Bad news for home theater enthusiasts


Disney is ending all DVD and Blu Ray releases down under for Australia and New Zealand which may be a harbinger of what can eventually happen to the rest of the world. Their last release will be Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3. From now on it's streaming only for them.

It's a good read for those with a big investment in physical media as streaming still can't match the quality and the big players just don't care as there'll be one less product to make.

Are we going to see a run on blu ray players with prices going through the roof again like we did when OPPO decided to call it quits? My OPPO BDP-103 is old and the mid level Panasonic DP-UB820-K is starting to look a bit desirable right now. 

All the best,
Nonoise

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Showing 1 response by knownothing

I was engaged in a similar discussion in 2009 with Macdadtexas where he claimed Blu-Ray was already toast because streaming was so convenient and good enough for most people including him.  Fourteen years later we are lamenting the pending loss of the hard format.  

Streaming quality has improved in the interim, but there is a lot of texture in both sound and video quality between services and titles, and on average I much prefer the sound quality of Blu-Rays to streamed content.  I think for audiophiles there is a lot be concerned about in losing Blu-Ray as an option as the streaming networks focus on the average consumer and costs.  Perhaps once everyone has a very big data pipe from source to home this wont matter, and content providers will step up their game, but there seems little incentive now.  I am going to start loading up on reference Blu-Ray disks ASAP.