The writing has been on the wall for a while (none of the Disney+ originals have a physical release) and it's a shame. With the majority of Disney's works staying in copyright until after I'm dead, this will grant total control (and knowledge) of how, when, and where I can watch their films. A copyright period longer than the typical human lifetime combined with streaming removing the protections of the first-sale doctrine means that there will be no legal way to watch without Disney knowing you are watching.
They recently announced the first physical release for a Disney+ original: WandaVision is coming out later this summer. Looks like a beautiful steelcase with a slip and character cards and postcards and more... but no actual physical disc. But they're marketing it as if it was a physical disc release... https://thedirect.com/article/marvel-studios-disney-plus-ste...
But the special thing about that steelbox is that it's literally an EMPTY bluray box. The text says: "Although there are no physical discs included ..."
This is what gaming companies are doing for their collectors editions. They charge people hundreds of dollars for a cheap plastic figure and a game case with a 4x5 sheet of paper with a code on the back. It’s all shameful.
The "Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty Secret Agent Gear Collection" is basically a collector's edition for the Phantom Liberty expansion, except it doesn't even come with a game code.
There's a weird reason for this- digital copies get access from hour one of the release, while physical copies had to ship. So you had this weird situation where the biggest fans of the franchise didn't get to play the game until a day or three after their friends.
This is insane. It's literally a "steelbook", apparently a disc-case phenomenon, yet with no book or disc inside. Just an (nearly) empty case with ... ads inserts inside?
Disney must think very little of their audience or be pandering to shameless collectors.
Extremely creepy that we’re losing the ability to consume media without being watched and analyzed every moment we do so. I think this is more invasive than people realize, even without meta’s eye tracking on its way
Quite right, but the solution to this isn't physical discs, or owning the "movie file", it's legislative. We need more restrictive legislation around storing then data mining user activity, and how that information is used. This applies to everything we do on our devices, but also interaction in the real world too.
With all due respect, and even considering that I am generally a fan of the "no technical solutions to legal problems", but this concrete example is where I draw the line: there is a clear benefit of a 3rd party _not being able_ to trace you _at all_ ; compared to whichever legal restrictions you want to put on it which may not even be physically nor technologically enforceable (at the end of the day they have the addresses and "bytes of the movie requested" for every user they served it to, no matter what the law says).
Not to mention the public (as usual) doesn't even seem to mind about their user activity being mined; at this point, even "western democracies" do it with various coatings of paint. Such democracies enforcing companies not to mine user activity, appetizing and trivial as this mining is, is just wishful thinking both today as well as at any point of history.
I would never exchange a broadcast medium where it is _impossible_ for the broadcaster to track me with one where tracking me is practically a side effect of its normal operation, even if I had the personal written guarantee of the current President of the Republic that the broadcasters would not be able to actually use any of the data they mine from it.
Owning a physical disc also comes with additional legal protections. Once you own the copy, many agreements become non-enforceable. This applies to a lesser degree to software (since the installation step involves making a copy), but even then there are protections.
Owning a copy doesn't just protect you, but the content itself as well. It means that Disney can't edit or censor the work post-release. It means they can't stop it from being accessed entirely.
Pushing for copyright change is actual change. It's just unlikely to happen while our law makers are representing the interests of corporations instead of the people.
And this will end up only hurting smaller creators. Disney can afford to churn out a ton of content every few years, whereas a novel/movie/art/etc. may be an individual's life's work.
It means what I wrote it means - there's no inherent reason why any content creator should be entitled to rent for a text they wrote or image they put together for their whole lifetime. A carpenter selling his work of art doesn't get rent for 70 years. Neither does a painter. Or a software developer based on the code they commited. What makes a writer or a singer (in reality, for MOST content that would be a publisher megacorporation) so special, that they deserve rent until end of life for a piece of text they wrote?
Let me reiterate, VAST, VAST majority of all cultural works aren't owned by authors themselves, but their publishers which don't pass on most of the rent they collect. Huge piece of this is owned by rent-seeking megacorporations collecting rent for things they did not create and which royalty agreements have passed long since.
Make copyright 20 years - most profits from content are made in first 5 years. 15 extra on top to be fair. After that, the artists will just actually have to create something new to earn money - just like everyone else in the world.
In no way are smaller creators "hurt" by shortening copyright. They'd still be able to enjoy their special privileges long enough to make plenty of money, and can continue to make money on their works long after they have entered the public domain.
> We need more restrictive legislation around storing then data mining user activity
How would such a law be enforced?
You don't know if your data is being mined and it's way to easy for a company to simply lie to a regulator about it. If they are following good security practices, it would be impossible for a regulator to really know whether or not that's going on.
It's either that or give the government backdoors into info systems so they can verify nobody is mining data... which seems not good.
I'd want some way to coerce companies into making physical media but I'm not sure that can be done. Perhaps as part of the library of congress? It seems like it would probably be reasonable for the government to say "If you won't provide physical media prints of your content, we will".
> I'd want some way to coerce companies into making physical media but I'm not sure that can be done.
Don't worry about physical media. Formats come and go. In order for a company to have any copyright protections at all on a work, a high quality digital version should have to be submitted to the copyright office which should automatically make that copy available at copyright.gov the instant the copyright on the work expires. Any edits or censored versions a company puts out later would then need to be copyrighted and submitted to the copyright office separately making sure that the originals are always preserved and available.
I'm not a defender of piracy. I buy stuff when a DRM-free version is available. But I've been thinking of piracy lately as a form of civil disobedience and actually a net benefit for mankind (sci-hub being a clear example)
If the whole ‘vote with your wallet’ thing is the only recourse for consumers, sounds like this is the system working as intended. I guess historical boycotts didn’t have viable piracy. But beyond that sounds like this is the desired/incentivized behavior.
I've always had mixed emotions about the whole piracy subject, but they have become less mixed and more supportive recently.
Seeing Harmy's "Despecialized" versions of the original Star Wars trilogy was a watershed for me. They're the best way of seeing the originals without Lucas's strange 90's CGI inserted into a 1970's movie, but technically they're piracy. (Oddly the pirate in a sense created a transformative work to more accurately re-create the original experience, but I'm sure Disney would prefer to see him crucified for the effort).
Anyway, I'm going to watch what I want and not worry about the philosophical questions at this point; I will worry about keeping the downloads anonymous though ;)
Personally I think piracy is the future. It's a net good for society and a normal behavior, and it doesn't hurt anyone. Corporations are just greedy.
These giant content monopolies are on their way out anyway, with personal AI tech that can generate movies and content on demand coming within 10 years.
Completely unfettered piracy is arguably not a net-good for society. I would also say the same about the current 95-year copyright term. There's a huge space between those two poles though that can be explored.
Agreed. I went all-in on paying for streaming years back and cut back on my pirating. Now that things are getting significantly more user-hostile, I'm finding myself pirating a lot more often. Oh well.
One day, piracy won’t be viable. Some new tech and/or legislation will gradually wipe it out (Eg, required software running on everyone’s machines validating every file, invasive stuff like that could happen in 20 years), maybe not today, but one day. We can’t rely on it
Our ISP reads torrents, then a random content owner sends a nastygram if the name matches something from the last 40 years or so (also depending on how popular).
I mostly download ancient stuff which flies under the radar; that's how I figured the enforcement parameters.
I have been told (but not confirmed) that recent versions of iOS won't let you add non-DRM protected music to your library (and for a monthly fee you can get a service that provides you with DRM protected versions of any non-DRM protected music you have). That seems bonkers to me, so does anyone know what the actual story is there?
Since day one, iOS has never let you just add MP3s to the music library on the phone directly - you've always had to sync it through iTunes on a computer.
This made sense when the behavior was inherited from iPods and two-way sync was difficult, but then they never had any incentive to add the ability once people stopped connecting their phones to computers anymore and they could just force people to buy all their music from them instead.
If you're reading Cory Doctorow books and blogposts, that's exactly what "they" are working on and the part of the population that cares about this may be a lot smaller than you think.
I know they are trying, but there will always be people with the knowledge to resist, like the HN crowd.
I can see more devices like iphones being sold and locked down, but I can't see open computers not being sold anymore, not so long as there are companies and people with a will to make them. Look at System76 as an example.
It's happening already. "Trusted Computing" is only the start. Can you even buy a CPU that isn't filled with that shit? Or a motherboard where every last chip is open/fully documented and verifiable?
HN people generally think of themselves as smart folks but frankly when it comes to voting (with their feet) they behave pretty much like average people.
> HN people generally think of themselves as smart folks but frankly when it comes to voting (with their feet) they behave pretty much like average people
I can’t help but notice that you’re detailing the thread with some counterfactual trolling. Maybe stop congratulating yourself for being so much smarter than everyone else and think about how you could state a coherent thesis and support it with data?
To be fair, as I've learnt, the iPhone has more than 50% market share in the USA. Which is relevant given that this is a discussion about HNers, who I assume most of which live there.
It used to be that in missing out of this content you were also missing out on a shared language to talk to your contemporaries. A cultural lingua franca. But now with so much fragmentation there that shared language is being lost anyway. I’ve not kept up with modern content and don’t feel like I have missed out because of it. The more difficult the content is to consume the fewer will consume it, the less network effect there is.
This used to bother me a ton, but now I'm thinking maybe we should have never put all these films on a pedestal in the first place as artistic achievements? As these corporations take control of cultural artifacts and treat them as merely intellectual property to be monetized, it all seems so uninspiring in retrospect, the whole industry and its accomplishments.
The fact that the term intellectual property has become generally accepted is, IMO, already conceding too much to rights-holders. Disney does not (and should not) have complete control over its copyrighted works.
This is also not limited to corporations; read almost any statement from e.g. the Authors Guild, and see there is an underlying assumption that long-term control over all aspects of one's creations is not a policy decision, but a moral axiom.
If you really want to include the process in your determination of what is art, then what about independent films created as labors of love that have the rights purchased by a corporation? Do those cease to be artistic achievements when the corporation buys the rights?
To be clear: I think we should have a robust copyright system, but what we have now is an absurd overkill and actively harmful towards encouraging creation of interesting new works.
Disney didn't even want VHS back in the day because they would make more money releasing old films from the vault into theaters periodically. Now that physical media has come and gone they're going back to the rent seeking days.
Seems like disney has given you a great incentive not to watch the formulaic garbage they produce. Why not just thank disney and stop watching. Disney isn't a utility required to sustain your quality of life. It's poison to rot your brain.
I'm a 4k UHD guy so I'm pretty bummed that we're finally going this direction. I have 1GB service and I still can't get a constant 4k stream with at least some artifacting. I wish they'd at least let up precache the movie before watching so it's guaranteed high quality. I mean on my TV btw which I don't think allows offline downloads like on Android.
I switched to 4K discs earlier this year, for the same reasons - no dropouts, no blockiness, no sudden resolution changes. Precaching would solve a lot of these problems (it's how movie theaters get their films now - via encrypted download). But I do prefer owning the physical media.
I figure that most of the streaming titles will be lost in time. Sure, the equivalent of "Casablanca" will still be available. But series that people are fond of but weren't good enough to win awards .. they'll vanish into the ether.
The theater versions are also compressed at a much higher bitrate (although I believe using a not-as-good codec as h265). I've heard 500GGB+ for a 2HR film.
Not sure how much benefit there is in h265 over h264 or something like j2k at high bitrates, at low rates h265 certainly is beneficial.
Either way 500GB for 2 hours is still significantly compressed - over 90%.
Standard UHD 10 bit 30 bits a pixel, even at just 24fps is 384021603024 = 6gbit/sec just for the video alone without audio, ancillary information, and container overhead. I suspect movies work in 12 bit too, and work at 4k, so that's 409621603624 = 7.7gbit/second, or about 7TB for a 2 hour movie.
I would imagine a big advantage for the production team is being able to screen it and pause on any single frame and have it be perfect - consumer codecs all seem to use keyframes, which certainly save a lot of space, but if you start on a non-keyframe you either get no output or pixel puke until the next one.
They mark which frames they're referring to, so you at most just get a little stutter to decode those other frames if you're optimizing for the scrubber use case.
I've not had this with anything I've "bought". If it were confiscated I certainly would have no qualms in downloading a copy.
If something is removed from netflix, that's fine, I'm not paying to buy things I watch on netflix - I'm paying to rent them. I wouldn't copy them any more than I'd copy a VHS I'd rented from blockbuster back in the day.
This. When all else fails, and this is the only way, then it is the way. I, too, am more than happy to pay $ for a high quality physical media, but if they aren't satisfied with my one time purchase, and instead choose to force me to pay for each subsequent rewatch if that is what I desire, then they will no longer get my business, and I'll find other ways to get what I want. Why should I not?
I don't mind the streaming so much as I mind the bitrates and lack of lossless audio. There is still a very clear quality difference between UHD BluRay and 4k streaming services.
There are also large differences between the different streaming services. For example: prime Video is quite bad, while Apple TV+ is quite good.
Then there is also the absolute ridiculousness of Sky Showtime, a brand new streaming services that launched in 2022 without 4k or Atmos support.
Audio quality is another big factor with streaming media. Streaming media likes to heavily compress surround sound effects. While discs aren't perfect, they usually have a more immersive audio experience because of less compression
I have been buying up all the Disney movies my kids like. We are back to DVDs. No paid streaming services. I have had it with algorithms and endless back to back movies on Plus.
I wonder if this is a proxy fight in the SAG-AFTRA/WGA strikes. Most of the core issue is the reduced residuals seen by workers on streaming, so making visible moves to cut out classic residuals completely would be a classic dick move in these kinds of fights.
Well, residuals are just a fancy term for profit sharing. Disney has used artificial scarcity to keep the value of its content high since I can remember. You'd never find a Disney movie in the bargain bin, for example.
Stopping DVD/Bluray production just seems like they weren't able to keep high profit margins and those movies were about to hit those bargain bins. Seems to me, completely unrelated to the strike.
I mean, Disney has specifically been pulling content because of the strike to put pressure on those striking. If there'd no content, then there's no residuals. A lot of writers (and some actors) are dependent on residuals to keep paying their bills, so it's a tactic to put on pressure at the negotiating table.
When you combine that with the fact that the writers and actors are striking because they get significantly less residuals from streaming than they did from traditional physical and broadcast media, killing physical media (and the bigger residuals) looks a lot like a strike breaking move.
There is a problem with Disney? You have a problem. No Internet? You have a problem. You live in a place where internet is slow? You have a problem. I do not understand why doscs are discontinued.
Recently I have bought ps5. I have no account, mostly play offline after installation. I forgot the times where games had no shops, clients, and you were able to play immediatly after installation.
I do not have a good internet connections. the fastest transfer is via disc
Yeah, plenty of northern outposts (and even a territory capital) in Canada that are 100% geo-satellite fed for internet. And no local caching (big miss there imo). And cabins with marginal cellular data, and when available, it's $$$. And days are short with (debatably) not a lot to do outside in winter...
"Northern outputs"? My grandparents an hour from Ottawa in a small town only had satellite internet until about six months ago when the government paid for fiber through the town.
Disney vault used to be a thing were movies were pulled and cycled later. Might be a combination of low sales and gearing up to go back to the Disney cycle wheel. My very quick search shows dvd sales down over 86% since 2008. It would appear everyone saying they are back on physical media here are outliers.
Yes, I realize that. There are Plex apps for everything. But then you have to worry about your Plex server being up, people’s upstream bandwidth is usually piss poor since most people have cable. On top of that if your device doesn’t support the same format that you encoded it in, the Plex server has to transcode.
That both limits the quality and puts more load on the server limiting the number of simultaneous streams.
Not to mention when torrenting you have to troll/trawl [1] the internet for a good high quality rips.
Or just using streaming service.
Since Disney is one of the four major studios that support MoviesAnywhere, you can buy a digital movie from any of the participating stores like from Apple, Google, Vudu, Amazon and they will automatically be available in your library from the other stores.
In the 90s I would spend the equivalent of £19 for an hour of star trek (£13 for the 90 minute tape is £29 in today's money).
I stopped once I could DCC them not due to the price, but because of availability. I could get the DCC the day after the episode was broadcast in the US, rather than 6 months later.
Still got a long way to go to get back to those costs, and the delay is no longer a thing (they seemed to have sorted out the ridiculous wait with the latest SNW season)
And the majority of people aren’t doing that. You hardly ever hear the music industry complaining about piracy once iTunes and especially Spotify came online. “convenience beats free”.
I had a Plex server set up at home with over 1000 movies collected over the years from 2007 - 2020. It got to the point where I would just rather buy/rent a movie than deal with torrenting or the Plex server.
Eventually, I just copied all 2TB+ to AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive and got rid of it.
> People who were torrenting were not buying DVDs.
People who weren't tortenting were also not buying DVDs. Convenience, plus artificially low pricing (Disney claims to be losing money on D+), will always Trump long term interests in the majority of the population.
Anecdotal, but as a family, of all the streaming/TV services we have been subscribed to [0] Disney Plus is the one we by far get the most value from, closely followed by the larger Apple One subscription.
I am not at all surprised to hear they are going all in on Plus.
0: Currently Disney, Apple TV (via One), Netflix, Prime, and we just last week canceled all Sky UK. Had Paramount for a couple of months when there was something we wanted, will resubscribe when it's back. We are downgrading to Netflix basic as it's only the kids that watch it most of the year (there are no ads on the kids account), and will upgrade for the month when one of the two shows we watch are new.
Pretty clear there's no future in watching Disney products. I've never been one to horde data, but it seems pretty obvious that sometime in the future it could get harder and harder to get your hands on the data you want. Some things really could potentially disappear forever.
Take a look at the numbers under DMED --> Content Sales/Licensing and Other --> Home entertainment.
Last fiscal year[1; p. 42], Home entertainment generated $820 million revenue (down -19% YoY) while the overall sub-segment profusely bled -$287 million in operating losses.
This past quarter[2; p. 44], the trend continues at $148 million revenue (down -36% QoQ) with the sub-segment still bleeding -$50 million in operating losses.
Disney's problem within DMED segment appears to be that Linear Networks has been floating Direct-to-Consumer's massive growth burn for several years, but cash flows from the former are fading faster than the latter is tracking towards being operationally profitable.
Speculating, what if what we're seeing is a sort of A/B test in a much smaller market where cutting a revenue stream with relatively high opex is an attempt to steer those high-retention consumers towards Direct-to-Consumer?
In any case, investors have certainly expressed their dissatisfaction by severely punishing Disney's stock. With the residual impact of lockdowns in Shanghai and Hong Kong still being felt in DPEP, all the recent negative press surrounding Disney World/DeSantis feud in Florida, and now union strikes, Disney is without a doubt in a tough situation.
Speculating, what if what we're seeing is a sort of A/B test in a much smaller market where cutting a revenue stream with relatively high opex is an attempt to steer those high-retention consumers towards Direct-to-Consumer?
Given Disney’s recent actions, there are likely Australian tax code reasons as well.
Do Australians tend to have region 4 DVD players or region free? For blu-ray, they're in region B with Europe, so importing will probably be simple... And a lot of Blu-Ray releases are region free anyway.
Maybe they are trying to split between theater for the high quality experience and streaming for everything else.
I know I am the minority so they won't be catering to me, but I loved UHD Blu Rays and have built a fun collection of movies. The video and sound have never been better.
Why? They'll plaster 4k all over it, and 95% of people are happy. The next 4% will consume no matter what. So why bother for that small percentage that cares?
(numbers are made up, but I bet 1% is high, most people eat what is in front of them)
No surprise here, it's the natural move to keep people under subscriptions. I wouldn't also be surprised if every single mayor studio out there actually start doing this. Perhaps in 10 years or less people will have no choice other than to get absolutely online to consume content of any kind. I do hope that at least books will be an exception. I think the problem also originates from people who don't care about subscribing and pay them blindly.
For Australian fans it's probably easy to import the DVDs and Blurays from some other country - since all have the English sound track.
Personally I'm going to miss to be able to collect current Disney and Pixar animations on Bluray and they are going to miss my money in the long run.
Disney already stopped releasing the films in 3D format. First in the US (no Frozen 3D there) then in Europe as well. I had to import the last one from Japan for a price of 1 year of Disney +
Compared to collecting Blurays and DVDs, Disney+ is currently cheap and good value.
But that's unlikely to stay that way. They will at some point raise prices a lot and/or introduce ads.
Also even now:
There's the problem with the picture quality (and internet connectivity) compared to Bluray. You also don't get to import out-of-area versions. Want to watch Pixar's Coco in the Mexican Spanish Dub? Not possible here.
Want to watch a film without "Skip Intro", Age & flicker warning or the complete end credits? Want to easily pause a film to analyse a scene, without some overlay covering the picture?
With Disney's track record on annoying logos and other distractions, I don't trust them to keep their user interface clean or not suddenly force ads and trailers on their paying audience.
I'm happy with my audio CD and DVD/BR movies and TV series collection.
I OWN these discs and no licensing agreements between corporations can deprive me of watching or listening to what I paid for.
Under local law, I can also make how many copies I like, to ensure that I'll be able to use these purchased (in opposition to: rented) products even after physical media degrades.
> I OWN these discs and no licensing agreements between corporations can deprive me of watching or listening to what I paid for.
Are you sure?
> The approach of AACS provisions each individual player with a unique set of decryption keys which are used in a broadcast encryption scheme. This approach allows licensors to "revoke" individual players, or more specifically, the decryption keys associated with the player.
For the time being, I'm sure. I don't have to use proprietary connected players that can change behavior when reconfigured by vendor against my will.
Until user-friendly hardware projects like frame.work (edit: "open hardware" may be a more suiting phrase), and software projects like VLC exist and are not de-legalized, my point stands.
You're right. But fully lawfully - I can use non-connected hardware like old dedicated players (my Yamaha Blu-Ray player has no issues with BD discs from at least 2 regions) or PlayStation3 that I no longer need connected to LAN. And hey - unlike its successors - PS3 can play audio CDs, too!
Since these media formats are seemingly being phased-out, using older hardware for "legacy" media seems reasonable.
As for audio, I am lawfully allowed to rip CDs, so open hardware and open-source decoders (like FLAC) will work well when Apple starts doing some shitfuckery around my AIFF rips.
If an exchange tries to squeeze it's participants they can just do a PNI or create their own. An exchange in it's simplest form is just a switch after all.
The exchanges would have favorable terms for rates on the intercontinental lines and such, no?
While I don't doubt Disney could get into the business (and may, they're ever-growing), I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense.
It may, but that's kind of what I was getting at RE: anticipation. I don't know the business well, and have never had Disney Money to play with!
They're the sole owners of their material, they could much more easily pass the costs along - perhaps arrange partnerships with local businesses, ala 'bundling'
It's a tug of war. Disney could route their traffic via their T1s where the Australian ISPs also have to pay to receive the traffic. Who can pay longer? And if there is a working market of ISPs the ones with peering or caches in their network can use the superior Disney+ experience in their advertisement.
Australia and New Zealand are often used as testbeds for the Western markets because they are large--but not too large, English-speaking, and have a similar-enough consumer behavior.
Parallel imports from Asia have effectively killed off local distributors of games and physical media in Australia/NZ. There's no reason to have a subsidiary import all the media when stores will just bulk import from Asia and then sell with the same margins at half RRP.
To reiterate my comments on the previous thread[1] about this:
I know this isn't typical HN type news, but to me this feels like the true beginning of the end for physical media.
I have always loved having the physical movies in the best quality that I can receive, VHS, laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and these days 4K blue rays.
I still stand that watching a movie in 4K from the UHD disc appears better quality than what I see on streaming.
And at the end of the day, if the streaming service decides to pull the movie, I still own a physical copy of it. I have so many laserdiscs and DVDs that just aren't available anywhere.
Streaming services could have some kind of global agreement and offer physical media on demand printing discs or any format when sold. Quite simple to implement with the streaming source available and a respectable market at global scale
I never got into Blu-Ray because I can do math and they never settled on an HDR format which was universal. In fact I still prefer Laserdisc, the colors were better, no re-grading ruining my favorite flics.
For now this doesn't really matter much, right? I assume everyone in Australia has multi-region DVD players and Blu Ray, and you can just order them from somewhere else on Amazon, right?
I mean this is clearly a sign of things to come, with no physical releases anywhere. But for now it seems fairly easy to work around, unless I'm misinformed about how the DVD/BluRay market works down under.
I ‘m watching “A new hope” and “Waterworld” and it’s amazing how practical effects can hold up. I’m not against CGI, but they’re all over the place in Marvel’s movies. Even “The Ten Commandments” is more watchable than “Love and Thunder”
