Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday February 01 2017, @11:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-buys-discs-these-days? dept.

Sony has written down $977 million in its movie business, blaming a decline in physical media sales:

In a Monday statement to investors, the company attributed the "downward revision... to a lowering of previous expectations regarding the home entertainment business, mainly driven by an acceleration of market decline." [...] "The decline in the DVD and Blu-ray market was faster than we anticipated," Takashi Iida, a Sony spokesman, told Bloomberg News.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by aim on Wednesday February 01 2017, @01:06PM

    by aim (6322) on Wednesday February 01 2017, @01:06PM (#461632)

    Well face it. You force customers to go through "piracy" rants, unskippable ads for other movies, essentially treat them like sh*t. I'm not even talking about playback (not copy) protection or region codes. Each time I put in a DVD for the kids (they love to watch the same stuff over and over...), I'm appalled... as are the kids, having to wait every effing time for "the good stuff". And you wonder why you're losing money there? I've boycotted BD as the lunacy has gone even further there.

    Frankly, service is infinitely better just grabbing an MKV online, paid or more probably not. Provide a decent product, and we'll get it legit, no problem. But treat customers like sh*t, eat dirt.

    Oh and for the current legit online content... guess what, some of us don't want to get just one translated version. We may want to get the original sound, or maybe a translation in another language. It seems that distributors really don't get this, from what I've heard from one IPTV provider here from their negotiations with content providers.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=4, Total=4
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday February 01 2017, @01:12PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday February 01 2017, @01:12PM (#461635)

    That's funny, I boycotted BluRay as well, and stopped buying DVDs at the same point. It just got too annoying.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Wednesday February 01 2017, @02:29PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday February 01 2017, @02:29PM (#461655) Journal
    I don't see most of that, because I watch DVDs with VLC which doesn't respect the do-not-skip flag. I've actually started buying DVDs again, because the prices have dropped to the point where I'm paying around £5/season for fairly recent TV shows in boxed sets, and at that price it's cheaper than renting. I have occasionally found some DVDs that will rip fine with DVDBackup, but won't play with VLC. One season in the Stargate SG-1 boxed set was like that: I quite enjoyed the irony of copy protection that prevents regular playback, but does not prevent copying.

    That said, even though I have an HD projector, I won't buy a BluRay. I got some by mistake for Christmas a year ago and spent a day trying to get them to play, before giving up. If you want to sell recordings of movies, then you should invest in making it as easy as possible for your potential customers to play them. When you sink millions of dollars into trying to make it difficult then people will start to wonder if you understand the business that you're in.

    --
    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @03:47AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @03:47AM (#461875)

      Handbrake will transfer a DVD to a playable .mkv file at roughly 100fps, a two hour movie in just under 30 minutes. That file doesn't have the "unskippable content" in it, and is so much more flexible than a disc in terms of where and how it can be enjoyed.

      I get that the movie business expects to show previews in theaters, ads on television, and more previews on disc media. I get that the music business wanted to sell a $10 LP album with 2.4 good songs on it instead of $0.99 singles. When the music business finally got around to embracing the digital world, they came back to profitability. How many billions will the movie business lose before they figure out how to follow them?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @07:03AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @07:03AM (#461907)
        And many people can download a similar MKV of a BluRay of that movie in just under 30 minutes. That downloaded MKV might be encoded better than some noob would have done with Handbrake.

        That's the thing I never got, why make your _paying_ customers sit through those warnings? To encourage them to stop paying for an inferior product?

        I hope that fucking works and they stop paying.

        Because of the stupid region bullshit, someone I know had to buy a bluray player from a different country so that he could watch stuff he _paid_ for that was only available in a particular region. If he didn't pick the paying option he wouldn't have needed to do such ridiculous stuff. Because of the stupid region bullshit, another bunch I know couldn't easily play a DVD they _bought_ on their laptop, they had to get help from other people.

        The fact is it's not that easy to download "pirated" movies for the average "uncle/aunt" types, but if you make the legit process even harder what the fuck do you think happens?

        Make it easier and lots of people with spare cash would go, "Come on seed! Oh fuck this seeding bullshit" or "what's the difference between this 1080p and that 1080p, is this dubbed in English or not?" or "hmm is this a malware site or not", and instead pay and watch the movie they want to watch.

        Or that pirate stuff might be completely beyond them so they ask their "helpful" teen kids/nephews/nieces who'd go "Just go to the official site, pay and watch whatever you want, it's really easy" and then the teens can go back to watching/playing their pirated stuff. Everyone wins. Whereas if you make shit too hard those "helpful" teens would find it easier to just download it for them.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:00AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @09:00AM (#461935)

          Exactly.

          I'm one of the few people who pay for DVDs. Every single time I decide to watch a DVD, the first five minutes is spent thinking "not this crap again, maybe I should switch to torrents like everyone else".

          The thing is, my computer is in my bedroom and the TV is in the living room. Getting torrents onto my would take some work, though with Wi-Fi, not as much as it used to. I've wondered many times, if I were to replace my DVD player with a Bluray player, would it require an internet connection to download "updates" (aka. stronger DRM)? If so, I would have to do the work to get internet to my TV anyway, and laziness would no longer be an excuse to buy rather than torrent...