and discard” approach from viewers.
Still, studios are discovering the value of releasing their back catalog in 4K UHD because it appears to strike a chord with the generation that grew up with physical media. Just this month Disney/20th Century Studio’s released “Speed” on 4K UHD Blu-ray with a brand new transfer supervised by director Jan de Bont.
I was lucky enough to see this transfer on the big screen when I worked at Fox and can say that’s one of the best-looking restorations I’ve ever seen. The same transfer is also available on iTunes but again, heavily compressed. Other older catalog titles on the horizon for a 4K restoration include the likes of “Basic Instinct,” “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and “In the Line of Fire”.
So, what are the pros of watching a film on digital over a Blu-Ray? You are saving space and you are spared the energy of physically inserting a disc into a player. That is it. Movies bounce around from one streaming platform to another every few months and even your iTunes digital library is not as safe as you think – you do not own those films and your access to them is at the whim of an existing deal between Apple and the studios.
On April 22nd this year, The Hollywood Reporter published an article regarding a lawsuit questioning Apple’s use of the word ‘buy’ when it comes to movies and TV shows as “Apple reserves the right to terminate access to what consumers have ‘purchased’, and in fact has done so on numerous occasions”. Perhaps ‘lease’ would be the more appropriate word for consumers.
There is no doubt audience and viewing habits are changing – films rarely have an opening title sequence anymore because younger audiences find the musical themes and opening credits “boring” – that I learned that from my years working studio test screenings in Los Angeles.
As a 40-year-old man working in the film industry, many of us express horror at the sight of the younger generations streaming a movie on their tiny iPhone, or God forbid watching a film on their new 4K television with ‘motion smoothing’ turned on – transforming a classy looking Spielberg film into “Days of Our Lives”. You know that problem is a serious issue when Tom Cruise even puts out a public service announcement about it.
After spending that money on a 4K TV and all those streaming platforms, are we really alright with a sub-par home viewing experience? The appeal of DVD at the time was that it offered viewers a better picture and sound presentation than VHS. As Hunt concluded, “this is like anything people become connoisseurs of – food, wine, whiskey, etc. The more experienced you are, and the more you’ve educated and trained yourself, the more you appreciate the difference.”
As part of the dying breed of physical media collectors, when I picked up my copy of “Speed” in 4K this month at Best Buy – the last copy on the shelf – I was excited to revisit the film and watching it was like reconnecting with an old friend; the transfer looked like a pristine film print and the Academy Award winning sound mix blasted through my speakers and the experience of watching the movie itself, it felt special.
When it finished the closing credits were not interrupted to suggest I immediately select some other random movie I had no interest in viewing. If you’ve had your time wasted searching for that favorite film on multiple streaming platforms only to find its only available to rent on digital for $5, consider buying the Blu-ray. For about $15; you are supporting an industry, have full ownership of your favorite film, and are getting the best audio and video presentation of that film money can buy.
