Lovers of physical media are a dying breed: DVD, Blu-ray, and UHD Blu-ray sales dropped by 23.4% year-over-year, according to the annual report for 2024 by the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) and market research firm Omdia.
That comes out to right around $959 million (source: FlatpanelsHD), which is down precipitously from $16 billion at the peak of physical media sales in 2005.
Admittedly, that’s somewhat unsurprising. Best Buy announced that it would stop carrying Blu-rays and DVDs starting in 2024 and Target said it would only carry them in limited quantities during major sales events like Black Friday.
In short, it was a bad year for physical media and — based on the lack of any new Blu-ray players announced at CES — it’s only going to get worse in 2025.
Will 2025 be the year physical media dies?
While it’s grim news for 4K Blu-ray player owners, the home entertainment sector as a whole is thriving. According to that same report from DEG mentioned earlier, spending across digital and physical home entertainment formats in 2024 was more than $57 billion, a 21% increase from the previous year.
However, that uptick was driven “largely by the continued growth of subscription streaming” services like Netflix, Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, and Max.
Again, this is probably unsurprising news that Netflix and its comrades are eating physical media’s lunch: Last year we saw Netflix break its way into the world of live events with the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight, while Hulu merged with Disney Plus to offer a wider catalogue of shows for one low-monthly fee.
As someone who follows this space pretty closely, I knew that streaming media is dwarfing physical media in terms of growth and consumer interest, but I had no idea that physical media was this far behind in the race.
I’ll tell you the people who did see this coming: The manufacturers who make 4K Blu-ray players. We haven’t seen any new 4K Blu-ray players coming from Sony, LG or Samsung in the last few years. Panasonic is pretty much the only major manufacturer left around — though I am rooting for the new underdog, Reavon, who just entered the space in 2021. At CES, absolutely no one was talking about 4K Blu-ray players.
I don't want to sound like a cynic, but with no new hardware on the horizon, sales dipping to their lowest levels ever and retailers pulling out of the market left and right, I think we might be witnessing the death knell of the medium.
If discs die out, we’re all the worse off for it
Like many of you, I have a love-hate relationship with physical media. I had a small VHS tape collection growing up that I happily ditched for DVDs in the early 2000s. But just as I had built that collection up, Blu-rays hit the market and suddenly keeping up with physical media felt like a losing battle. I haven’t bought a single Blu-ray since.
No matter how good Netflix’s compression algorithm is, 4K streaming at 15Mbps is never going to match the performance offered by a 4K Blu-ray’s transfer speeds of 128Mbps.
But 4K Blu-rays always felt different to me. They didn’t feel like a half-step upgrade that Blu-rays felt like. Packing HDR support alongside spatial audio formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, 4K Blu-rays genuinely feel worth their premium sticker price. (Yes, I know Blu-rays offered better technical specs over DVDs, but the timing was awful.)
Streaming content, for all its convenience, isn’t giving you the same picture fidelity that a 4K Blu-ray version offers. That’s due to the way streaming services encode and decode content as it moves over the network. No matter how good Netflix’s compression algorithm is, 4K streaming at 15Mbps is never going to match the performance offered by a 4K Blu-ray’s transfer speeds of 128Mbps.
I just hope that the world doesn’t make that same revelation after they’re gone.
The good news is that they’re not gone yet, and now is as good of a time as any to start investing in the format. Amazon regularly has some excellent deals on 4K Blu-rays, and that allowed me to pick up The Batman and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse for just $10 apiece during last year’s Black Friday sales event.
If you’re worried that you’re breaking into 4K Blu-rays just as they’re prepping the rollout of 8K TVs — don’t fret. 8K TVs haven’t taken off and with the way sales are right now, 8K Blu-rays couldn’t be further from hardware manufacturers’ minds.
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