Bluray has been the last refuge of “physical” collectors for years. Now the industry is strangling it
Sony has announced that Abandon the production of physical formats Like Blu-ray. They are not the only ones: Panasonic, Sony and Oppo They stopped manufacturing playback devices in 2018, Samsung In 2019 and, at the end of last year, also did LG. We can be in favor or against physical formats, considering them more or less superfluous, but the position of the industry is clear: the players will increasing Games in physical format and the world of film disc edition, increasingly dedicated to collecting, disappears. It is not definitive, but almost. Although Sony’s pass is more radical, as we counted yesterday, LG has given some extra nuance to its decision to stop manufacturing players: it has eliminated the section of these devices from its website, According to Arstechnicabut from LG Korea they have not affirmed that this cessation is permanent. Although they are going to make a parenthesis in the manufacture and sale of their devices, of which he also did not take any new model since 2018, being the Ubk90 and Ubk80 The last ones that updated. Consoles are no longer the last redoubt. To this growing shortage of players is added that consoles are no longer that safe specio for physical format devotees. Both the Xbox Series X and S and PlayStation 5 took the market with Blu-ray player, but soon they joined Options without disk reader. But more than four years ago of that, and the trend begins to blow in the opposite direction: PlayStation 5 Pro leaves, by default, without disk (which can be bought independently at a completely deterrent price). And Microsoft’s turn towards a philosophy of “Any device is an Xbox“It favors the game in the cloud and the abandonment of the physical. Et tu, brute? Less records. Of course, accompanying this fall we have the descent of releases of the games themselves and, above all, films on the support. There are less and fewer stores that take care of it: the chain Best Buyone of the most important in the United States, has stopped selling Blu-rays and DVDs in 2024, and the extended Target He announced that he would only do so on indicated dates. In Spain, there is nothing more to take a walk through businesses that were once unavoidable appointment for the physical format collector: in El Corte Inglés, for example, the film zone has been reduced to the minimum expression, and serve on request in the most cases. The market is compressed. At a speed of infarction, in addition: between 2019 and 2023, the US DVD market and the Blu-ray 40% were reducedand the situation is complex enough to make it difficult to find a single guilty. The main and most striking is the streaming. Who sees movies to hang out finds more than satisfied their needs with the streamingdo not need to accumulate films in physical format that yes, they look better, but with nuances that only interest experts (we live times in which television come, by default, with Activated options that tasting the photography and color work of any movie). But Netflix and Prime Video are not the only villains of this story. It is the market, friend. The public that consumes physical format has also changed: before the arrival of the platforms, the economic formats such as the DVD and the latest VHS spoils made it economy to buy movies. Now it is a luxury article, on a parallel path to which they have followed The vinyl of music Let us add to this circumstance that the space for storing physical formats has been reduced in these times of rented rooms of 60 square meters, where every centimeter of bucket is vital, and we will have circumstances that are not favorable to the pile chaotic and compulsive of the DVDs: Do you remember when it was impossible to buy the newspaper without half dozen records?) Nor are the producers for the work. And finally, we have the companies themselves, little interested in the business of the physical, since the streaming It is much more profitable: a platform that includes its catalog or that of its partners in its offer bridges intermediaries such as stores, and gives more benefits. The digital format, in addition, means that if we want The same product, something that does not happen when a physical copy of a film is owned. We will always have collecting. Interestingly, while Majors They gradually distance from the physical market (Disney recently announced that he would edit less 4K movies, a witness that Sony would collect with part of his catalog, while the least commercial options of his cinema Possibly they would disappear), collecting and special editions live a golden age, on a new path very similar to the one traveled by the vinyl. Recoverations of classics, attention to unknown and worship as it was not seen from the first explosion of the VHS, and stamps as criterion, Arrow, 88 films, Eureka or indicator, among many others making some classical and modern cinema editions as not It had ever seen it. That is The authentic future of the format: A remnant for cinephiles and cinephagos. Header | Diego Correa In Xataka | I have been testing the best teles that come to the market for more than 20 years and these are the films I use to analyze its image quality
