Survey: Consumers prefer DVDs to downloads
Consumers have spoken. They'd still rather pop a disc into a DVD player than download or watch a video online, according to a new survey.
Sales and rentals of DVDs and Blu-ray discs in the U.S. made up 88 percent of consumer home video spending over the past three months, according to the survey released Tuesday by market researcher NPD Group.
Your average U.S. consumer paid about $25 per month on video purchases and rentals, with 63 percent on DVD purchases, 7 percent on Blu-ray Disc purchases, 18 percent on rentals, 9 percent on video on demand, and only 3 percent on digital downloads.
Despite the continued popularity of DVD and Blu-ray, online viewing has gained a foothold. In the past three months, 9 percent of connected consumers said they watched movies online versus 5 percent last year. Eight percent rented a movie online, a jump of 4 percent since last year, NPD reported.
"Discs are still and by far the dominant way Americans enjoy home video, but there is an increasing appetite for digital options," said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD. "The good news is that the consumers engaging with digital video today also tend to be heavy consumers of DVDs and Blu-ray Disc, but it remains to be seen just how long physical discs and digital formats can co-exist."
The information was taken from an update to a recent NPD Group report entitled "Entertainment Trends In America," which measured home video usage for the previous three months. Conducted online, the survey was based on responses from more than 11,000 U.S. consumers.
Sales of Blu-ray players are themselves growing here in the U.S., with prices down and more consumers craving to watch their favorites in high-definition.
Lance Whitney wears a few different technology hats--journalist, Web developer, and software trainer. He's a contributing editor for Microsoft TechNet Magazine and writes for other computer publications and Web sites. You can follow Lance on Twitter at @lancewhit. Lance is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and he is not an employee of CNET. 
Until the USA has far more network capacity and switches to IPv6 addressing, they'd rather rent movies on DVD and/or Blu-ray formats.
If it weren't for caps, you could queue up a bunch of movies for download, and start watching them as their downloads finish. Really, it's not conceptually different than NetFlix - and that's gotten to be a very popular rental method.
I could care less about using up all my bandwidth, it's the time involved in the download that sucks. For ALL my other needs, my bandwidth is fine. I often have four computers playing on-line games at the same time (WOW and Guildwars mostly), so I'm not going to pay for more bandwidth just so I can download movies.
Also, as you can see 63% of the money spent is on DVD/Blu-ray purchases. This shows people still prefer buying movies over renting (or at least don't mind the higher cost of a purchase when they want to). Personally, I like looking through my movie list, going to my 500 strong collection and picking out a movie, firing up the flatscreen and the blu-ray player and watching the movie I'v picked out NOW, not in an hour or more. Plus, I visit my local big box store every Tuesday and check out anything new I might want to purchase. If the Blue-ray is $25 or less for something I like, I'll buy it. Otherwise I get the DVD.
Even if my cable was faster, I still wouldn't down-load movies for rent since I'm not confortable giving out a credit card number over the net. Besides, I don't want to rent, I want to purchase. 63% of money spent agrees.
And downloading HD movies is somewhat of a red herring, seeing as you can stream it right now.
-John
www.ipv4depletion.com
A DVD is still far superior, if only because it's less time consuming and more convenient (once the disk is in hand).
I think a bigger issue is that depending upon the bitrate of the content some online content just doesn't look very sharp on a large TV whereas a standard DVD often looks fine with a little bit of upconverting.
People don't care what the media is.. they just want it to work.... and they want it to be cheap.
But the commenters ought to get their facts straight. Of course you can "download to a TV". We 'download to a TV' with an AppleTV. For *renting* movies, we ust love it. We haven't even bothered to go to the video store since we got it . We rent both SD and HD stuff. It works beautifully with our 'slow' 3mb DSL connection. SD are as good as DVD - at least on our 61" HDTV. And they're buffered enough to watch in 30 seconds. SECONDS, not minutes. HD movies are almost as good as BluRay (via PS/3), though those do take about an hour to buffer. Still faster than going out to the video store, by the time you factor in the hassle of driving there, searching for a movie, finding a DVD/BR that's not scratched to hell, then driving back home. Then going back the next day to return it. How quaint. Good for you if you live next door to a Blockbuster. But many folks don't.
Now for buying movies, that's different. People want that physical disc that they know they won't lose just because of a fried hard drive. Until BR burners become cheap and common with an easy way to make a backup/playable disc of online purchases, movie downloads won't catch on.
Between Hulu, Netflix, and google searches, I'm set.
I'm not sure whats so hard about that - anyone with have a brain and an ounce of energy should be able to hook it up. Though perhaps if you're a couch potato, you have neither :P
This 'old computer' will also need a high-speed internet connection, wireless or otherwise, as well, so not necessarily all that simple.
You do yourself no favor by being condescending and insulting.
When you replace your old computer you are going to find out that unless your plasma set has HDCP support you won't be able to use Netflix anymore with that TV.
That being said, it really will not matter if the economic mayhem continues and ISPs start ramping prices for less service and caps in response to the usage of downloadable media. Expect your monthly rates for a 2Mb connection to hit $80-$100 just so you can download 3-4 movies a month. And then a fee for every megabyte beyond that size from 25 cents to a dollar. If you doubt me
The internet is business my friends, not a right nor a freedom. To use it for entertainment, you have to pay the piper.
I hope so. Maybe with a big enough public backlash we can drop these cable franchises and get some real competition in place.
With time, everyone chooses the cheapest, most convenient option. Downloading and streaming IS the future. I'm watching House on Hulu right now, as I'm typing this out.
Costs to download recent movies are significant, even if it's only for a single play.
- by gerrrg May 12, 2009 11:43 AM PDT
- @freemarket--2008
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (53 Comments)And House is also on DVD.
And costs to BUY movies are even MORE significant than downloading it.