>The impending closure of UltraViolet - which will shut its doors on 31 July - is another indication that even offering a free digital copy with every disc has failed to ignite sales.
>You only need to look at prices to also realise that 4K Blu-rays are not selling in significant numbers. New, premium releases still carry a hefty mark-up that is the same or similar to their cost at launch two years ago. Venom, for example, is £25 for the 4K edition, £15 on conventional Blu-ray.
>Yes, it comes with Dolby Vision, but so too does a 4K HDR digital copy of the film that costs £14 on iTunes. Many at that price also come with Dolby Atmos surround sound, aping their physical counterparts.
>A higher volume of sales of the physical version would drive the full RRP down, but that hasn't happened in the last two years and time is a-ticking. The same happened with 3D Blu-ray and look what happened to that.
>To be honest, 4K Blu-ray was going to be a hard sell from the start, with Sony deciding not to include a player with its second edition PlayStation 4 consoles: the standard PS4 and PS4 Pro. It told Pocket-lint at the time that its users prefer digital 4K streaming, but things might have turned out differently had it actually supported the format. After all, the PlayStation 2 almost single-handedly helped the DVD market to thrive.
I wanted to get HDBR for my computer when I got a new build last year but I would have had to get a very specific and much more expensive motherboard, cpu, videocard, and rom drive - all the DRM for it is ridiculous So I said fuck it regular bluray it is
And also the powerdvd that came bundled with what I got stopped worked so now I use leowa too
DRM drives people away not save money
Landon Peterson
It's a shame because streaming 4K is nothing like watching it off the disk
Justin Perry
4k failed because this. they aren't even selling appropriately large panels (and projectors are total ass) to warrant 4K. Then trying to sell a (color crushing) saturation bump as a fucking feature totally alienated basically everyone on the A/V knowledge spectrum.
There was a huge rush of 1080p TV sales because panels were large and cheap, and that's all that mattered. Thinking people would just chuck their 60-70 inch panel because a new resolution came out was fucking retarded. Thinking people would happily buy a new panel and rebuy their entire collection because a new resolution came out was also fucking retarded.
Tech companies have never once managed to understand what drove any large scale adoption of tech and they keep thinking they can push obsolescence cycles.
Most people literally can't tell the difference. Especially when they've got a 40" 4K screen and sit at the opposite side of the room
Wyatt Barnes
why do you keep reposting this thread continuously OP?
Jonathan Sanders
Because 4k isn't noticeable enough for normies to even tell a difference. 480i to 1080p was hardly noticable for normies. Everyone had uncles and grandparents who bought HDTVs, paid their cable providers for HD only to watch the SD versions and never even touch the HD versions of those channels. You saw the rise of upscalers and nromies couldn't tell the difference between 1080p and 480i upscaled.
Hell most normies haven't even calibrated their display. How are they going to give a fuck about HDR if they don't even know what their screen is supposed to look like?
1080p succeeded because it was a jump from 25-30" screens to 40" screens. Did consumers care about the massively inferior picture quality? No, they saw the big screens at low prices and bought in.
4K is a jump that isn't visual. It's the same as HDR and 3D, you can't get these concepts across to people. And BR has been utterly cannibalised by low bit rate streaming.
What's funny is that the writing has always been on the wall for this shit. Back when my country upgraded from analogue to digital radio, guess what changed? Audio quality got worse, and radio broadcasters got richer. Why? Because digital radio lets you use less bandwidth for the same signal, so instead of improving the quality of existing radio stations, they simply compressed everything into 1/5th of the bandwidth and then sold the other 4/5ths of available space to new radio companies.
It's the same shit with streaming. We won't have picture quality as good as a 4K blu-ray on Netflix or any other one of these awful services for DECADES. And nobody will give a shit, because the concepts of bitrate and compression are utterly lost on the layman.
Anthony Hill
PS5 & the new Xbox will help push 4K blu-rays
Also the digital copies of 4K movies are worse than 1080p Blu-ray, compressed as all hell
Carson Wilson
>Digital is beating Blu-Ray because a digital copy service is shutting down
Asher Hernandez
My dad does this. There is even a button on the remote to switch directly to the HD version of the channel.
It annoys me the most when he is watching a movie like star wars or lord of the rings in SD when HD is a button press away.
John Taylor
if consumers were sheep, then 4K would've been successful though.
also did you mean to make an argument for the fact 4K isn't noticeable or is that just your ESL going haywire?
The main takeaway is the idea that no one with a 60" TV is going to sit four feet away from it. People buy large panels so they can spread around across a room.
Daniel Turner
It's not even that uncommon, with people over 45 who pay for HD cable and use an HD TV it's something like 80% who never actually use their HD channels and just watch everything in SD. The most common reason was they didn't even know the channel wasn't HD since it looked good enough for them.
Xavier Cook
>if consumers were sheep, then 4K would've been successful though. No, because it's a bad business idea.
These people do not understand what resolution is. You cannot properly convey the difference, and even if you can, from the distances most of these "people" are sitting from their 100" displays, there's no visible difference between 480p and 16k.
People wanted bigger screens for cheaper, which is why HD took off. Because it came with LCD for most people, HD CRTs had been out for years and had terrible sales. People just wanted a bigger screen so they could sit further away from it.
4k was never going to take-off, because most people stream anyway.
Joshua Wood
i wish physical video games came with a digital copy, and that digital was cheaper
Carter Richardson
Then people would just buy physical, take the code out, and re-sell the game.
Ryan Martin
>Thinking people would happily buy a new panel and rebuy their entire collection because a new resolution came out was also fucking retarded. This exactly. Rebuying an entire collection of movies made far more sense when we were switching from VHS to DVD because DVD offered many advanatages over VHS. It didn't degrade through use, was more compact, supported better video and audio quality, etc. The only advantage blu-ray offered over DVD was better video and audio quality, but that alone isn't enough to get people to rebuy their entire collections AGAIN on a new format. 4K blu-rays are the same shit.
All the consumer cares about are convenience and value.
Nathaniel Edwards
PS 4 and Xbone can already play Blu rays tho.
Isaiah Edwards
>HD CRTs had been out for years and had terrible sales
As someone who actually had (and junked) a HD CRT TV, I can tell you they sold poorly because they were ultimately quite ass and overly expensive. But saying there was no market for high resolution CRTs is pretty fucking dumb, considering monitors.
also, it seems you are intentionally making an argument for a lack of visual differences between resolutions. Which is really quite moronic. DVD took the fuck off because it was practically night and day from VHS. Then, like you said, HD took off because large cheap panels. Now 4K is fizzling (the same way 720p did) because there isn't sufficient visual difference between 2K and 4K and everyone already has a perfectly adequate (and huge) panel.
Nathaniel Hill
Why do you keep reposting the same thread over and over?
Isaac Lewis
How can anyone not tell the difference between sd and hd, seriously?
Mason Thompson
>DVD took the fuck off because it was practically night and day from VHS. DVD took off because you don't have to rewind them. That's it. That's the entire reason people were willing to upgrade their libraries.
Because otherwise you'd have to explain why laserdisc was an absolute failure.
Ian Adams
>feet Jesus Christ. How long is that in the non-retarded system? I'm not going to use my foot to measure that fooking distance.
Hunter Lee
asking why laserdisc failed is just betraying the fact you never actually saw/handled one.
Ethan Hall
Laserdiscs were huge and bulky and more expensive too I think. I also don't remember them being pushed/marketed nearly as hard as DVD was when it came out. I remember Blockbuster having a DVD section around '97 and my dad bought a DVD player around that time too.
Hudson Peterson
Frankly, I'm skipping 4K entirely. My 6 year old 46" 1080p TV is perfectly fine. I'll upgrade to 8K when it's available and reasonably priced, and there's at least some content.
Josiah Fisher
How many people even bought Blurays? Even people with PS3s never seemed to buy them.
Carson Lopez
They probably needed a new fancy name. "4K Bluray" is the equivalent of "Wii U". Rookie marketing mistake.
Elijah Gonzalez
>I'll upgrade to 8K when it's available and reasonably priced, and there's at least some content. Year 2035 here we go!
Daniel Smith
Land on the moon nigger
Brody Howard
I do. However, i rarely buy at full price. yes, that sheet has 959 entries and a lot of those are boxed sets. Total expenditure over 11 years is 6493,41 €
Not sure but probably enough to sustain a Bluray market since most films have had Bluray release at this point. But I also don't know anyone who has a large Bluray collection or bothered to replace their entire DVD collection with Blurays. Most people even today seem to either have held on to their DVDs or moved to online streaming entirely or created their own personal streaming libraries (Plex etc).
Michael Johnson
>muh moon landing Like clockwork. Classic textbook Amerifat. The Apollo missions were brought to you by the Mighty Metric System™ btw.
Thomas Phillips
literally everyone I know went from DVDs to piracy to streaming. Enthusiasts pirate and have a Plex server, normalfags use Netflix. No one got on board with Bluray.
I don't think they needed that big of a market to keep Blurays in production. They would not have been expensive to make so keeping it as an option was always possible. But all the Bluray/DVD stores shut down before 4k Bluray was even a thing. If I wanted to buy a Bluray I'd HAVE to get it off Amazon which at that point you're using online and it starts to make sense to just stream or pirate it.
Lincoln Smith
blu-ray was just a DVD update, just all other disc based formats will be as such there really is no real need to upgrade to blu-ray, it offers nothing new besides quality, which isn't really a priority for the regular consumer
Connor Anderson
the other problem was that since regular consumers didn't care, only enthusiasts really got into it. But then so many releases had controversies with terrible filters and restorations and shit applied that made them inferior to DVDs. You had to actually do your homework before buying one instead of being able to confidentially grab it off the shelf and assume it would be better.
Jason Nguyen
Why did Trump wow to save the failing coal industry instead of resurrecting physical media?
most cable providers i know have a setting to just remove all SD channels that have HD versions in your package. Why not just flip that setting for him?
Xavier Miller
Streaming on hand-held devices wins. Most people now will choose a tablet over a PC with much better capacity any day. They choose lesser capacity, and know that any TV made in the apst 3 years can stream 4K UHD just fine.
And when we now have post-millenials raised entirely on streaming their media on their phones, the physical media is dying.
Nicholas Allen
Shame zoomers are so retarded, 4K blu-rays in HDR shit on streaming
Kayden Rodriguez
>I don't think they needed that big of a market to keep Blurays in production. Thats what I suspect. Its probably all AV nerds propping up the BR industry.
I have a 65" 4k TV hooked up to my PC for gaming from time to time. To difference in quality from 1080 is marginal. Well made HDR on 1080 gives more visual fidelity than 4k without it. Unless you don't have like a 90" screen 4k is a complete meme.
John Edwards
PS5 will play 4K blu rays? I've read nothing about.
