Speaking of things staying the same, Blu-rays and DVDs also won’t have their content altered after purchase, as we’ve seen happen to digital versions of media.
While certainly in decline, the US Blu-ray and DVD disc market made $1.34 billion in the year ending in March 2023, according to market research group Circana. Data from the first half of 2024 from entertainment trade association The Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) found that while overall Blu-ray and DVD sales declined 22.2 percent during that time period, there were some areas of growth, too:
Consumers continue to show strong demand for collectible disc formats with SteelBooks, [or Blu-rays sold in collectible steel cases], up 44 percent and 4K UHD Blu-ray catalog sales growing by 16 percent.
A Dune: Part Two SteelBook. Credit: Steelbook
Furthermore, sales of newly released Blu-rays decreased more slowly, at 14 percent, according to DEG. A look at the top-selling Blu-rays for the week ending on November 30 based on data from Circana shows recent films, like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Deadpool & Wolverine, topping the list.
And it was only about a year ago that 4K Blu-rays of the megahit Oppenheimer actuallysold out.
There are still options
For those interested in a new Blu-ray player, though, the options are more limited with LG exiting the market, but that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. Even though brands like Panasonic and Sony haven’t made new Blu-ray players in years, they continue to sell them. And the market still sees the occasional new release, such as the Magnetar UPD900 that came out last year.
With the benefits of physical media still present, the demise of LG Blu-ray players is notable, but not defining, for physical media aficionados.
For those who don’t want to use their Blu-ray player anymore, there’s always the option to turn it into a laser-scanning microscope.
It’s worth noting that the amount of data expected to be stored on Redboxes is small compared to Redbox’s overall business. Since Redbox once rented out millions of DVDs weekly, the data retrieved only represents a small portion of Redbox’s overall business and, likely, of business conducted on that specific kiosk. That might not be much comfort to those whose data is left vulnerable, though.
The problem is more alarming when considering how many Redboxes are still out in the wild with uncertain futures. High demand for Redbox removals has resulted in all sorts of people, like Turing, gaining access to kiosk hardware and/or data. For example, The Wall Street Journal reported last week about a “former Redbox employee who convinced a 7-Eleven franchisee” to give him a Redbox, a 19-year-old who persuaded a contractor hauling a kiosk away from a drugstore to give it to him instead, as well as a Redbox landing in an Illinois dumpster.
Consumer privacy concerns
Chicken Soup’s actions may violate consumer privacy regulations, including the Video Privacy Protection Act outlawing “wrongful disclosure of video tape rental or sale records.” However, Chicken Soup’s bankruptcy (most of its assets are in a holding pattern, Lowpass reported) makes customer remediation more complicated and less likely.
Mario Trujillo, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that this incident “highlights the importance of security research in uncovering flaws that can leave customers unprotected.”
“While it may be hard to hold a bankrupt company accountable, uncovering the flaw is the first step,” he added.
Turing, which reverses engineers a lot of tech, said that the privacy problems she encountered with Redbox storage “isn’t terribly uncommon.”
Overall, the situation underscores the need for stricter controls around consumer data, whether it comes internally from companies or, as some would argue, through government regulation.
“This security flaw is a reminder that all companies should be obligated to minimize the amount of data they collect and retain in the first place,” Trujillo said. “We need strong data privacy laws to do that.”
We noted earlier this week that time seems to have run out for Apple’s venerable SuperDrive, which was the last (OEM) option available for folks who still needed to read or create optical media on modern Macs. Andrew’s write-up got me thinking: When was the last time any Ars staffers actually burned an optical disc?
Lee Hutchinson, Senior Technology Editor
It used to be one of the most common tasks I’d do with a computer. As a child of the ’90s, my college years were spent filling and then lugging around giant binders stuffed with home-burned CDs in my car to make sure I had exactly the right music on hand for any possible eventuality. The discs in these binders were all labeled with names like “METAL MIX XVIII” and “ULTRA MIX IV” and “MY MIX XIX,” and part of the fun was trying to remember which songs I’d put on which disc. (There was always a bit of danger that I’d put on “CAR RIDE JAMS XV” to set the mood for a Friday night trip to the movies with all the boys, but I should have popped on “CAR RIDE JAMS XIV” because “CAR RIDE JAMS XV” opens with Britney Spears’ “Lucky”—look, it’s a good song, and she cries in her lonely heart, OK?!—thus setting the stage for an evening of ridicule. Those were just the kinds of risks we took back in those ancient days.)
It took a while to try to figure out what the very last time I burned a disc was, but I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities. The first (and less likely) option is that the last disc I burned was a Windows 7 install disc because I’ve had a Windows 7 install disc sitting in a paper envelope on my shelf for so long that I can’t remember how it got there. The label is in my handwriting, and it has a CD key written on it. Some quick searching shows I have the same CD key stored in 1Password with an “MSDN/Technet” label on it, which means I probably downloaded the image from good ol’ TechNet, to which I maintained an active subscription for years until MS finally killed the affordable version.
But I think the actual last disc I burned is still sitting in my car’s CD changer. It’s been in there so long that I’d completely forgotten about it, and it startled the crap out of me a few weeks back when I hopped in the car and accidentally pressed the “CD” button instead of the “USB” button. It’s an MP3 CD instead of an audio CD, with about 120 songs on it, mostly picked from my iTunes “’80s/’90s” playlist. It’s pretty eclectic, bouncing through a bunch of songs that were the backdrop of my teenage years—there’s some Nena, some Stone Temple Pilots, some Michael Jackson, some Tool, some Stabbing Westward, some Natalie Merchant, and then the entire back half of the CD is just a giant block of like 40 Cure songs, probably because I got lazy and just started lasso-selecting.
It turns out I left CDs the same way I came to them—with a giant mess of a mixtape.
Connor McInerney, Social Media Manager
Like many people, physical media for me is deeply embedded with sentimentality; half the records in my vinyl collection are hand-me-downs from my parents, and every time I put one on, their aged hiss reminds me that my folks were once my age experiencing this music in the same way. This goes doubly so for CDs as someone whose teen years ended with the advent of streaming, and the last CD I burned is perhaps the most syrupy, saccharine example of this media you can imagine—it was a mixtape for the girl I was dating during the summer of 2013, right before we both went to college.
In hindsight this mix feels particularly of its time. I burned it using my MacBook Pro (the mid-2012 model was the last to feature a CD/DVD drive) and made the artwork by physically cutting and pasting a collage together (which I made the mix’s digital artwork by scanning and adding in iTunes). I still make mixes for people I care about using Spotify—and I often make custom artwork for said playlists with the help of Photoshop—but considering the effort that used to be required, the process feels unsurprisingly unsatisfying in comparison.
As for the musical contents of the mix, imagine what an 18-year-old Pitchfork reader was listening to in 2013 (Vampire Weekend, Postal Service, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and anything else you might hear playing while shopping at an Urban Outfitters) and you’ve got a pretty close approximation.
Enlarge/ A Redbox movie rental kiosk stands outside a CVS store.
Since 2004, red DVD rental kiosks posted near entrances of grocery stores and the like tempted shoppers with movie (and until 2019, video game) disc rentals. But the last 24,000 of Redbox’s kiosks are going away, as Redbox’s parent company moved to chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy this week. The end of Redbox marks another death knell for the DVD industry at a time when volatile streaming services are making physical media appealing again.
Redbox shutting down
Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, which owns Redbox, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 29. But on Wednesday, Judge Thomas M. Horan of the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware approved a conversion to chapter 7, signaling the liquidation of business, per Deadline. Redbox’s remaining 24,000 kiosks will close, and 1,000 workers will be laid off (severance and back pay eligibility are under review, and a bankruptcy trustee will investigate if trust funds intended for employees were misappropriated).
Chicken Soup bought Redbox for $375 million in 2022 and is $970 million in debt. It will also be shuttering its Redbox, Crackle, and Popcornflix streaming services.
DVDs in decline
As a DVD-centric business, Redbox was living on borrowed time. The convenience of on-demand streaming made it hard to compete, and bankruptcy proceedings revealed that Redbox was paying employees more than it was earning.
Overall, the past year hasn’t been a good one for DVD or Blu-ray devotees, as many businesses announced that they’re exiting the industry. In August, Netflix quit its original business of mailing out rental DVDs. Now the king of streaming, the remaining DVD business was so menial that Netflix gave away DVDs as it shut down operations.
Once industry disruptors, DVDs and Blu-rays have been further ushered out the door in 2024. In April, Target confirmed that it will only sell DVDs in stores during “key times,” like the winter holiday season or the release of a newer movie to DVD. The news hit especially hard considering Best Buy ended DVD and Blu-ray sales in-store and online this year. Disney is outsourcing its DVD and Blu-ray business to Sony, and Sony this month revealed plans to stop selling recordable Blu-rays to consumers (it hasn’t decided when yet).
Bad timing
It’s sensible for businesses to shift from physical media sales. Per CNBC’s calculations, DVD sales fell over 86 percent between 2008 and 2019. Research from the Motion Picture Association in 2021 found that physical media represented 8 percent of the home/mobile entertainment market in the US, falling behind digital (80 percent) and theatrical (12 percent).
But as physical media gets less lucrative and the shuttering of businesses makes optical discs harder to find, the streaming services that largely replaced them are getting aggravating and unreliable. And with the streaming industry becoming more competitive and profit-hungry than ever, you never know if the movie/show that most attracted you to a streaming service will still be available when you finally get a chance to sit down and watch. Even paid-for online libraries that were marketed as available “forever” have been ripped away from customers.
When someone buys or rents a DVD, they know exactly what content they’re paying for and for how long they’ll have it (assuming they take care of the physical media). They can also watch the content if the Internet goes out and be certain that they’re getting uncompressed 4K resolution. DVD viewers are also less likely to be bombarded with ads whenever they pause and can get around an ad-riddled smart TV home screen (nothing’s perfect; some DVDs have unskippable commercials).
Streaming isn’t likely to stabilize any time soon, either. Team-ups between streaming providers and merger/acquisition activity make the future of streaming and the quality of available services uncertain. For example, what’s ahead for Paramount+ and Pluto now that Paramount is planning a Skydance merger?
There’s also something to be said about how limiting reliance on streaming can be for movie buffs and people with unique tastes. Treasured content, like older movies or canceled TV shows, isn’t always put on streaming services. And what is put on streaming is sometimes altered, including with new music and controversial scenes/episodes or embarrassing moments at live events removed.
A DVD company like Redbox closing was years in the making. There are people who believe it’s prudent to maintain a physical media library, but renting one is even more niche. Still, places that offer DVDs have gotten significantly rarer recently, and relying solely on an increasingly cable-like streaming industry for home entertainment is a scary proposition. Seeing an alternative option in the form of a red, slender box outside my grocery store actually sounds nice right now.
Sometimes, it’s worth taking a moment to note the end of an era, even when that ending might have happened a long time ago. Today, Apple announced that it considers the mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro obsolete. It was the last MacBook Pro to include an optical drive for playing CDs or DVDs.
This means that any MacBook Pro with an optical drive is no longer supported.
Regarding products deemed obsolete, Apple’s support page on the topic says:
Products are considered obsolete when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 7 years ago… Apple discontinues all hardware service for obsolete products, and service providers cannot order parts for obsolete products. Mac laptops may be eligible for an extended battery-only repair period for up to 10 years from when the product was last distributed for sale, subject to parts availability.
Apple stopped selling the mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro in October 2016 (it was available for a while as the company’s budget option in the Pro lineup), so anyone doing the math saw this coming. Further, it’s been years since this particular Mac was supported by the latest Apple OS releases. Released in 2020, macOS Big Sur ended support for the device, though older versions of macOS continued to get security updates.
The exclusion of an optical drive in subsequent MacBook Pro models was controversial, but it’s now clear that whether Apple was jumping the gun at that point or not, optical drives have fallen away for most users, and many Windows laptops no longer include them.
Apple still sells an external optical drive it calls SuperDrive that can read and burn CDs and DVDs. However, it hasn’t been updated in ages; it still uses USB-A, which most Mac hardware no longer includes. So, even if you have Apple’s external CD/DVD drive, you probably need an adapter to use it with your modern Mac.
That’s a sign of just how relevant optical drives are for today’s users, but this seems like a good time to remember a bygone era of physical media that wasn’t so long ago. So farewell, mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro—honestly, most of us didn’t miss you by this point.
