Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 63 posts

Re: DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

#31

Post by titusjohnson »

oliwarner wrote: post #24
Buttons840 wrote: post #12

DVD rentals via mail seem like an easy business to get into. Few customers, but little overhead. Anyone in the nation can be a customer, though few will be, and shipping is easier than ever these days. Is anybody doing this? But ultimately the publisher will stop selling new movies on DVD or Blu-ray, etc, so it wont save us.

> easy business to get into Good luck getting rental rights. The very reason modern streaming sucks so much is that every other production company wants to be a streaming distributor; pulling rights from other streaming services. Just holding a DVD does not give you the rights to lease it out. At least, that's if you believe the legal spiel on the disc.

You can. The Right of First Sale gives you the ability to do anything you want to your DVD. You can loan it, rent it, mortgage it, whatever. You cannot copy it, so you'll need to buy enough copies to sustain your rental model, but you can certainly rent out DVDs you own. That's how Netflix started.

Re: DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

#32

Post by chung8123 »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #29
stevekemp wrote: post #4

Over the past few months I've actually gone back to buying DVDs. Sure their quality isn't amazing, but they're so practical and dependable. The local charity shops sell movies for €1 each, and boxed-sets of TV-series are typically no more than €5 each. I even managed to pick up a decent DVD player to sit under my TV for €25, used. Before this I used to stream to a chromecast, with VLC, but it was always a bit of a pa…

I'm not going back to DVD because of unskippable fear inducing anti-piracy and "FBI" warnings. Every time you launch a movie they violate your brain with this nonsense. If I have to rip and tweak the DVD, it's easier to torrent it.

Buy the disc and torrent the file?

Re: DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

#33

Post by tracker1 »

yourusername wrote: post #15
CafeRacer wrote: post #8

I dont mind paying for content, but the current state of streaming makes it easier to get movies from torrents. Like the Alien for example, some parts are on Netflix, some are not. Meaning i have to buy like 5 different subscriptions to be able to watch everything i want. Or even better one, Dr House. I don't think we had it streamed in our country, so the only way to watch it was to pirate. Its bad how the platforms…

I also don't mind paying for content but i want the content as it was originally broadcast. With streaming if you "buy" something they might eventually replace the background music or cut scenes that are deemed insensitive or clash with the director's new vision. Or they decide you need to view 4:3 content with the top and bottom cut off in 16:9. Or in some cases you might lose access to the content entirely because…

It's actually bugged me a lot with (HBO) Max's streaming service that so much WB content isn't available on the service... or pieces are missing in movie collections. My hope would be that more would congregate to the service over time now it's simply less. I want to support the ongoing shows that I like, but it's hard to justify in that the couple shows a year are all I watch on any given service.

Re: DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

#34

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #29
stevekemp wrote: post #4

Over the past few months I've actually gone back to buying DVDs. Sure their quality isn't amazing, but they're so practical and dependable. The local charity shops sell movies for €1 each, and boxed-sets of TV-series are typically no more than €5 each. I even managed to pick up a decent DVD player to sit under my TV for €25, used. Before this I used to stream to a chromecast, with VLC, but it was always a bit of a pa…

I'm not going back to DVD because of unskippable fear inducing anti-piracy and "FBI" warnings. Every time you launch a movie they violate your brain with this nonsense. If I have to rip and tweak the DVD, it's easier to torrent it.

You can't just look away from your TV for 5-10 seconds?

Re: DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

#36

Post by toast0 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #12

DVD rentals via mail seem like an easy business to get into. Few customers, but little overhead. Anyone in the nation can be a customer, though few will be, and shipping is easier than ever these days. Is anybody doing this? But ultimately the publisher will stop selling new movies on DVD or Blu-ray, etc, so it wont save us.

Discs don't survive too many mailings. I used a niche rental by mail service before I moved to Netflix, and they were more open about their logistics.

I don't recall if they said how many mailings a disc would typically survive, but they also had a lot of back and forth with the postal service to get a mailer that qualified for lower price postage, but they had to drop their cardboard insert that helped with longevity of the discs.

There were some series where the early discs tended to be broken, which made it harder to stock, especially if the sets were out of print.

Then you've got things like recent shows may not even get a release on disc at all.

Re: DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

#37

Post by galdosdi »

titusjohnson wrote: post #31
oliwarner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> easy business to get into Good luck getting rental rights. The very reason modern streaming sucks so much is that every other production company wants to be a streaming distributor; pulling rights from other streaming services. Just holding a DVD does not give you the rights to lease it out. At least, that's if you believe the legal spiel on the disc.

You can. The Right of First Sale gives you the ability to do anything you want to your DVD. You can loan it, rent it, mortgage it, whatever. You cannot copy it, so you'll need to buy enough copies to sustain your rental model, but you can certainly rent out DVDs you own. That's how Netflix started.

For clarity, this is indeed the case in the USA and is the huge advantage physical media have. That's why mom and pop video rental stores with their own interesting taste were so common in the late 20th century.

It's possible the OP is from another country with slightly different IP law?

Re: DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

#38

Post by fnordpiglet »

CafeRacer wrote: post #8

I dont mind paying for content, but the current state of streaming makes it easier to get movies from torrents. Like the Alien for example, some parts are on Netflix, some are not. Meaning i have to buy like 5 different subscriptions to be able to watch everything i want. Or even better one, Dr House. I don't think we had it streamed in our country, so the only way to watch it was to pirate. Its bad how the platforms…

I see this gripe throughout but the streaming subscription service is more like HBO in the old cable days. They had a licensed set of content that rotates every month. You don’t get to own any of it because their whole illusion of catalog depth is based on the rotation semantic. This is less about streaming and more about royalties and licensing.

Although still imperfect as an ownership mechanism the analogy to DVDs is purchasing the content from say Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV. You can “own” a much broader catalog, the ownership rights aren’t super clear or stable over time, but the DVD / streaming video is licensed to you permanently and sits in your library.

Using contemporaneous language Netflix is to HBO as Amazon Prime Video ownership is to a DVD.

Re: DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

#39

Post by galdosdi »

I don't know if not everyone knows about this, but Amazon and YouTube offer $3 movie rentals and seem to have a really extensive catalogue, as in I've never failed to find a movie there that would have been available in the old DVD Netflix with its huge selection. I guess they managed to get the rights from all the big IP companies, much as Spotify and Apple before them did for music.

It's honestly the best way to watch things today, and probably the best way to watch things in all history (although Netflix DVD was cheaper if you watched more than 3 movies a month). It's cheaper than video rental stores used to be and no more expensive than RedBox, but you don't have to go anywhere.

That's why RedBox is dead. Of course RedBox wasn't killed by Netflix -- Netflix doesn't compete with them at all. It's Amazon/YT Payperview that killed them, I assume.

Yeah, streaming sucks, but a la carte pay per view is amazing and underrated. And I emphasize again, it's cheap -- it only seems expensive compared to streaming, but it's cheaper than rentals used to be in video stores, which IIRC also cost $3, but that was 25 years of inflation ago.

Re: DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again

#40

Post by rchaud »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #38
CafeRacer wrote: post #8

I dont mind paying for content, but the current state of streaming makes it easier to get movies from torrents. Like the Alien for example, some parts are on Netflix, some are not. Meaning i have to buy like 5 different subscriptions to be able to watch everything i want. Or even better one, Dr House. I don't think we had it streamed in our country, so the only way to watch it was to pirate. Its bad how the platforms…

I see this gripe throughout but the streaming subscription service is more like HBO in the old cable days. They had a licensed set of content that rotates every month. You don’t get to own any of it because their whole illusion of catalog depth is based on the rotation semantic. This is less about streaming and more about royalties and licensing. Although still imperfect as an ownership mechanism the analogy to DVDs…

Didn't most people subscribe to HBO for its original series? In the 2000s they had Entourage, Sopranos and Six Feet Under and probably many more I can't remember.
Post reply on HN