Disney to cease sale of all DVD & Blu Ray releases in Australia - do you still buy physical?

Disney to stop releasing DVDs and Blu-ray discs in major change for Australian customers

Australian Disney fans looking to add to their movie collection will have to get in quickly as the entertainment giant moves to stop releasing DVDs and Blu-ray discs nationally.

The Walt Disney Company confirmed it is pulling out of Australia’s physical media market, and the limited number of Australian and New Zealand stockists will no longer receive DVDs after Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3.

7NEWs.com.au understands the decision is due to dwindling physical sales and the increasing popularity of online home entertainment, such as Disney+.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 will be the last physical release in Australia and is set to arrive in stores in August.

Previously released titles are expected to be available while local retailers sell down their existing stock.

Once sold out, Australian Disney fans keen to get their hands on a DVD will have to turn to international online retailers.

Popular movie and pop-culture reviewer Dave Lee, who posts to 133,000 subscribers on his Dave Lee Down Under YouTube channel, said the move was not surprising given the state of Australia’s physical media market.

“I’ll be very candid about home media in Australia. It’s doing terribly,” he ~~tweeted~~ X'ed.

“Almost no one I know in real life buys physical, the physical ‘collectors’ online are a very, very small bubble.

“It’s been dire straits out here for a while. This has been a long time coming ... doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck.”

https://7news.com.au/business/retail/di ... c-11414857

Do you still purchase DVDs and Blu Rays? Maybe you still have a VHS...

I just finished watching The Last of Us (superb) on 4K Blu Ray because I didn't want to watch it in 720p shat-o-vision on NOW. Not all streaming services are created equal...or like AppleTV/iTunes, basically. Unfortunately a lot of the masses don't appear to give two gooseberry fools about the picture or sound quality of what they're watching.

This won’t effect me if it goes worldwide which it will soon. However my brother is autistic and although he uses Disney plus etc he still always wants the dvd as well.

The same strategy they've always used, and people will keep falling for it.

Five years from now, they'll remove certain films from Disney Plus and re-release them on disc, as the only way to be able to watch them.

I don't buy DVD's or blu-ray, mainly because there's very little in the way of TV series or films that I want to keep rather than any aversion to physical media. I rarely stream TV/films these days either.

I still buy physical games or at least did when I did gaming regularly. If I ever pick up gaming again I'd probably stick with physical.

I still buy physical media for music where possible (ImAgInE nOt StReAmInG MuSiC etc etc etc). I only use spotify to discover new bands or listen to acts where I haven't been able to source a physical copy and/or download the album. I don't want to pay for a subscription service, I want to listen to albums in the order they were intended rather than shuffled (thankfully the desktop version of spotify allows this) and I want the bands to get as much of my money as I can so if possible I try to buy physical from the bands website. I also enjoy leaving my phone behind and going out for a walk and just listening to music on my MP3 player, disconnecting from other distractions that my phone brings. I also don't like the fact that for all the hype Spotify gets that there are acts I still can't find on there and albums I have added to favourites get removed.

Last edited by Robbo-92 on Mon Jul 31, 2023 12:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I buy the very rare film/series on disc now, part of my reasoning is if I have the bulk of that series/franchise on disc already, take GoT for example, I've got all of that so bought HotD as well (that I still need to watch actually), I've just bough the 4K version of The Super Mario Bros Movie, but I don't think I'll even buy anything else till the next series of HotD is out on disc. So I don't think it'll impact me much at all really.

I mostly just stream, but I like having a curated shelf of my favourite films. Physical is still better quality over streaming too (although you can pirate and presumably legally download from somewhere in high quality).

I've also had internet outages in the last two weekends which is an annoying reminder that offline entertainment is useful to have still!

I did stop buying TV and films on disc... but over the past year or two I've gone back to getting discs again. Streaming can be very good indeed; it's instant, has a great range of stuff and is often good value. But... streaming can be rubbish, too - separate providers, multiple subs needed and stuff being taken off the services.

I've reverted to preferring discs but I don't expect the physical market to last too much longer. I'm just enjoying it whilst it still exists.

Problem with discs is that, they can't fit enough episodes on on one disc. 4 or 5 Simpsons episodes per disc.

I'm not getting up to change it that often. If I could get the first 8 series on one disc that'll be good.

Apart from a few Netflix originals, i buy all my movies on blu ray.

I hate the idea of streaming being the only option, not to mention the better image/sound quality you get on blu.

Still buy music on CD and 4K Blurays whenever possible.

I haven't bought a TV show or movie on DVD/blu ray in over a decade now so this wouldn't bother me. I still collect CDs where possible but a lot of the music I listen to is from obscure bands on Bandcamp where they often don't have physical releases.

One of the additional issues with Disney not releasing physical media, is that it affects not just their own main productions, but also everything else they've gotten their grubby hands on over the years.

So that means no further releases for stuff like Indiana Jones & Star Wars, not to mention all the content from the likes of 20th Century Fox (such as Avatar) and the various other production companies which have been taken over.

Ecno wrote:Problem with discs is that, they can't fit enough episodes on on one disc. 4 or 5 Simpsons episodes per disc.

I'm not getting up to change it that often. If I could get the first 8 series on one disc that'll be good.

That made me do a LOL, Ecno! :lol:

.

I bought Gladiator on UHD a few months ago. It was my first movie physical media purchase in about 8 years. I bought it because I have a decent 4K collection on my Apple Store account but certain movies - True Romance and Twelve Monkeys to name a few - aren't available digitally in 4K due to licensing nonsense.

do you still buy physical?

For TV and Movies, no. I download or wait for Netflix/Disney.

Games yes, all the way.

I don't buy shows or movies in physical form anymore, due to the cost and the space they take up. But, I might be encouraged to, now.

This is a horrible move - there's going to be so much lost media over the next few years, as streaming companies delete their back catalogues to stop paying residuals and save on taxes.

Also, it's not just new releases, so imagine the entire back catalogue of companies like Fox being discontinued and unavailable on physical media.

It's an appalling move.

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:This won’t effect me if it goes worldwide which it will soon. However my brother is autistic and although he uses Disney plus etc he still always wants the dvd as well.

I can understand that.

If you can't download a copy, or have a consistent way to do that in a kinaesthetic way. It's common for us to replay the same thing often, sometimes over and over again, and a disc copy is one way of being able to do that without having to be glued to a computer or small screen, which is hardly comfortable.

I still have a copy of Fantasia on VHS that apparently I used to watch over and over again. It's in my diagnosis but they misheard my mum and put it down as a "game", which is very stereotypical. It was the classical music and synchronised animation I liked, quite different.

That said I can't remember the last time I bought a film or TV show in any format.

I'm still very much into my physical media.

Basically it comes down to finally getting my home theatre set up a few years back.
If I just had a TV I'm not sure I would care enough (4K doesn't really come into its own until you get into much bigger sizes), but my projector gives me a 120" 4K image so I really want to get the best picture and sound that I can out of it.

In most cases that comes down to 4K UltraHD Blurays. Streaming services offer 4K streams, but the video and audio bitrates are far lower and compressed so that they use up as little bandwidth and space as possible. Which means a lower quality image.
The discs are in most cases the highest quality versions of these movies/TV shows.

Black and White movies especially look really nice with 4K HDR transfers as it picks up so much more fine detail and subtlety in the greyscale.

Even 1080p can look considerably better on Bluray than streamed.

Beyond that there are some wonderful boutique labels putting out immensely varied libraries of films from all over the world that wouldn't perhaps get a major release.
4K especially is prone to relatively good special and collectors editions (They know it's a niche that's generally into their movies so they can sell this stuff). Next time you pass an HMV pop in and have a look at their BluRay section. Lots of cool stuff to see.

There's also a lot of older stuff that just never made it to streaming services and might only be stuck on DVD. They might not be the best movies, but they still deserve to be watchable and preserved in some way.

Once I have the disc I have full control over what happens to it and I can watch it for as long as I have a device capable of reading it.
No media conglomerate can reach into my home and take that from me (Yet :dread:

), but they can nuke anything from their paid services at a moments notice for nothing other than a tax write off.

So yeah I'm not happy about this news. Disney do not care about their physical stuff at all.

But I still think physical media has it's place, even if that is as a niche for those more interested in films/movies in general.

One thing's for sure, Disney will be single handedly creating a fresh boom in piracy.

Disney to cease sale of all DVD & Blu Ray releases in Australia - do you still buy physical?

Do you still buy any movies and TV shows on disc?

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