Discs versus Digital Streaming
Just as the VHS videocassette was the dominant home-video format for nearly twenty years before it was superseded in the late Nineties by the DVD, which was supplemented about a decade later by Blu-ray, these currently popular disc formats are now supposedly being threatened with extinction by the latest technology for delivering movie content to home consumers--online digital streaming.
DVD sales have been declining over the last six to seven years, but the overall home-video business got a boost in 2011 from rising sales of Blu-ray discs and a sharp increase in movie rentals via digital streaming. Detailed financial reports and revenue projections prepared by the Digital Entertainment Group, SNL Kagan, the NDP Group, Nielsen, IHS Screen Digest, and Home Media Magazine, among others, contend that digital streaming represents the future of the home-video business. Some industry analysts predict that 2012 will be the first year in which home-consumer viewing of movies via digital streaming will surpass the number of viewings on DVD or Blu-ray discs. Although disc sales provide a higher profit margin for the studios, the streaming video market is expanding at a much faster rate than disc sales or rentals. Some corporate gurus have already begun to write off the production and marketing of physical product as "a dying business model," and many companies are scrambling to secure a prominent share of the digital-streaming business.
Netflix was one of the first DVD rental companies to offer its subscribers the choice between digital streaming or receiving a disc in the mail, and today most of the company's more than twenty million subscribers have opted for the immediacy and economy of online rentals. Many other companies--including Apple iTunes, Amazon Prime, Blockbuster on Demand, Cinema Now, Hulu, Vudu, and Ultraviolet, among others--are aggressively competing with Netflix, offering a variety of menus and fees for digital streaming rentals as well as "electronic sell-through" of digital downloads, which can be stored and accessed for a limited period of time in the Internet "cloud."
It's easy to understand the growing popularity of streaming movie rentals, especially among families for whom a trip to the local multiplex can be a costly and complicated effort. Many couples and individuals also prefer online streaming so as to be able to watch movies on their computers, tablets, or smartphones, since they are primarily interested in a few hours of entertainment and are not particularly concerned with state-of-the-art visual or sound quality, not to mention screen size.
For those of us, however, with a more serious interest in movies--including that diverse community of cinephiles, film buffs, movie collectors, film students and educators--DVDs and Blu-rays remain the preferred formats. The visual and sound quality offered by discs is five to ten times superior to that offered by even the best digital-streaming services, which must digitally compress their movie files in order to deliver them within the limited bandwidth range of your Internet service provider. None of the supplementary materials available on discs--including commentary tracks, cast and crew interviews, making-of documentaries, and frame-by-frame analysis or freeze-frame capability--are available with online streaming.
DVD and Blu-ray consumers also have access to a more comprehensive selection of titles. The Netflix library, to take just one example, currently offers about 20,000 titles for streaming as opposed to more than 100,000 titles available on DVD or Blu-ray. While we all have complaints about favorite films that are still not available on DVD, there's no question that DVD and Blu-ray have been of inestimable value for the cinephile community. Bolstered by the rapidly increasing popularity of the high-definition Blu-ray format, the digital disc business actually shows remarkable vitality, with more and more new titles released each year, including some stunning Blu-ray reboots of classic titles, complemented by the flourishing MOD phenomenon--courtesy of the MGM Limited Edition Collection, the Warner Archive, and the Sony Pictures Choice Collection--which provides DVDs of marginal studio titles.
Cineaste inaugurated its "Homevideo" column (now titled "DVD Reviews") in September 1985, and in the years since the vast number of films released on DVD and Blu-ray have been of crucial importance in our efforts to provide comprehensive coverage of the cinema, past and present. Regular readers of this magazine are aware that our coverage of films on DVD and Blu-ray has often migrated from the DVD department to feature interviews and articles.
In this issue, for example, the British Film Institute's release of a new all-region dual DVD/ Blu-ray edition of Bill Douglas's 1987 feature film, Comrades, which was never released in the United States and sadly neglected in the United Kingdom, is the subject of a feature article. The article on avant-garde filmmakers Stephanie Barber and Abigail Child focuses on new books about their work, but it's the DVDs that accompany both volumes that will make their films more widely accessible to viewers. A new Blu-ray of Roman Polanski's Chinatown is the focus of a review and an interview with screenwriter Robert Towne. In addition to the regular selection of DVD and Blu-ray reviews in this issue, our Website features coverage of several other new releases of note, as well as the latest in our ongoing Selections from the Archives reviews of MOD releases.
Despite the rush of some distributors to jettison the DVD and Blu-ray for the latest get-rich-quick technology, we expect that the vastly superior DVD and Blu-ray formats will be around for at least another decade or two. Film culture is important to too many people for the sole home-viewing option to be one in which movies are simply sent down digital pipes to an undifferentiated mass of consumers.
--The Editors
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