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There is a another thread of this title, but it's in another forum, and it concerns hardware issues.
DVDs are obviously at the edge of a precipice, the same sort that CDs reached some years back. People don't buy them like they used to. Hollywood had come to rely on DVD sales to make their real money on a film, but due to the economic collapse, Netflix, and the halfhearted and frustrating intoduction of high definition media siphoning off the collector market, DVDs rather suddenly seem to have nowhere to go.
The evidence is everywhere- the multipacks of movies for under ten bucks, the DVD product just sitting on the shelves, Borders eleminating CDs and DVDs from their stores, Blockbuster in trouble, etc.
It's only now that the effects of the economy will really be showing up in movies, since there is such a long lead time for most films to get released. National Public Radio had a piece on this very issue 7/28/09. They talked of "the most envied movies of the Summer", namely The Hangover and Transformers II, the low-budget moneymaker and the monster hit.
So we are back to the strange tendency of Hollywood to want to gamble on tremendously expensive films that might hit it big. In this economic climate, the report said that all it would take would be just a few big turkeys and studios could disappear.
What this doubtlessly means is that less and less of the old product makes it to Blu-ray. People who find it difficult to sit through films made before the eighties will probably be okay; the rest of us will be SOL, at least until movies on demand really get going.
Ah, but Netflix can keep us going. Maybe, for what is out there now. But if the studios don't come up with new issues and let the old catalogue disappear, things will change.
Maybe this has already been talked to death, and maybe there isn't much else to say on the matter anyway. But I think about this stuff a lot these days.
DVDs are obviously at the edge of a precipice, the same sort that CDs reached some years back. People don't buy them like they used to. Hollywood had come to rely on DVD sales to make their real money on a film, but due to the economic collapse, Netflix, and the halfhearted and frustrating intoduction of high definition media siphoning off the collector market, DVDs rather suddenly seem to have nowhere to go.
The evidence is everywhere- the multipacks of movies for under ten bucks, the DVD product just sitting on the shelves, Borders eleminating CDs and DVDs from their stores, Blockbuster in trouble, etc.
It's only now that the effects of the economy will really be showing up in movies, since there is such a long lead time for most films to get released. National Public Radio had a piece on this very issue 7/28/09. They talked of "the most envied movies of the Summer", namely The Hangover and Transformers II, the low-budget moneymaker and the monster hit.
So we are back to the strange tendency of Hollywood to want to gamble on tremendously expensive films that might hit it big. In this economic climate, the report said that all it would take would be just a few big turkeys and studios could disappear.
What this doubtlessly means is that less and less of the old product makes it to Blu-ray. People who find it difficult to sit through films made before the eighties will probably be okay; the rest of us will be SOL, at least until movies on demand really get going.
Ah, but Netflix can keep us going. Maybe, for what is out there now. But if the studios don't come up with new issues and let the old catalogue disappear, things will change.
Maybe this has already been talked to death, and maybe there isn't much else to say on the matter anyway. But I think about this stuff a lot these days.
