Disc Death

In the last ten years my company has gone from burning thousands of DVDs a year to burning under a thousand for the whole year. I recently finished a edit which was mastered in HD (high definition) and offered to the public as a DVD, Blu-Ray DVD, a flash drive or as a download from Dropbox. Surprisingly there were a considerable amount of orders for standard DVDs. I had written on the ordering forms that a standard DVD was going to be the worst quality of the choices. I was amazed of the amount of orders I had for Blu-Ray DVD's. There was a limited amount of orders for flash drives and I am happy to report that most orders were for the Dropbox download.

Here is my thought on the order breakdowns. The standard DVD is the dodo bird of video storage. It is a dying breed as the quality of the video is sub standard. What keeps this format alive is that older consumers still have the old DVD player hooked up to the tv, movie bins at Walmart, and other on-line and brick and mortar sites still sell movies at low prices. Blu Ray DVD's are of HD quality but really have never had the impact that was expected. The reasons are twofold. 1. Around the same time of the Blu Ray Push, downloading and streaming were becoming available to the masses and (2) because of this new competition in delivery, the Blu Ray never reached the popularity of standard DVDs and thus disc prices and players stayed high.

I think that flash drives and Dropbox have this in common. It take a bit of technical knowledge to download files and lots of folks don't know how to do this and are too lazy to want to mess with it. Dropbox by far was the most popular way to receive the

videos. If you can download a flash drive then you can use Dropbox.

I think my breakdown is good news for distribution of your videos. Downloading saves time, doesn't reduce quality of the product, and there is no physical device to send. Besides Dropbox there are numerous ways to share a video with one person or a thousand.

Thom Baker

Former Adjunct Professor at the University of Missouri, School of Engineering