(More of a placeholder for an actually interesting essay than something I really needed to say, if I'm being honest.)
Most people today do not care about video formats at all, becuase they just stream everything anyway. But for the people paying attention there is often an idea that progress is inevitable and quick. By this I mean that there is a sort of pattern of history where a certain format flourishes until its replacement comes along (often emerging out of a format war) at which point the replacement flourishes and the old format vanishes with the exception of collectors and other weirdos. So you have VHS reigning supreme until the introduction of the DVD, at which point it fades. Then Bluray replaces the DVD, bringing us to the age of 4K.
And yet, we are now hearing rumors of 8K blurays (there are already TVs available for them,) but 4K is far from the dominant format. Hell, rumors of the demise of DVD are greatly exagerated. For example look at this report on the market share of various titles and formats. DVD still holds the majority of the market (albeit just slightly) while Bluray holds the majority of the remainder. If you go back through previous weeks you'll see a similar story. Sometimes DVD doesn't manage to get more than half the market, but 4K never gets close to cracking even a quarter of the market.
So what's up here? It's not like we see VHS on that chart (even though there are still a few weirdos like me with VCRs.) Keep in mind that the 4K format is 6 years old and Blurays are 16 years old. Let's contrast the situation with DVDs. 6 years after the DVD would be 2002. At that point most people had DVD players, though the combo player meant that they might keep VHS tapes around. 16 years later would be 2012, when VHS tapes were only for collectors and people scouring thrift stores. We did in fact see a pretty quick decline in VHS sales which has not been matched by the later format switches. Why?
It's not really that hard to see as long as you take off your modernist "progress is everything" goggles. While there certainly are people who will buy new things just to have new things (as the success of various Apple and Google ventures has shown) most consumers just want something that meets their demands. DVDs had several obvious advantages over VHS tapes, including:
Note that this was still not enough for people to immediately switch over to DVD. Many people didn't want to buy a new player at first, and even those who did would either keep a VCR or get a combo player. (There is also the issue that VHS tapes did have the advantage of being easily recordable, but demand for that decreased due to DVRs and the like at roughly the same time that VHS probably would have been abandoned anyway.) Note that I didn't stress the improved visual quality of the DVD format. Certainly, it is a nicer looking format, but VHS was good enough for most consumers, especially on the CRT TVs that were common at the beginning of DVD's lifecycle.
Since DVD had such obvious benefits over VHS, it didn't take long for consumers to prefer buying DVDs. You might keep a collection of VHS tapes around for a long time before selling them off at a garage sale or to a thrift store. But you wouldn't be that likely to buy a VHS version of something when a DVD was available, especially if the price was similar (and since DVDs quickly became cheap to produce, after a few years DVDs became cheaper than the old price of VHS tapes, often even without adjusting for inflation.) Once you hit a critical mass where the majority of your collection is DVDs it becomes more and more annoying to keep those tapes around, and that combo player takes up a lot of space in comparison to the fancy new DVD players.... There was also the issue of HD TVs. Once those came around the visual issues with VHS became more apparent (they aren't as bad as people try to pretend these days, but defintely noticeable at a glance.)
Now let's think of the benefits of bluray over DVD:
And that's pretty much it. They take up the same amount of space for storage, they don't really have significant improvements to interactivity (yes it is possible to do some things that can't be done on DVDs, but how many blurays take advantage of it?) But if we're being honest here DVDs already have good enough image quality for most people. Sure, you can definitely tell the difference, but is it enough to really impair your enjoyment of a movie? Keep in mind that most people don't have an issue watching a movie on their tiny smart phone screen. The higher space could be nice; I recently picked up an anime disc that stores 52 episodes across two blurays as opposed to the 8 DVDs reaquired on the previous release; the video quality is the same on both releases. But this is pretty limited in its usage: you can only really get huge disc savings by having DVD quality video or a little better, and if you're just selling one movie you can fit it all on one disc either way. Plus these things are so small that people aren't terribly worried about storage space, so the fewer discs only really matter if you save money, which you usually won't.
Still, the video quality on bluray is just noticeable enough that most people are willing to spring for it as long as it isn't too much more expensive. It helps too that the bluray player is a decent streaming device, meaning that people can buy it for other reasons first and then choose to get blurays over DVDs later. And there is the backwards compatibility issue. Unlike the frankenstein devices needed to play both VHS tapes and DVDs, a bluray player is compact and fits together more naturally (they still need two different lasers, but the average consumer isn't aware of this.) So you can simply buy a bluray player as a replacement to your failing DVD player (especially after the prices dropped) and then experiment with blurays afterwards.
But note that there is no "critical mass" issue like what we had with DVDs. There came a point where it was logical to ditch your VHS tapes because they took up too much space and it was annoying dealing with a combo player. But your DVDs take up the same amount of space as your blurays, and you are probably using the exact same player you would use for blurays alone to play DVDs. Why then would you ditch your DVDs? The only reason is that the low image quality on DVDs so utterly disgusts you that you can no longer bear to own them, but most people are perfectly fine with DVD quality (even if they prefer blurays.) This also creates a supply issue in some cases. Since DVDs are so prolific, there are still some people who have not purchased a bluray player. So if you are a low budget studio needing to release a disc, DVD is still the safest avenue since you don't cut off any potential customers. Bigger companies will still do the old DVD/Bluray combo pack, but these are so easily available that there isn't a huge motivation for people without bluray players to buy them. Contrast with VHS tapes where so much of the market lost the ability to play them that releasing on VHS was idiotic.
And finally we get to 4K. The truth is this: almost no one cares about the increased visual quality on 4K. It's the type of thing where you might have your friend stand close to the TV to "really take in" how good it looks to brag about your new purchase. But hardly anyone sees a bluray quality image on the TV and thinks "this looks so blurry that I can't enjoy this movie." And keep in mind that to adopt 4K you need a new player, and potentially new cables. But why a new player, just for that? Remember, DVD gave you new features like interactive menus and chapter selection, while Bluray gave you various internet streaming options. 4K players only give you the ability to view things in 4K, and only with all the right equipment. Most people simply do not care.
In fact, it's hard to see how DVD will drop out of the market in the near future. I can only really see two options:
But you still have a segment of the video crowd that lives in the "more advanced discs with more pixels is more gooder" philosophy, and so is expecting 8K to soon take us by storm, even though 4K is still floundering in the water.
July 1, 2022