Originally posted by samhain
Yeah, these kids today don't know the pleasure of walking into a video rental place, scanning through Netflix isn't quite the same thing, and watching the 15 minutes of trailers before the film to pick other low budget movies/unknown movies to rent next time, Robot Jox for example.
Robot Jox! “Achilles, I’ll crush you like a bug!”
Holy shit, that takes me back.
Originally posted by Blakemore
DVDs are like CD players. They were good but got old very fast. Same with the iPod. Remember that? Ew.
DVDs lasted over a decade "in the mainstream", though. It wasn't a passing fad. It was a staple of homes and offices for a long ass time. Some movies which performed poorly at the box office, more than made their budgets back in DVD sales. An example of this was Idiocracy which did poorly at the box office but sold DVDs and DVD rentals like crazy.
Budget $2–4 million
Box office $495,303
Idiocracy was released on DVD on January 9, 2007. It has earned $9 million on DVD rentals, over 20 times its gross domestic box office revenue of under $450,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
These days, almost everyone has seen it. Mike Judge made his money off of this film in spades despite the poor box office performance. The re-broadcasts also made him some nice money from licensing, too. Box office performance made it seem like a failure. But Mike Judge made many millions off of this film and tons of people have seen it.
Here's a list of movies that did well on DVD but not so hot at the box office:
https://www.nme.com/photos/13-box-office-flops-that-became-hugely-successful-on-dvd-1420911
This article details the decline of DVD sales (and you can see why DVDs were huge for over 10 years):
So here's what happened and why DVD/Blu-Ray/Physical Media sales of home entertainment declined:
Functional Internet Bandwidth
Streaming services didn't take off in the late 2000s. The internet bandwidth was just not there in the primary "money markets." Internet bandwidth had to be functional enough to stream 480p quality before it meant anything in the streaming space. We started hitting those figures a bit after 2010. By 2015, a comfortable majority of homes in the modern world could stream 480p and a significant portion could stream HD and full HD.
Now, a majority can stream HD and full HD and a healthy portion can stream 4K (degraded).
Look at this chart:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-connection-speed-in-the-us/
This is one of those niche areas of knowledge I have because of what I was doing for a living around 2015 - I had to know market bandwidth for a big data analytics program I was running back then. We literally had to fight for bandwidth in some markets because of streaming services (almost exclusively Netflix), running our big data collection during off-peak hours: usually 2-4 AM.
The streaming fad will never end as long as humankind exists. It will just expand and get crazier and crazier.
Unless we have an anti-Technology apocalypse, streaming video over a live internet connection is here to stay forever.
Another future where streaming ends is the singularity where humans, as we know it, will cease to exist and biological entities.
Originally posted by Blakemore
So everything is in the cloud?... Great we're gonna live like Wall-E and Bardock was right that this will be our lives.🙁
Not too sure about the cloud thing. The "cloud" is just someone else's computer. A server with data on it.
But, yes, the Wall-E thing is legit. We are seeing that video remote talk thing more than ever due to the COVID-19 thing forcing everyone to use video conferencing and calling more than ever. We saw a massive traffic uptick in video conferencing services since March.
Originally posted by Blakemore
It shows just how dumb people really are. 😬
It really does. It makes me legit buttmad.
I know we give each other a hard time on KMC but to be absolutely for a moment:
The Drug War is both racist and classist in the US. It is part of a multi-hundred billion dollar industry. If I was elected president and ended the drug war, got rid of the ATF, got rid of ICE, and brought most our troops home (and had the extras protect our borders like a proper military should), I'd be assassinated because there's just far too much money sitting on the drug war.
It's that bad and corrupt.