Disney ends physical media in Australia & Asia!

[gaastra]

Australia ends all disney dvds, blu-rays and 4k after gotg 3. It will be your last. You are digital only for disney stuff. Asia also except for japan who still has dvd rental stores!

Canada loses movie club also. Looks like disney is starting to kill of dvds and going digital in areas.

[Bill1978]

When a company decides to make this decision, they need to also commit to not removing their IP from their streaming service that this decision benefits. As an Aussie this is disappointing news. I also feel for those people who live in the parts of Australia that have dodgy internet service and probably rely on physical formats for their entertainment.

[EricJ]

I know Australia has a healthy interest in home theater, but I've lived through twenty years of panic articles trying to push the US narrative of (...) Format "dying", and trumpeting headlines of "Beginning of the End? - Frozen not to get Blu3D release in UK!"

And then we would have to explain to all the other wishful clickbait-believers that UK's home theater, or Japan's streaming industry, etc., is not the same as in North America, where television is a more central part of the entertainment industry, and where Hollywood studios try to get their budget-recoup money first with the home crowd.

[Ben]

Yes, but this isn’t scare stories. Disney has confirmed they’re out of physical media in Oz. Next up…?

[EricJ]

I didn't say they WEREN'T, I said that historically any attempt to extrapolate sweeping North American home theater data from that is naive at best, and desperate at worst.

[gaastra]

Dave down under a big disney dvd youtuber who has even given dates for disney dvd releases by disney says dvds have not been doing good there and he knew this was coming months ago.



As for japan they are still having dvds as stores like animate still sells tons and they still have dvd rental stores!

Disney dvds do well there at the dvd rentals.



Can't get this one to link like the others. Sorry.

https://youtube.com/shorts/_-fdnDkWdvs?feature=share

Here is a really older video but you can still see more of them.

[EricJ]

Not sure about DVD sales in Japan, but when VHS arrived there, the industry was so corporatized that VHS was ONLY available as rental, and sell-through Disney or Ghibli for the home didn't even exist until the studios teamed up in '99.

Because of that, Laserdisc was widely available for home sale, and never lost popularity--
Which is why any US home-theater LD techie usually had to order his movies as Japanese imports (no-region NTSC), and DVD was slow to originally catch on over there, since contented late-90's LD fans didn't really see the point of it.
A fact that later hit home for both countries when US fans wanted bilingual DVD releases of Godzilla and "Princess Mononoke", and Toho had to realize their rights stubbornness was going to cause reverse-importation problems.

[Ben]

Well that, and of course the fact that Japan had Hi-Vision LD — widescreen high-definition on a disc as far back as the early 90s. Who needed DVDs!?

[James]

Best Buy is the next domino to fall:

BREAKING/EXCLUSIVE ON THE BITS: BEST BUY IS EXITING THE PHYSICAL MEDIA BUSINESS FOR GOOD IN 2024

https://thedigitalbits.com/columns/my-t ... 01223-1100

[Daniel]

Terrible news.

[Ben]

What’s up with The Bits the last couple of days? Seems to be very slow to load, if at all…!

And what about BB's exclusive titles, James?

[Randall]

The Bits was experiencing heavy traffic, and it overloaded their server. The BB news was BIG. The site seems okay now.

In my town here in Canada, discs had largely disappeared from BB already over the past few years, so this wasn't news to me. You were lucky to find 10-15 or so new release titles at the front of the store, and BB stopped carrying Disney altogether a year or so ago, hence why I've been getting my Disney Steelbooks from the US, with James' help. (Really weird seeing titles like Rumble and Paws of Fury for sale at BB, but not Wakanda Forever or Encanto!) And I know most US stores also already had their disc displays scaled way back, too. Really, this won't put much of a dent in things, as most people had moved away from buying discs at BB already, BB then scaled back their disc displays until almost nothing was left, and sales naturally hit rock bottom.

I actually buy most discs direct from the boutique labels these days, or from Unobstructed View in Canada (UV distributes Kino, Shout!, Arrow, Criterion, Warner Archive, and various smaller indies). Bigger mainstream releases I get from Amazon, or occasionally while at Wal-Mart. So, my habits won't change. The boutique labels, though operating on slim profit margins, are doing okay for now. Kino still releases a ton of stuff, and Criterion keeps chugging along. We did recently lose Network in the UK, and Random Space Media in Australia, but there's no indication of losing others yet. Things have evolved, but we'll still be able to buy discs for a while yet, even if studios like Disney don't give us everything we want.

[Ben]

Ah, gotcha on Billy.

The irony is that they scale back their physical presence because people are not buying as many discs because they have no physical presence…!

[James]

What's weird is they're also removing their online presence as well. I get, but disagree, with taking that space back in stores. Not sure why they can't just keep them in stock online.

[Ben]

Yeah. I guess that’s still all warehouse space that they they can use for household goods and games, bits 'n' bobs, etc, and keeping inventory of masses of titles, many of which probably top out after six months to a year and just sit there, probably ends up costing more than it’s worth to store them, sadly.

Have no fear…vinyl is still with us (having never really left, albeit sinking to the "underground" for a while) and physical will still be around for a while. My only worry is that distributors will keep making more "lavish" product to keep us interested, meaning bigger boxes, when all longtime collectors mostly want is standard cases so that we can collect more of this stuff!