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Best Buy is exiting the physical media business for good in 2024
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Rip, my favorite thing as a kid used to be going to Best Buy and just going up and down all the aisles of movies trying to figure out which one to spend my allowance on.
Now younger people will understand how us old people felt when Blockbuster closed
You mean when Blockbuster killed the Mom and Pop video stores.
And that time when video killed the radio store.
Shack
It was a radio shack
Or when Walmart killed regional department stores. Or when malls killed main street, or when CD's killed cassettes, or that time that cassettes killed 8 track. Or... I'll just stop now. Some of us are old. Most of the rest will be eventually.
Edit: mainstream to main street
I worked at blockbuster. It was a great job.
I used to love going to visit my friends who worked at Blockbuster and loiter around the store for hours
i'm younger people and going to best buy to go up/down the aisles was not even close to being a thing for us lol
They wouldn't be killing it off if it was a favorite pastime. Strolling up and down the aisles or buying physical media at all is what the people that were sad Blockbuster closed would do. The same people.
Exactly
Back in the day, probably 2000 or so my buddy had a 100 disk cd changer that malfunctioned under warranty so he brought it in so they could fix it. Well, they fucked it up and got him and new one. His old CD’s were trashed in there so they gave him credit for 100+ CD’s. He called me and a few other aficionados and we proceeded to get super baked and went in to get 100 cd’s. We were there the entire day and took many safety breaks. One of the best times I ever had
Were the cds in those long plastic things that would clack as you pulled it forward to see the next one? God I loved that sound.
Oh ya. Back then the store was basically 80% music stuff. The tvs and other appliances were way out toward the edges and the middle was just rows and rows of music and some listening stations.
Another 15% was video games. In 2000 there would have whole aisles of PS1, PS2 Dreamcast, N64 and Xbox games.
What’s a safety break?
a break in which you get high again so you’re safely able to choose the best music possible.
For this occasion, we met in my other friends 1985 Chevy citation II and smoked weed and listened to wutang and Pink Floyd and discussed findings and direction
That would be the best day of my life if I was there.
Too high to continue
Ha no. It's a break to go smoke more.
No, "safety break" is the break you take to go smoke weed.
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Best Buy’s cost wasn’t $18.52 per CD. It was cheaper to retain goodwill with customers I’m sure.
I remember doing Black Friday at Best Buy one year because they had cheap DVDs. Got to the checkout line and the guy was like "You got here at one in the morning to save $6 on a Munich DVD?"
But I was in my early 20s, so it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Munich kicked ass though!
It's true! Although truth be told I never watched the DVD. Great movie but not one it's easy to be in the mood for, y'know?
Very timely today, strangely enough.
Worked black Friday at a circuit city once. My fucking scanner broke and people just kept plopping stacks of dvds at my register. No choice but to keep ringing the upc manually with the num pad.
Thanks for the flashback to hell.
Did this in the pc gaming aisle. Could only afford on sale stuff.
Got huge sales on command and conquer, mass effect, fifa, and several other games that i ended up playing for like a decade.
It was like hunting for the steam sale before steam
I’d save and save until I got $100, and then I’d go buy all the CDs I had been waiting to get. This was 2000/1 or so.
Did you ever do the BMG CD club thing? I would repeat the introductory offer all the time
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This how they are going to get you: "Behind the Scenes Plan for an additional $5.99/mo"
Get the bloopers and behind the scenes from all of Universal Studios’ amazing films for only $5.99 a month!!! (For the first 12 months, regular price $7.99 a month). Taxes extra.
Which will be $12.99 when the next crisis happens in the world and they need to "adjust for inflation".
Most of that exist when you buy a digital copy. All the extras are included there. Streaming sites are just going to have the film, but a purchased digital copy comes with the extras.
Even if some digital copies (or streaming services) add the extras, there are far fewer extras being produced today than their were at the height of the DVD, when pretty much every movie was stuffed to the gills with added features.
It's wild to think that I have more special features for The Animal staring Rob Schneider than I do for Spielberg's Oscar nominated The Fabelmans, just because they were released in different eras.
DVDs used to have games. Some of the worst "gaming" experiences of my life. But they had spirit.
I got a lot of "playtime" out of those "games" for the first two Harry Potter movie. As a kid they were decent fun. I thought the Chamber of Secrets one was better done than Sorcerer's Stone tho.
They really used that format to its potential. I remember the Star Wars DVDs even had a demo for Battlefront on them.
Try playing a 4K LOTR vs steaming. Sorry but the quality is night and day difference, including the sound.
I think Best Buy should be a little more patient, especially as the cost of streaming keeps going up.
4k streaming is almost as good visual quality as a 1080p Blu-ray
"Digital Copy"
yea i have a bunch of those discs. almost all of them are useless, half of the services they were redeemed on are not gone, or consolidated.
I think you mean "temporarily leased" digital copy. It can stop working at any time with no recourse.
Thankfully Disney+ does this for a decent amount of their movies, but it should be more widespread
ugh its so sanitized tho. as if the behind-the-scenes were written and planned out. it just feels so fake like you're seeing exactly what they want you to see and nothing more
I'm a manager of a Tower Records (yup, still exists in Ireland and Japan) and I'm happy to report that we're doing just fine, but there's a very particular reason for this: variety.
Tower here was always an alternative to bigger brands like HMV or Virgin. While they would focus on bulk buying, Tower didn't and doesn't. The store's philosophy has always been that it's better to have 1 or 2 copies of 30 things than 60 copies of 1 thing. It's served us well for 30 years now, 21 of them independently (the rights to the branding were offered for sale in 2002 to all international corporate or franchise Tower outlets, a lot of these did buy out the branding but only two companies survive who still use it).
If you discount two Irish TV shows and the complete box set of Breaking Bad, in the last 30 years the two biggest sellers on DVD for Tower have been Spirited Away and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, titles that you just wouldn't really see in a bulk scenario that often (or not at all in the case of Darkplace). We're a cult shop for collectors, and the model still works (for us at least).
What this does mean is that prices are higher but the variety is better, and as physical media shrinks overall, the demand for particular offbeat or mostly forgotten titles has remained about the same. We have a very specific audience and that's who we cater to. You could sell Season 4 of Succession one moment, and an obscure Italian horror film the next. Sometimes there are total anomalies, like Dungeons and Dragons comprehensively outselling Super Mario Bros.
Streaming services absolutely can be great, and for the vast majority it's everything they would ever want, but not for everyone. Those who still like physical media and will seek it out are more likely to like and seek out variety, so places that are still trying to use bulk buying and popularity or buzz of a title as a business practice and getting in as much of it as possible just doesn't work anymore. Those who would have bought the DVD historically just won't now, they'll stream it instead.
For comparison, I worked for HMV back from 2009 to 2013 when it first closed in Ireland (the brand has now reappeared for a fourth run in the market). At one point, Twilight: New Moon came out. My store got 7 different variants of it, totalling 2500 copies (including one which was just a big cardboard box with a mirror and a 2 Disc DVD in it that cost 4 times as much). All eventually sold within about two months. If a store bought 10% of that for something like, say, Barbie, yes it would sell, but it would take significantly longer to do so as most would naturally wait for it to show up on a streaming service rather than hang on to the physical copy.
The demand just isn't there. Bulk ordering means more profit (in theory), but that focus just doesn't work in execution anymore, and places like Best Buy won't take the risk on a bigger catalogue of stuff that runs the risk of sitting on shelves not selling for years in some cases. But those things always will sell eventually, if you are willing to wait.
There is room for physical media. Even CDs are resurging a bit for us, and vinyl is by far our biggest market as well. Special editions / Remasters etc. do far more for us than most new releases do, but for places like Best Buy, you may get some, but not too many. This is part of the problem with trying to cater to too big and generic an audience; you just can't take a risk on something that won't fly straight out the door.
For physical media at this point you have to have a business model actually aligned to the demands of those who still want to buy it, and that isn't one that's driven solely by maximising margins and clearing shelves out as quickly as possible to get the next lot in, but rather trying to ensure that you have that obscure 1970s TV show or that repress of a jazz album or that copy of a film with a particular documentary in the extras, and you only get that with cult offering stores. It would be really nice to see more of them.
I remember when Best Buy was THE place to go to pick up movies.
Back in the day when they had three to four full aisles of dvds. New releases were always on sale at least 20% cheaper than anywhere else. Bought so many great films and series there.
Sad to see the state of things as a physical media lover.
Do you remember the Virgin Megastores? Good times. Listening booths. Vinyl players. 3 levels of music and movies.
Games are physical media too.
The article is vague on this, are they still selling physical video games?
Yes still selling them, but even this may not be much longer, my store is about to cut our gaming software section in half next week.
My store became a Best Buy "Outlet" which means you walk in and find lines of washers, dryers, and other large appliances, with a few mostly empty shelves off to the side with whatever small electronic stuff isn't selling in their other stores.
Talk about depressing.
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I’ve been collecting my favorites on blu ray/dvd. I wouldn’t be surprised if companies stop releasing physical media altogether, in hopes that we subscribe to their streaming service
It'll be a bad day when places like Shout Factory close and we lose out on the lesser known film physical releases.
It's going to go the way of Criterion and the like. Small, boutique labels that target an enthusiast market. Criterion often put out releases of titles that also had a mainstream, mass-market version as well. So companies like Criterion, Shout Factory, Arrow, 88 Films, Vinegar Syndrome, etc. are going to take over much of the market. Producing releases of classics and cult films.
What's going to decline are physical releases of generic, mid-list, mainstream films. The audience for those is the one who isn't buying physical media.
I agree with this analysis, if anything things like what's happening with Best Buy will probably bolster these more niche pre-existing companies.
Don’t put those evil words on the universe
And even they do bare-bones releases with no extra features, right? Nothing like what we used to get from the studios themselves. It's like how we have to praise Barnes and Noble, the big-box bookstore, for still existing.
Very recently it was announced some stream only movie was getting a physical release. I can't remember which one, but physical media isn't dead, it just isn't going to be as mainstream as it was pre-streaming days when it seemed people were buying 2 or 3 movies and TV shows on DVD/Blu ray a week.
Loki and Wandavision got physical releases after being streaming only for a while.
Along with the first 2 seasons of The Mandalorian.
Prey (2022) as well
And since you bring up Loki I haven’t even been able to watch the first episode of the new season because every time I try it ends up pixelating on me. That’s not an issue with physical media.
Prey?
Prey and Weird were the two big releases I can think of. Weird was even on Roku so is double obscure.
My hope is that, even if this happens, physical media will see a renaissance in the near future similar to what's happened with vinyl.
Quite a few of my friends (me included) have started collecting more physical media recently. I don't know if its just wanting your favorite things in your house, or streaming service bullshit or what that is driving people to collect vinyl's, blu rays and physical books but it feels like its on the upswing for specific demographics.
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Especially with the recent trend of removing shows from streaming to avoid paying royalties.
My GF likes to go to second hand stores because she’s one of those. And I have to go along because I’m a good BF. So I started trying to find my favorite movies and shows on DVD/blu ray at the stores for something entertaining to do because I hate shopping. And I’ve been building up quite a collection for like 2 or 3 bucks a pop.
Then they remove shows and movies with no warning, never to be seen again.
The day that happens I cancel every streaming service I have. I STILL want to get a hard copy of Project Adam. Wake up, Netflix!
Think vinyl. There are cinephiles that will keep physical media thriving.
I've been doing the same, and I hope that's not the case because as films cycle in and out of streaming I like the convenience of having it on disk for whenever I want - or supporting media that I really really enjoy.
Others in this thread have likened it to how audio enthusiasts still collect physical CDs or vinyl for their music, while most people use Spotify or whatever. But I disagree, as my issue isn't the quality difference per se but rather selection. The streaming market for music is way more consumer-friendly than for movies and TV. Until the day that one streaming services offers everything (and I mean everything) I think there will be a market for people who want to opt out of having every service and just pay for the films they really want
I hate subscription services. You pay a lot for little, and then lose everything when you cancel.
It's already happening. Try getting the Best Picture winner CODA or Tragedy of MacBeth. They're only available streaming from Apple.
The saddest thing is when you have a new favourite and it's not released at all. The only way to see it is whatever streaming platform it was released on or sold to after the cinema run.
Yep, me too. I've noticed that streaming services have gotten ridiculously overpriced, and often charge on TOP of the service fees (looking at you, Amazon.com, $14.99 to stream an old Steve McQueen movie on TOP of prime charges, wtf??). Not just that, but they've taken hundreds of movies OFF their streaming services (looking at you, Netflix), again--wtf?
So, like you, I've been buying up my fave dvd's from ebay, and bought a portable dvd player as well (bc new laptops don't have a dvd player). Had given a lot of them away because it used to be easy to find them on streaming sites. But now streaming sites are being greedy and ridiculous and it will end up backfiring on them.
Yeah man. When I graduated HS in 08 and the years around then I loved jsut going to Best Buy and scooping up a bunch of cheap dvd/blu rays and stocking up.
Looks like now is the time
It was a big deal when Best Buy first came to town because they were one of the only places you could find a big collection of $10 CDs.
For my generation, this was us with Tower Records.
I bought so many used but basically mint CDs from Tower in the mid-90s to early 00s. I still buy stuff today that I’m really into, but lack of disposable income makes that hard to justify when I have Spotify.
Even better were the good ol days of true Black Friday sales and all the Blu-ray’s for a few bucks.
The biggest thing about digital is that someday or any day they can remove that content forever. And you paid for something you think you owned but you were actually leasing it.
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Absolutely theres no stopping progression for sure. Physical can be expensive and it takes up a lot of space.
It's not at all the same. A blu ray disc looks 100x better than any streaming service, even those touting 4k/HDR.
Don’t worry, it didn’t say anything about stopping carrying physical media for bad, just for good.
Time to bite the bullet and get me a 4K blu player. For whatever reason they are still expensive, but I am tired of film and tv going missing from streaming services on a whim. The nice this is I can find a lot of cheap movies at used stores for next to nothing.
Panasonic ub820 is a godsend. However a PS5 or series x does get the job done as well. 4k Blu rays rock.
I got my PS5 in the middle of the pandemic when they were flying off the shelves. I got a digital because it was all I could find. But I don't play it on my main, big tv so I still have a spot for a 4K player.
That’s like the main reason I go to Bestbuy.
I have no reason to go to best buy ever again.
I imagine this will become the fate of Best Buy. If you thought old Circuit City stores were awkward to reconfigure, holy hell…some of these Best Buy’s look like a giant blue flying wedge.
a best buy near me shut down and reopened in a smaller space in the same strip mall, I read somewhere that they are focusing on having only the "essential" merchandise in-store with geek squad and their other services offered but mainly will act as an online pickup location for their site
My Best Buy hasn’t had movies in years. They seriously have one little cube thing with the newest movies and that’s it. There’s a used disc store next door though that has tons of blurays and 4k movies
Save Physical Media
If vinyl is being made, physical movies won’t stop either. It’s just that there won’t be the fun of looking at them in very many stores, and less competition will likely mean higher prices. Continued disappointments for the next few years are to be expected but there is a market there still. Plus people would pirate and sell on discs if they stopped entirely
Toy stores closed and now physical media will be gone. What a boring world for a kid. Order toys on Amazon and download a game on your console. No reason to leave the house and socialize
Honestly this is so depressing for kids. I got exposed to so many things by going to stores with my friends, and even if we didn't buy anything we'd still go hang out in a safe public space and get to be part of the community and get to see other kids from school, get to meet people from nearby schools, etc.
Now it feels like increasingly in modern society we've decided kids can only go school or home. Then we wonder why they have no attachment to their local community...
You just made me realize how much I miss neighborhood communities. I still don't know my neighbors' names, but back in the day you ran into them all around your local part of town.
Right?! Imagine all the missed experiences from going to a mall to pick up some movies. There's a whole adventure of things to do along the way and back. Now, nada.
This has been coming for awhile now, it's been crazy watching the shelving just shrink, and shrink, until the whole of the blu-ray section at any brick & mortar was just a couple modular shelves and a couple buckets full of loose dvds or whatever next to them. But finding out they're not even going to sell them online is pretty crazy to me. Best Buy still at least sells vinyl online, even if their stores don't have shelves for it! It's weird to think that going forward Best Buy is going to have more in common with a record store than a video store.
It's wild how severely undervalued that - essentially - screening ready film-prints for your home, are now. For decades the film industry was absolutely scared to death of the idea, and basically fought against every advance in home theater that they could to keep staving off the parity that was inevitably coming, either through legislation, pricing, technological restraints, or all three.
And now you can, for cheap as hell, basically get a 55" 4K display that is better at contrast and color depth than many theatrical presentations, and you can buy a straight-from-the-negative digital copy of a film for less than 20 bucks (often less than 10 if you're good at a sale or shopping used) and put it in a less than 80 dollar blu-ray player (or the video game console you've got already under your TV anyway)...
...and people don't fucking want it. They don't care. The film industry nightmare of a home theater experience that is virtually indiscernable from a theatrical one is here, and it turns out: Nobody cares! A lot of folks don't even know that there has never been a time since blu-ray and 4K UHD have existed that they've ever even gotten CLOSE to selling as much as DVD did in that same year. And DVD dropped off a fucking cliff, too.
The sheer convenience of "good enough" streaming providing "good enough" choice that you can access without having to get up from the couch has permanently ensured physical media for film and tv is a niche audience at best going forward. People will still make them, people will still sell them, but you'd better be ready to pay a decent premium to a boutique label, and you'd better hope those labels are good at striking licensing deals.
The same thing already happened with CDs so it wasn’t too surprising. I remember people kept complaining about the drop in audio quality on MP3s. Meanwhile back in the day I was re-encoding my MP3s at lower bitrates just to save space. Even with FLAC now, people are just streaming music from Spotify or whatever.
People who really care, and I mean really care, about audio and video quality will always be the minority. Fortunately for companies that cater to them, those people will still spend a lot of money on it.
But the difference between 192 or 128 mp3 and uncompressed is much smaller than the difference between streamed video on some of these services and uhd disks. Some of them look like absolute crap. Iirc Disney is particularly bad
I hope that will keep disks alive.
I was re-encoding to 96kbps back in the day lol. A reason I didn’t notice though was because I had junk equipment back then. Now that I’m older and have money to spend on nicer speakers and such, I definitely can tell a difference between 96kbps and 128kbps.
For video, I can tell a slight difference for streaming but it usually doesn’t bother me. The video has to be like 720p or lower blurry for me to notice. Also, you gotta keep in mind a lot of people had that “motion smoothing” feature on their tv and couldn’t notice how bad it was. The average person doesn’t really care about quality. They just want to hear their tv can do 4k or whatever even though they have no idea what that means.
I have a 4k bluray player and have been trying to keep adding to my collection. Hopefully this means I can at least pick up a bunch of cheap copies of classics.
You should be able to, yeah. Honestly, if you're cool with blu-ray (and there are a LOT of really good standard blu-rays, the diff between 2k and 4k isn't anywhere near as big as the jump from 480p to 1080p) you should be able to grab up any holes in your collection really cheaply, especially on the secondhand market.
I picked up several during Prime Days. Highly recommending keeping tabs on the movies you love for the holiday shopping season cause it feels like we're nearing the end of getting these for a good deal as they become more for niche audiences like us.
Right? I went into my local BBY for the first time in years to pick up the Picard Season 3 Steelbook, and was shocked at how shrunk the media section had become. Like you said it was three rows of portable racks tucked in the back corner between small appliances and car audio. Compared it to a photo I took from Black Friday 2016 and it’s not even a tenth the size. I get most of my physical media off Amazon these days and didn’t know how bad things are now.
Part of it is probably related to people in cities not being able to stay in permanent housing solutions. I’ve lived in five apartments in six years due to work needs and price changes.
Not going to invest in a better home theater solution until I have stable housing (ie buying a house or condo) because moving lots of shit sucks. I would love to have a sweet home screening setup but it’s just not practical for me right now. I would imagine many are in the same boat.
Eh, I've moved a decent home theater between rentals. If you're moving furniture anyway, it doesn't significantly add to it.
When my dad was a young adult in the seventies, his hi-fi system was the only thing of value that he owned. It went through a few sublet bedrooms.
That said, I'm not wall mounting anything until I own the place.
To be fair buying a home theater set up, even on a budget, is a expensive.
it really is crazy to me the home theater set up you can get now and how cheap it is. same with home security and all tech i guess. it's all so good and affordable.
back in the day we'd be talking thousands of dollars at least.
The world is going to regret the day physical media stops.
For years I’ve always been skeptical of having access via streaming because no matter what, you don’t “own” the content, just the “access” to said content so long as it remains on said streaming platform. Correct me if I am totally wrong though.
Also, look at HBO and other platforms purging certain content from their platforms—such as Westworld last year. Nothing is safe just because it’s on a platform.
In addition, streaming services will retroactively edit certain episodes. If the music rights for a scene expire, they have to replace the music and it's not as good. It's why, if you want to watch Scrubs as it was intended, you need to get the full series on DVD.
Unfortunately having a series on physical media isn't enough to have all of the original music.
Older shows didn't have that negotiated in when they would eventually be sold for home use.
21 Jump Street comes to mind.
Biggest example is Daria. 99% of the original music is gone. The show is still great but not having the music takes away from the 90’s vibe.
same with "misfits" when I watched it on hulu for the first time in years. one of my favorite scenes of the show is in the last episode of season 1, when nathan puts earbuds in and the drums of "low rider" from war starts playing. iconic, to me. and hulu replaced it with a totally different song. ruined the vibe! retroactively changing scenes (disney did this with a scene in lilo and stitch apparently, on disney plus).
but music rights is a monster, whether digital or physical. I'm falling in love with that 90s show "northern exposure" and music is such a huge part of the show. even physical releases in the US requires changing the music (same issue with wkrp in cincinnati iirc). not all DVD releases are the same, unfortunately. only way I can watch shows like that as originally intended is via piracy.
Totally agree.
I love looking at my bookshelf, my cd collection, my Blu-ray collection, my family photo collection, my magazine collection. Even my videogame collection.
Imagine if one day you wanted to just quickly reference something but your internet connection was down, or your service provider was down, or went under, or increased your charge to access "your" stuff that you paid for...
Oh, is that a hypothetical scenario that would never happen!?! Pretty much every single XaaS has unexpectedly increased their prices on their customers at some point in time!
I'm not saying having these things digitally is a no-no. It's very convenient, can save you storage space, and be useful. But if the price goes up, I start questioning if I really want this thing online any more. Just one step closer to cancelling.
Next up, no such thing as digital sales, only rentals....
This has been planned for a looooong time.
Pretty soon we peasants will own nothing , everything will require constant payment.
Remember when they tried to sell us on limited number of views physical media?
Hell yeah! They never gave up on that.... its still the end goal.
Ah yes DIVX from Circuit City.
Ah yes, the days we were walking around with 20GB iPods. I remember thee.
Next up, companies learning again how easy it is to keep content you have possession of just once.
I will gladly pay a fair price for a convenient product delivery, but Im also ready to raise my flag again when they think they can make me pay cable tv prices to "rent" 5 movies a week or some shit.
Its all coming....
Tiered services, want to watch Nightmare before Christmas every year? You have to pay to rent it every year.
yarrr I hear the high seas calling my name!
It may be what companies want, and not in the interests of consumers. But there is no denying that consumer preferences are what is killing off physical media.
People are just not buying Blu-Rays like they once did. It is just so easy to stream it or rent it.
I guess you could argue that making streaming cheap and easy, at a good enough quality for most to not notice the difference was part of their insidious plan. That's kind of the best way for a company to do something greedy though. Make a quality service. That's what everyone 20 years ago was saying needed to happen to stop media piracy.
“You will own nothing and like it”. Iv been calling streaming “The conditioning of giving in to less owner ship”. You don’t own the house you live in or the car you drive. The mother fuckers don’t even want you to own entertainment.
And piracy will be even more rampant
Do you guys think this is all a sinister plot to prevent consumers from owning things? I get the concerns over phasing out physical media, but I feel like they’re an unfortunate side effect of technological progress and the evolving landscape of media consumption rather than part of an evil plot.
To prevent people from owning? No. To pump continuous money from consumers, yes.
Precisely why I don't do subscriptions and I own all my music, it's mine and always will be. I keep hundreds of gigs of music on several drives :) and I use my iPod. I'm a 27 year old boomer
After waiting a few minutes for the site to actually load
The article contained ZERO information confirming this
If physical media goes away I'm just gonna go full pirate, fuck the not actually owning my shit direction this is going in.
BIG MISTAKE PHYSICAL MEDIA IS ALL THAT MATTERS YOU DONT OWN SHIT WIITH DIGITAL
Shame. I prefer to buy physical. The leasing swap these streamers go through is stupid.
Physical media is all I buy now a days, as a disillusioned digital only user in the past. Now a days I either buy physical or pirate. There's no reason to buy digital if I don't own the rights to keep it in perpetuity.
Forever physical! We cut D+ and Netflix and for the same money buy 1-2 4K or Blu-rays every month, sometimes more if we look secondhand.
My philosophy shifted to quality over quantity. Sure I don’t have access to the 1000 titles on streaming but I’m also not wasting 20 mins browsing a bunch of garbage churn content to hopefully find something good. But I do have a small library of great film I’m likely to enjoy for years with my family and friends.
Best Buy is exiting the physical retail business for good in 2025.
I remember a few years back when my Internet connection suddenly died. I had been dragging my feet on updating my cable modem to DOCSIS 3.1 or or 4.0 or whichever and the cable company suddenly ended support without prior announcement. So I walked a few blocks to Best Buy to get a new one. Coincidentally enough, I ran into another guy in the aisle in the exact same situation.
When your Internet goes out, you can't just go buy it online. We're building increasingly fragile systems that don't handle disruption well. Having your power go out pretty much breaks your life. Just-in-time logistics are a great idea that saves a ton of money and makes more goods available to consumers worldwide at a lower price... until there's a disruption to the supply chain like we saw with COVID and everything breaks simultaneously.
Which is sad. Hate ordering expensive electronics online for the fear that they will be stolen when shipped.
I’d rather buy a $15 cord online than the same thing in Best Buy for $89
Nah, they sell TVs and appliances now.
I just bought a TV from Best Buy yesterday... on Amazon.
I was confused when it said I could ship via Prime or "pick up in store today". Then I saw it was Best Buy as the seller.
I've considered them the Amazon Showroom for like a decade. Looks like that is actually coming to fruition.
Black Friday sale is gonna be insane this year if they need to clear out their whole inventory.
Damn does this mean no more SteelBooks?
No more Best Buy steelbooks any way.
Damn that sucks. I just recently bought BestBuy's steelbook of No Time to Die simply because the cover design looks way more badass than the standard retail version.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/no-time-to-die-steelbook-includes-digital-copy-4k-ultra-hd-blu-ray-blu-ray-only--best-buy-2021/6483491.p?skuId=6483491
There are quite a few at my local Best Buy and probably still some at most stores
I'm wondering this as well.
Weren't most movie steelbooks exclusive to Best Buy? Wonder if someone else will pick up that torch.
Most of Disney's were, at the very least. I've been picking up the Marvel ones I want since the first GotG, and they've never been available anywhere else (in the US).
There must still be demand for them given the recent announcement of physical releases of Mandalorian, Loki, and WandaVision all included Steelbooks, so I would be surprised if another retailer doesn't step in to get those exclusives. Target and Walmart usually have their own exclusives anyways since that seems to be one of the few ways of generating interest in buying physical media nowadays, so I could easily see one or both of them trying to secure Steelbooks for their stores.
Amazon likely.
Barnes and Noble has them still I think! Good collection of Criterion releases too
And this will give them reason to price gouge even more than they already do.
I’m one of the idiots that paid $40 for the new B&N membership card and plenty of old movies are priced well under $10. But the new release DVDs cost $30, which is completely absurd. The selection is fire, though, between the Criterion Collection and anime titles alone. It just really sucks that B&N is slowly becoming the first choice for brick and mortar movie purchases instead of a niche fall-back.
Good memories hitting up Best Buy on Black Friday in the late morning and picking through the discounted DVDs and Blu Rays. That’s also where I got my Xbox 360 at launch. I knew a guy who worked there and he hooked us up and let us out the back door with it.
It really sucks seeing us moving to a digital only world. I don’t think people dislike physical media, we just live in a time now where people are struggling so much more financially and it makes more sense to save money by streaming.
This is some bullshit. Physical media is the only way to actually 100% own something so I’d rather not be unable to hold in my hand my favorite films, TV shows and games - especially when physical is the only way to access commentaries and special features for 99% of media (which is a HUGE reason to purchase for me). This is a really bad example of variety turning into replacement.
Fuck this shit.
This really is the end of an era. Their physical media section has been shrinking for years though.
Just in time for streaming services to become too expensive and too fragmented and for people to want to go back to cheap physical media...
lol... you figured it out. No more physical copies. You gotta subscribe.
WHAT?!!!!!! Then where can we get them now?
Walmart, Target etc
I wouldn't highlight Target too much. They've been decreasing their physical stock more and more lately. Walmart sounds like they're doubling down on the game but who knows after this news.
Yeah I work at Target. Apparently there are some stores that don't even stock DVDs anymore. My store just cut our DVD section in half. That being said Target is probably one of better "retail" places if you're looking for vinyl.
What makes you say Walmart is doubling down on the physical media game? Very interested if best buy is bowing out
Walmart serves lots of markets in the US where there are still people who don't stream the majority of the time. Remember, the internet companies took the money to make the US have better infrastructure, but they didn't use it that way. There are still lots of people without proper speeds on upload and download, plus people who don't have wired internet access at all, and refuse to pay for spotty satellite solutions.
So I would expect places like Walmart to continue to cater to the markets they serve until they change.
edit: source, my parents who to this day still do not have any wired service at their home, because the last time they asked the nearest company (comcast I think) wanted them to foot the bill for the line down the street to their house. Their whole street, and all the streets on the other side of their house away from the highway nearby do not have any wired internet access at all, and it's not a small portion of the town they live in. This is incredibly common where I live.
So the remaining physical media vendors are Amazon, Target (for however long that lasts), B&N, Wall-Mart, FYE, and whatever’s become of Right Stuff. Maybe Sam’s Club and Costco.
Costco has been reducing floor space for books. I can't remember seeing any movies in there in a long time. I guess a couple at the holidays, but they NEVER have had much of a footprint there.
Amazon. People want to boycott them, but they have the availability and I doubt they’re going to follow suit. I’ve primarily gotten movies from them.
Literally just got LOTR set 4K for $39.99
As much as I hate giving amazon more money, in terms of availability, price, and returns, it really is the best place to get them.
If this is true, it's a bit like McDonald's deciding to no longer sell fries. Best Buy will only speedrun it's own demise if there's hardly any reason to go..
Surprised this didn't happen earlier to be honest. Best Buy as a company has not been doing great compared to its heyday.
This doesn't mean it's the end of physical media though. It's just another part of its evolution of being focused entirely on the niche collectors market with direct label sales or from Amazon which can afford nearly unlimited warehouse costs for stock.
I wouldn't be surprised if other retailers pull out next year as well.
They used to have a great CD selection back in the day.
Such a shame. I collect steelbooks and a lot of Best Buy’s were great and affordable.
The site got hugged to death or something so I can’t read the article. Are they referring to physical media as all physical media or are they saying they’re getting rid of DVD/Blu-Ray and CDs? With the exception of a couple of really shitty stores all the ones in my area dedicate about 1/3 of the store to physical media if we’re including video, music, and games.
What are they going to fill that space with? Physical media is about the only product they carry that the stores aren’t saturated on.
The article says "This includes not just their in-store Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K Ultra HD sales, which the retailer has been gradually phasing out for a couple of years now in their many store locations nationwide, but online sales as well. This means no more Best Buy-exclusive Steelbook titles, and no more titles from Best Buy period."
I've seen rumors they might stop carrying physical video games too, but no mention in that particular article.
Only a matter of time.
They'll still be around. Hell CDs and vinyls are still around. So like them they'll turn into items for collectors, promotions and for art house/indie movies.
I just wish they'd bring back things like commentary for some old shows like Futurama. I loved those on my dvd collection. If those were on platforms like Disney+ I'd be happy.
When I started working at Best Buy in early 2000s, the entire middle of the store was just long rows of music cds.
It’s funny because everybody has/wants a 4K TV, and the only way to get true 4K is with a physical 4K Blu Ray disc. Streaming can’t hold a candle to it.
digital storage runs out of room. streamers can remove movies anytime they want. you can always make room for a dvd box. when you watch a movie on streaming you pay the same price everytime. each viewing on dvd makes it cheaper and cheaper.
Limited Run Games going to make a killing when they do movies.
That’s already happening, only they’re called Arrow, Powerhouse, and to a lesser extent Criterion.
I worked here when we had CDs for sale. It was so much fun to see everything new coming out and talking with the fans buying it.
Pretty much the main reason I went to Best Buy disappeared when my local Best Buy stopped selling physical movies.
Still have my binders. Feel bad for you digital-only folks.
God DAMNIT I just want to walk through Hastings again. Id do aaaaanything to walk through a Hastings again. They were the first big blow to me :/
Brit here. I used to travel to the US a fair amount for work and I used to spend hours browsing places like B&N and Best Buy for the cool shit we didn't get here (mainly Criterion blu rays).
Sad times..
it starts like this, then there is the "cloud" service. then you have to subscribe to keep the cloud service running, then you are RENTING something you are supposed to OWN. gotta buy some TB harddrives and start stocking up.
Honestly, best buy has been shite for quite a while.
In the early to mid-2000s, my high school and college days, I spent all of my money there. Constantly buying music, movies, and games. It was the best. Last several times I've wandered in it's been a mess of warehouse deals and open box stuff, cell phone stations, and TVs galore, plus it's now focused heavily on kitchen appliances. Music isn't in there at all, movies are one shelf of overpriced best buy-exclusives of stuff I'm not interested in, and the video game section is ravaged except for the shovelware and a handful of hugely popular games everybody already has (plus a bunch of toys based around mario and such).
The only thing I've bought from best buy in years was...actually, no. We window-shopped for my son's car stereo there, but we didn't even buy it there because it was cheaper at Crutchfield.
Man...it really is lame what's happened to what used to be my favorite store.
that sucks so bad
It’s so sad, I have a decent physical library but I’m missing lots of titles. Unfortunately for me in Canada, most stores don’t carry anything and most “boutique” labels don’t officially release in Canada so they’re $45+ for one 4K title.
And further locks Amazon and eBay as my movie and box set seller for the foreseeable future.