That optical discs and drives are in a decline is not news, they are long gone from laptops and PC case designs have squeezed them out from desktop PCs too. Hand in hand with this is the decline of optical discs as a way to distribute music and video. That’s where shiny discs have taken another blow, or nail in the coffin – one of the (remaining) major Blu-ray player manufacturers has definitively thrown in the towel.
LG has announced that it is officially ending its activities in the area of Blu-ray players, the relatively widespread video discs technology that revolutionized video quality nearly 20 years ago – along with the competing HD-DVD format (which failed), they made it possible for the average person to watch high-quality 1920×1080 pixel video at home for the first time.
Today we are spoiled and probably don’t always realise it, but this was truly a revolution. The difference to what you could suddenly see from movies versus the blurry images on standard definition DVDs (720×480 or 720×576 pixels) was huge. Blu-ray disc technology also encouraged remasters of many films, which finally made it possible to see many of the previously obscured visual wonders.
But the end of the line that LG has now confirmed is not only for Blu-ray players, but also for their 4K successors, i.e. Ultra HD (UHD) Blu-ray players. Unfortunately, this format have never achieved proper success and widespread adoption. LG will also cease production and sales of its UBK80 and UBK90 UHD BD players, so this is a total resignation in this market, as there is no work on any successor 8K video disc format going on anywhere as far as we know (and there probably never will be).
The aforementioned players have been on the market since 2018 without getting another successor, so the cut off here is probably not surprising. According to information from FlatpanelsHD website from several sources within the company and directly visible on the company’s website, production of these players has been discontinued and it’s just the remaining stock that will be available temporarily until inventory sells out. The company’s official communications wasn’t apparently willing to fully confirm this being a total exit, but that’s probably just for the sake of appearances. LG players have been disappearing from the market throughout this year, so although it’s being reported now, the company appears to have made this decision many months ago.
LG is not alone in this. Samsung and the Oppo brand have also abandoned Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray players. However, Panasonic should still be making them, and Sony is also advertising some on its website. Of course, LG’s departure means that there’s not a huge amount of sales, and that could quite possibly lead to those companies ceasing production as well. So we may really be looking at the start of the end of video discs, although this last act of the play may still take years.
The same FlatpanelsHD website published interesting sales statistics this spring. According to these, UHD Blu-ray is growing its share of movie disc sales (16.2% in volume and 27% in share of sales in 2023, while regular Blu-ray had 31.7% and 38% respectively), but video disc sales per se have been steadily falling – while 625 million USD worth of UHD Blu-rays were sold in the US in 2018 (and 4 billion USD worth of video discs overall, including BDs and DVDs), by 2023 the total was just a 1.25 billion, and UHD Blu-rays made 341 million of that. So overall, it’s a severely shrinking market.
Why want a movie on a disc?
Now you may be asking why we’re describing this as a sad thing and not instead rejoicing over the fact that Netflix/Disney streaming has once again triumphed over relicts of the past and that that’s the way it should be. Streaming has clearly won in the market because of how easy it is for users. But it can’t be said to be an entirely ideal distribution method. For one thing, the various streaming services will happily rent the right to watch the video, but you can’t usually buy it – the goal is to make you pay a constant subscription (and sooner or later you’ll find that you need more than one of those subscriptions, because some movies or shows aren’t covered by the first one). Or movies can disappear from the streaming catalogs… True, some of this is ultimately just a matter of price, which can also be quite high for retail movies on disc buys.
The other thing that is not ideal in Internet distribution is compression. Although internet connections are getting faster, the bitrates available to streaming video are always lower than what they could be with video discs. This is a deficit that will probably never be completely solved. Therefore, from the perspective of a lover of visual art in films, whether live-action or various animation techniques, the departure of video discs is a sad loss. It means that what you’ll see out of a piece of work on your home cinema setup will be more compromised, and the loss or damage to detail from compression will in turn eat up a slightly bigger chunk of what the film could potentially show you if it was not for lossy compression effects.
Perhaps the only hope is that video discs will hold on long enough to survive as a format for the discerning video enthusiasts. Something similar may have happened for gramophone (“vinyl”) records, although for those it’s questionable if there are actual technical merits in terms of sound quality. Ultra HD Blu-rays do have undeniable advantages in terms of video quality, which kind of makes us afraid that given Murphy’s Law, they probably won’t see the same resurrection as records for this very reason…
Sources: FlatpanelsHD (1, 2) Tom’s Hardware
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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