As Online Streaming Booms, DVDs Hear a Death Knell - NYTimes.com
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Goodbye, DVD. Hello, Future.
By DAVE KEHR
Published: March 4, 2011
THAT distant rumble you hear is the sound of yet another
approaching cultural shift, accompanied by all the shouts of joy and
gnashing of teeth that come with such upheaval.
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Rick Wilking/Reuters
The brick-box Blockbuster,
once the dominant DVD
franchise, has fallen into
bankruptcy in an era of other
video options.
The DVD isn’t dead yet, but it’s
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definitely looking a little peaked, at
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least in the eyes of the home-video
industry. Sales continue to decline
(volume is down about 40 percent
from this time last year for the Top
20 titles, according to Home Media
Magazine), the formerly ubiquitous neighborhood rental
shops have all but vanished (Blockbuster, once the
dominant franchise, has plunged into bankruptcy), and
the major studios have drastically cut back on full-scale
releases of library titles.
The days of the digital versatile disc may well be coming
to an end, at least in its established form as a factory
pressed, attractively packaged object of mass
consumption. But there are several new formats
competing to replace it, each with benefits and drawbacks.
As in comedy, watching movies nowadays is all about the
delivery.
Blu-ray discs, introduced in 2006, offer 5 to 10 times as much space for data storage as
a standard-definition DVD. They have superior sound and image quality as well as a
range of bells and whistles — from social networking interfaces to elaborate games —
designed to make the experience of watching a movie more “active” for twitchy 21stcentury audiences.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/movies/homevideo/06dvds.html?_r=1&ref=movies&pagewanted=all
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As Online Streaming Booms, DVDs Hear a Death Knell - NYTimes.com
Blu-rays are essentially pumped-up DVDs. The so-called MOD discs (for “manufactured
on demand”) are the familiar DVD’s slimmed down, small-scale cousins: burned on
computers, rather than pressed on machines, produced in limited quantities with generic
covers, and generally devoid of elaborate menus, supplementary material and much in
the way of restoration work. As pioneered by the Warner Archive Collection, and now
adapted by other programs like Sony’s Screen Classics by Request and MGM’s Limited
Edition Collection, MODs allow niche marketing of movies that don’t have the wide
commercial appeal of recent theatrical releases.
For those who find physical objects too much of a burden, there is the new world of
direct electronic delivery. Cable systems were there first, with on-demand channels that
offer access to recent films for charges ranging from $3 to $10, though the heat has now
passed to the Internet-based on-demand streaming services like Netflix and Hulu Plus
(Hulu’s new premium pay service), which offer all-you-can-eat buffets for monthly fees
in the $8 to $10 range. Other Internet services — like Wal-Mart’s VUDU, Amazon
Instant Video and Apple’s iTunes Store — offer individual titles for à la carte download
at prices from 99 cents to $20.
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For the casual consumer of moving images these developments in delivery systems
promise to make life a bit easier, and maybe a bit cheaper: no more red envelopes to
mail back, no more late fees and perhaps a wider selection of titles than your store had
to offer.
But if your interests range beyond recent Hollywood releases — into, say, older, foreign
or nonfiction films — the prospect of another change in format brings a mixed sense of
hope and fear. Hope, to the degree that the new distribution strategies may make it
economically feasible for a broader range of movies to enter the marketplace; fear,
grounded in past experience that suggests format changes invariably leave legions of
once widely available titles in limbo.
In the beginning there was 35-millimeter film, the international standard for theatrical
exhibition. In the 1950s most big cities had art and revival cinemas (and over on the
wrong side of the tracks, the more humble and aromatic institutions known as grind
houses) that simply drew on the stock of old prints that the studios maintained. After
that came 16-millimeter, the narrower, easier-to-handle gauge that brought old movies
to television (for the all-night late shows that were the first cinémathèques many of us
knew) and later fueled the college film societies of the ’60s and ’70s.
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In the ’80s VHS tapes commodified the movie so that it became a clunky staple of the
living room and den. VHS also created an entirely new market for distributors and soon
drove second-run theaters, revival houses and the nontheatrical 16-millimeter scene into
oblivion. Vast numbers of films, once commonly available, were lost in that transition,
but VHS offered the compensating advantages of convenience and affordability.
Later in the decade laserdiscs emerged as the preferred medium of collectors, offering a
sharper image and digital sound, as well as multiple audio tracks that could contain
alternate language versions or filmmakers’ commentaries. But the double-sided 12-inch
discs were bulky and expensive, and relatively few titles were remastered from VHS to
take advantage of the laserdisc’s technical superiority.
When DVDs first became commercially available in 1997, they combined the best of both
worlds, offering the cheapness and convenience of VHS and technical specs far beyond
even what laserdisc had to offer. But the higher-resolution images and improved sound
quality of DVDs meant that many older films would have to be remastered to be brought
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Page 2 of 5
As Online Streaming Booms, DVDs Hear a Death Knell - NYTimes.com
3/8/11 8:53 PM
to market in the new format, an expensive proposition that resulted, once again, in the
disappearance of many titles.
Blu-ray ups the ante again. With its dramatically higher resolution the format can reveal
flaws in the source material that VHS and DVD obscured. Ideally, preparing a film for
Blu-ray requires access to the 35-millimeter camera negative or an early generation
print. Even then, extensive and expensive digital and photochemical restoration may be
necessary to bring older titles up to snuff.
That’s more of an investment than most distributors are willing to make in library titles,
which is why so few classics have made it to Blu-ray. (If you’re wondering why “Citizen
Kane” still isn’t available in hi-def, it’s partly because the camera negative was destroyed
in a vault fire in the 1950s.)
By contrast, streaming video seems like a return to the low-tech past. As Eric A. Taub
reported on The New York Times’s Gadgetwise blog, the quality of Netflix’s streaming
video seems roughly on a par with VHS: tolerable on a small computer screen but
painfully inadequate on an HDTV. But for many consumers that seems to be enough.
The company’s subscription base shot up after its chief executive, Reed Hastings,
announced in November that Netflix was phasing out “physical product” and would be
“primarily a streaming video company delivering a wide selection of TV shows and films
over the Internet.”
But downshifting to the tech-specs of VHS has an upside too. Where it can cost up to
$40,000 to prepare a new film for a Blu-ray release, a distributor can take an existing
master and deliver it to a streaming site for no more than $600. Because of these
favorable economics, some hard-to-find titles have started turning up on at Netflix, Hulu
and other sites.
Netflix, for example, now offers an intriguing selection of films from Republic, United
Artists and Paramount that have been hiding in the shadows for decades. But don’t
expect miracles. It’s great to be able to see Nicholas Ray’s rare 1955 “Run for Cover,” but
not so great to see its original widescreen VistaVision format whittled down to fit the
television standards of 20 years ago.
The advent of streaming has spawned some premature optimism. “This instant, sitting
right here,” Roger Ebert wrote in a Jan. 22 article in The Wall Street Journal, “I can
choose to watch virtually any film you can think of via Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, MUBI, the
Asia/Pacific Film Archive, Google or Vimeo.”
We can only hope that this vision will become a reality one day, but right now it seems
distant.
If you are interested, say, in exploring the work of John Ford, you can currently find only
about a dozen of his more than 50 surviving features on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon
Instant Video combined, all of them titles widely available since the VHS days. (One truly
rare Ford film, the delightful 1917 comic western “Bucking Broadway,” can be seen free
at the excellent site Europa Film Treasures, a cooperative project among several of
Europe’s leading film archives.) A search for Ernst Lubitsch turns up six films from his
36-year career in Germany and America; of Jean-Luc Godard’s more than 90 features
and shorts, 9 are available.
The good news in this context is that things can only get better, both in terms of
technical quality and available content. Since I began writing the DVDs column for The
Times in 2004, I’ve concentrated, not surprisingly, on new DVDs. Now the scope will
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/movies/homevideo/06dvds.html?_r=1&ref=movies&pagewanted=all
Page 3 of 5
As Online Streaming Booms, DVDs Hear a Death Knell - NYTimes.com
3/8/11 8:53 PM
expand to include these newer methods of delivery.
In the short term I expect to be covering many more of the MOD discs that have been
arriving in encouraging quantities from Warner Brothers (the studio that has done the
most to keep its library in wide circulation), Sony, MGM-Fox and other new players,
and, in the long term, doing my best to nose out the interesting and unusual in the
dizzyingly vast, largely uncharted territory of the new Internet repositories.
It’s an eye-wearying job, but I’m thrilled that I get to do it.
A version of this article appeared in print on March 6,
2011, on page AR14 of the New York edition.
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As Online Streaming Booms, DVDs Hear a Death Knell - NYTimes.com
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