“DVDs were a sign of your identity and your personality,” says Gunnarsson. Yet the holdouts, wherever they are in the world, are united by several shared goals. (The company still rents out DVDs in the United States, but those rentals account for less than 2 percent of its US revenue.) Gunnarsson believes around 60 percent of the global DVD market is still based in the United States. In the UK, the collapse of the high street played a large role in the format's demise, almost as much as the rise of Netflix-which, lest we forget, started out as a DVD rent-by-mail company. The DVD’s popularity differs depending on where in the world you look. Holliday, president of Technicolor Home Entertainment Services, which produces more than 80 percent of every disc-based format around, from DVDs to Blu-rays to video games.
Five million Americans bought a movie for the first time between April and June 2021, according to David J. “It just suits their demand.” In the UK in 2020, 7 million people still bought a disc-based TV show or movie. “There is a solid cohort of consumers wedded to DVDs,” says Liz Bales, chief executive of the British Association for Screen Entertainment, an industry body. Subscriptions to services like Netflix have increased from 39 million worldwide in 2011 to 1.2 billion today-almost swallowing the DVD industry whole. And as demand for DVDs has plummeted, video streaming has risen in its place.
But there are still 300 million of the things-even if your collection is long gone or gathering dust on the bookshelf. Just 300 million DVDs are expected to be sold worldwide this year, down from an average of 2 billion every year between 20.
The number of total physical video transactions made worldwide has dropped from 6.1 billion in 2011 to 1.2 billion in 2021, according to market research firm Omdia.