It’s sensible for businesses to shift from physical media sales. Per CNBC’s calculations, DVD sales fell over 86 percent between 2008 and 2019. Research from the Motion Picture Association in 2021 found that physical media represented 8 percent of the home/mobile entertainment market in the US, falling behind digital (80 percent) and theatrical (12 percent).
But as physical media gets less lucrative and the shuttering of businesses makes optical discs harder to find, the streaming services that largely replaced them are getting aggravating and unreliable. And with the streaming industry becoming more competitive and profit-hungry than ever, you never know if the movie/show that most attracted you to a streaming service will still be available when you finally get a chance to sit down and watch. Even paid-for online libraries that were marketed as available “forever” have been ripped away from customers.
When someone buys or rents a DVD, they know exactly what content they’re paying for and for how long they’ll have it (assuming they take care of the physical media). They can also watch the content if the Internet goes out and be certain that they’re getting uncompressed 4K resolution. DVD viewers are also less likely to be bombarded with ads whenever they pause and can get around an ad-riddled smart TV home screen (nothing’s perfect; some DVDs have unskippable commercials).
Likewise, I’m far less hesitant to accept buying digital console games than video because I generally can expect that once I download a game on my one device that I’ll pull out the same device whenever I want to play it and it’ll keep working when offline and even after the servers are gone, until the hardware fails. Modern games’ physical releases rely so heavily on updates and DLC that the cart/disc you get isn’t complete anyway; buying physical effectively becomes a digital game with an extra point of failure (and partial resellability). PC gaming complicates things but at least some games are available completely DRM-free there.
With video content sold online, streaming directly from some server is always the focus. As soon as the server disconnects you become unable to watch by default. Even if some service lets you pre-download within its app and watch offline (which probably won’t work indefinitely without checkins anyway), that’ll defeat the portability expectations for watching your videos on any device interchangeably.
Blu-ray video isn’t ideal considering you cannot watch it on a phone, tablet, or linux system without cracking its DRM, but that’s still way better for lasting access than anything else major movie/TV studios are willing to let consumers access without piracy.