In October, Best Buy decided that physical media just wasn’t worth the lucrative shelf space it was taking up and announced that it would stop selling DVDs and Blu-rays altogether. “To state the obvious, the way we watch movies and TV shows is much different today than it was decades ago,” a Best Buy spokesperson told Variety at the time. “Making this change gives us more space and opportunity to bring customers new and innovative tech for them to explore, discover and enjoy.”

Earlier this week, Barstool Sports reported that Best Buy had carried through on that pledge.

Meanwhile, The Walt Disney Co. reached a deal yesterday to license manufacturing and distribution of its physical media in the U.S. and Canada, including DVDs, Blu-ray Discs and 4K Ultra HD Blu-rays, to Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

The deal includes the company’s vast catalog of titles, along with any new releases.

As part of the deal, Disney is shuttering its subscription service and online store, the Disney Movie Club, which sold Blu-rays and DVDs of Disney films.

Disney informed a reported 10 million Movie Club members by email as well as on its website yesterday that the service will stop taking orders in late May and shutter entirely on July 20.

Sony will take over marketing and distributing the discs to retailers.

The move comes after Netflix mailed out its last rental DVDs in September, sending out random bundles of DVDs to all remaining customers and telling them to just keep them, on the house. It was one way to get rid of excess inventory. They probably would have just ended up in landfills otherwise.

That leaves Redbox as one of the last left standing in physical media with its DVD rental kiosks. But it’s now a big fish in a rapidly evaporating pond. Chicken Soup for the Soul purchased the struggling rental business in 2022 for $50 million, assuming Redbox’s $325 million in debt in the process.

But in its recent SEC filings Chicken Soup raised “substantial doubt” as to whether it can “continue as a going concern” largely due to that debt.

Last summer, Next TV reported that a tally from the Digital Entertainment Group, which gets sales data directly from studio suppliers, estimated the entire physical rental market in the U.S. at just $502 million for the previous year, with Netflix reporting $146 million in rental business in its final year in business.

The Justice Department was instrumental in taking down a trio of Amazon sellers who were trying to fix the price of DVDs and Blu-ray Discs.

Morris Sutton, Emmanuel Hourizadeh and Raymond Nouvahian have pleaded guilty to conspiring with others to fix (first raise, then maintain) the prices of the videos they sold on their Amazon storefronts, dating back to November 2017 and continuing through October 2019. The Justice Department Antitrust Division’s Chicago office prosecuted the case.

Their crimes carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine, though that can increase two twice their ill-gotten gains or twice the loss suffered by their victims if either is greater than $1 million.

Sentencing will be up to a U.S. District Court judge.

“Price-fixing schemes chip away at the benefits afforded to us by a fair market system,” Michael J. Driscoll, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, said. “Artificially inflating prices to avoid giving consumers a choice, for the sole purpose of benefitting those involved in the fraudulent scheme, is a violation of federal law. These guilty pleas should serve as a warning to other like-minded criminals.”

MARINA DEL RAY, Calif. — The packaged media business remains in steady, steep decline, but Lionsgate executive Thomas Hughes says it isn’t done just yet.

“We still sell a lot of DVDs at Walmart,” Hughes said Tuesday morning, speaking at Parks Associates’ “Future of Video” conference. “We’re on the coasts, so we don’t see it. But other people still buy DVDs.”

Hughes wouldn’t reveal just how many DVD and Blu-ray units Lionsgate is moving these days.

According to the Digital Entertainment Group, sales of video titles on packaged media declined 14.46% through the third quarter to $2.79 billion. Disc rentals meanwhile, were down 16.26% to $1.365 billion.

Consider that as recently as 2010, the total U.S. DVD and Blu-ray was still worth around $16 billion annually, after peaking in the mid-aughts.

For his part, Hughes was simply making the point that a business worth over $4 billion isn’t necessarily nothin’, even if it appears to be in terminal decline.

Notably, he said that ad-supported video-on-demand is Lionsgate’s biggest revenue grower this year, doubling in size—Hughes wouldn’t reveal specifics on that business, either.

While the Walmart’s Vudu-branded AVOD may be growing fast while the disc business circles the drain, it is—somewhat ironically—that produces more usable sales data, Hughes added.

“We’ll have a guy walk into a sales meeting and say, ‘We just sold three Blu-rays on register three in Poughkeepsie,'“ he said. “The packaged media business still has all the great sales data. The reason is that it’s just been around a lot longer,” he said.

The market for UHD Blu-ray Discs is in the nascent stage, and a new forecast seem to agree.

 Futuresource predicts that 8.4 million UHD Blu-ray discs will be sold this year, equating to just 4% of global Blu-ray sales.

Prices for players are becoming more palatable. Sony Electronics, for example, recently set a $300 price point for the UBP-X800 UHD Blu-ray Disc player, which will also support high dynamic range, Dolby Atmos and DTS:X audio. 

The firm also notes that it has yet to see “significant traction” from UHD electronic sell-through even as a broader choice of titles in that format – from independents and major studios – emerge, but said that could change if major broadcast and telcos and other types of service providers latch on and begin to support and sell the format.  A potential “game changer” could emerge if Apple launches a 4K store, Future source said.

For now, streamed SVOD movies is the most commonly accessed source of 4K content, but holds that UHD Blu-rays are poised to be the “crème de la crème” with respect to quality experience and film choice.

At the end of 2016, about 17 million households across the globe had access to streamed 4K UHD content from an SVOD service and a TV capable of playing it back, Futuresource said.

Outerwall, the company behind all of those Redbox DVD kiosks and a failed subscription OTT venture with Verizon Communications, announced Tuesday that CEO J. Scott Di Valerio has stepped down and resigned from the board.

Di Valerio (pictured), who was elevated to CEO from CTO of Outerall in April 2013 and is late of Lenovo and Microsoft, was replaced on an interim basis by Nora M. Denzel, a member of the Outerwall board since 2013. Denzel's also a former exec of Hewlett-Packard, Legato Systems and IBM.

Shares in Outerwall were down $7.45 (9.58%) to  $70.32 each in early trading Tuesday.

Outerwall, which has started a search for a permanent replacement, did not announce a reason for Di Valerio’s departure, but Outerwall chairman Nelson Chan noted in a statement that thanked him for contributions, noting that “the company is well-positioned due to its strong operating and financial foundation and a deep and talented team of employees.”

“Outerwall continues to capitalize on its market-leading brands to drive profitability and deliver value for shareholders, partners and customers. To accelerate the progress we are making, the Board believes that now is the right time for a leadership change, “ Chan added.

Among recent action, Redbox announced a pricing increase that took effect Dec. 2, 2014. The price for DVDs rose 30 cents to $1.50 per day, while Blu-ray discs increased 50 cents, to $2 per day. On Jan. 6, 2015, the price for video game rentals rose $1 to $3.

Redbox Instant by Verizon, the Netflix-like subscription multiscreen video service, shut down on Oct. 7, 2014, noting at the time that the offering “was not as successful as we hoped it would be.” The venture, launched in March 2013, offered a streaming library plus the option to obtain credits toward DVD/Blu-ray discs, and to buy and rent video titles electronically.

Looking ahead, the company said it expects consolidated revenue for the fourth quarter of 2014 to be in the range of $598 million to $602 million, with core diluted earnings per share from continuing operations to be $2.40 to $2.52. The company had already forecast earnings of $1.85 to $2.15 per share on revenues of $575 million to $605 million.

Outerwall said it will provide 2015 annual guidance on its fourth quarter earnings call, scheduled for February 5.