As Online Streaming Booms, DVDs Hear a Death Knell

The DVD isn’t dead yet, but it’s definitely looking a little peaked, at 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 21st-century audiences.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

via nytimes.com