Apparently, people really like to declare physical media as a dead medium.  While I can understand, more people are moving towards streaming Netflix and finding ways to download their media, I still feel (as I said in February of last year) that physical media is not going anywhere any time soon.

If you read this article from CrunchGear, you’ll see that the article and the people commenting that “physical media is dead” and pointing to the fact that they “stream from netflix” or “use bit torrent” to watch their movies.  And while this is most definitely the case, that geeks are streaming/downloading movies more than buying them, the rest of the non-geek population is not.  We as geeks live in our own little world and regularly forget that the rest of the world doesn’t think like us.  They also do not (for the most part) act like us either.  Which means, when they want to watch a movie they either buy it from the store, rent it from Blockbuster or Netflix, or watch it on Pay-Per-View off their cable/satellite boxes.  Watching on Pay-Per-View is about the closest to streaming a movie onto their television that the average consumer gets.

The average consumer of audio/video mediums prefer having the physical media.  That’s just how it is.  Now, in reference to this and the article’s attack that people aren’t buying Blu-Rays I say if that was true, the Blu-Ray section at my local best buy wouldn’t take up an entire front and back of a very long store shelve.  Also, people aren’t buying Blu-Rays because they cost more than DVDs and in case you forgot, we’re in a recession and that means that people are watching their spending.  If they can get a movie for 12-15 dollars on DVD or spend 25-30 on a Blu-Ray, chances are they’re going to buy the DVD over the Blu-Ray.  And since the report in the article mentions that people are buying fewer DVDs, in this particular recession it looks like that most people are opting against both movie mediums.  We’re in a recession, so people buying less is no great shock, but lets keep it in mind when we’re looking at the purchasing of a non-necessity okay?

Just to reiterate, physical media is not dead.  It is also not dying like we geeks think it should.  The average consumer is buying fewer DVDs and skipping Blu-Ray because we’re in a recession.  Before you count physical media as having bit the big one, consider all the pieces.