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.

While it was "greeted with a shrug" by most media outlets and American consumers, Netflix's decision to exit the DVD rental business in September will result in a "catastrophic act of cultural destruction," rendering most of the known cinematic library unobtainable, writes political cartoonist Ted Rall in the Wall Street Journal. 

Just half of top-grossing films from the early 1970s can be streamed, Rall noted. And of the 23,000-plus movies released in the U.S. since 1899, including foreign titles, streaming services only make available around 7,300 titles, he added, citing Statista data. 

An earlier Washington Post story from Ty Burr , making the same point, noted some specific well-known, semi-recent titles that aren't available to stream, either via FASTs, AVOD or SVOD: Cocoon (1985, directed by Ron Howard), Short Cuts (1993, Robert Altman), New York, New York (1977, Martin Scorsese), Henry & June (1990, Philip Kaufman) and Silkwood (1983, Mike Nichols). 

We confirmed this for each title via search and aggregation platform Reelgood -- you can't rent any of these movies online, either digitally or on physical disc. 

You can still buy them, however, on disc. We found a Criterion Collection version of Short Cuts on DVD via Amazon for $21.22. And platforms like eBay also offer physical purchase options for many titles. 

But as Rall points out, how many folks are going to risk $20 on a film title they'd never seen before?

And beyond mere convenient consumer access, there's a larger issue of curation to consider. 

DVD usage is now solidly on a downward trajectory such that it inevitably dips below a scale threshold for which it no longer makes economic sense for even specialty providers like Criterion Collection to keep manufacturing certain titles.

So, just because you can buy Cocoon today doesn't mean you're kids will be able to find it 20 years from now. 

Rall adds further punctuation by noting the winnowing down of history's collective film vault by previous calamity and format change. 

Consider that 90% of films made before 1929 are gone forever, or that a 1937 fire at the Twentieth Century Fox film vault wiped out every studio title made before 1932. 

Thousands of films were successfully curated and made available to the masses amid the VHS explosion the 1980s and 90s. But many of these VHS titles disappeared amid the transition to DVD in the aughts. 

As a solution, Rall suggested that, "A government entity with relevant experience such as the National Archives’ vast Moving Image and Sound Holdings in College Park, Md., could be tasked with the creation of a national digital lending library."

Book Authors and publishers are required to supply the Library of Congress with copies of their titles when they apply for copyright, he noted. Congress could dictate that films become available via a digital lending library after they haven’t been commercially streamed for a set number of years.

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.

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.