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Are we going to see a resurgence in physical video media?

· 2494 words · ~13 min read

physical-media streaming opinion

On 1 July this year, Sony announced that from January 2028 it will stop producing discs for new PlayStation games. A few weeks later, reporters visited the Sony DADC plant in Austria (the facility that has pressed something in the order of 24 billion discs) and found the assembly lines already being converted to micro-optics, with 300 staff being retrained to make lenses that project turn signals onto tarmac.

Meanwhile, Tesco has started stocking discs again after quitting in 2022, 4K Blu-ray sales went up last year, and steelbook editions now take nearly a fifth of everything Britain spends on physical video.

So which is it?

The short version

No, we are not going to see a resurgence in physical video media, if by “resurgence” you mean the format growing back into the mainstream the way vinyl did.

What we are seeing is a floor. The bottom of the market has fallen out and what’s left is a smaller, richer, deliberately premium business that has stopped collapsing and started behaving like a going concern. That is genuinely new, and it is much more interesting than a comeback narrative.

The numbers, which are more encouraging than you’d think

US consumer spend on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD was $870 million in 2025, down 9.3% year on year, and down 85.7% from the $6.1 billion of 2015. That first number looks grim until you look at the second derivative. Annual declines through the early 2020s ran at 20–25%. 2025 was the first single-digit drop since 2016.

Inside that shrinking total, 4K UHD Blu-ray grew 12%.

The UK picture is better still. The home entertainment market here hit a record £5.7 billion in 2025, up 10%. Physical took over £150 million of that, and, per the BASE figures written up by Film Stories, fell by only 4.7%, the slowest decline since 2010. Blu-ray including 4K did £84.2m, DVD £64.7m, and 4K UHD specifically was up 19.5%.

The detail I keep coming back to: steelbooks accounted for nearly £2 of every £10 spent on physical, at an average price around £32. Tesco, which walked away from discs in 2022, came back. Downton Abbey: The Finale shifted 56,000 DVDs. A Lord of the Rings trilogy box set sold 13,800 copies for £804,000.

None of this is a mass market. All of it is a functioning one.

For scale, though: US subscription streaming was $57.5 billion in the same year, up 19.8%, and 92.4% of all home entertainment spend. Discs are now a rounding error on streaming’s growth, not a competitor to it.

Why the people who are buying are buying

Because “buy” turned out not to mean buy. Microsoft shut its Movies & TV storefront in July 2025. Existing purchases still play, for now, but you can’t buy and you can’t download. PlayStation has twice stripped purchased content out of people’s libraries when a licence lapsed. California now requires digital storefronts to say so out loud: AB 2426, in force since 1 January 2025, makes you disclose that a “purchase” is a revocable licence, and pointedly exempts goods “provided for permanent offline use”. The law has effectively drawn a legal line between owning a thing and renting it indefinitely.

A disc on a shelf sits on the right side of that line. It is the only format where nobody can reach into your house and take the film back.

Because the quality gap is real and isn’t closing. 4K UHD carries 72 to 144 Mbps depending on disc capacity. Netflix and Prime Video sit around 15–25 Mbps, Apple nearer 40. Audio is starker: disc gives you lossless TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, streaming gives you a compressed approximation of it.

This is the bit I find professionally interesting, and it’s worth being precise about why the gap exists. It is not a technical limit. Nothing prevents a streaming service shipping 100 Mbps video. Delivering video at disc bitrates is easy for a CDN today. Doing it for a major live event, with millions of viewers each pulling 144 Mbps, is a different matter: most CDNs and ISPs would need to scale their networks, and it would take a lot of planning and coordination, but purely from a technical perspective it’s feasible. The real constraint is that every additional byte is a byte someone pays to move, multiplied by tens of millions of concurrent viewers, and the marginal viewer cannot tell. So encoding ladders get tuned to the point of “indistinguishable on a 55-inch telly in a lit room”, and stop there. A pressed disc has a delivery cost of zero once it’s in the case, so it can be gratuitous.

Streaming bitrate is an economics decision wearing an engineering costume. That’s the honest version, and it’s why the gap will persist even as networks get faster.

Because the catalogue is a lottery. Films appear and vanish on licence cycles. If you want to watch a specific thing on a specific evening, a disc is a guarantee and a subscription is a probability.

The premium tier nobody is selling

Here’s the thing that actually sent me down this hole.

There are two boxes with 4K disc drives sitting in tens of millions of living rooms, and for an entire console generation each of them has had a free opportunity to one-up the other on picture quality. Neither took it.

Xbox Series X does Dolby Vision for games, and for the streaming apps. Put an actual UHD Blu-ray in the tray and you get HDR10. PlayStation 5 doesn’t do Dolby Vision at all, in any context. Neither console has ever supported Dolby Vision Profile 7, which is the profile the discs themselves are mastered in: the dual-layer one, a base layer plus an enhancement layer, which exists more or less solely because UHD Blu-ray needed it.

So the premium home cinema angle was there, unclaimed, for years. Microsoft in particular could have owned “the best film player in the house” against a rival that had nothing to answer with. Instead both platform holders looked at the same market research and concluded that nobody chooses a console on disc fidelity, and the January 2028 announcement is that conclusion reaching its logical end. The next Xbox is widely rumoured to skip the drive entirely, I hope they reconsider or this isn’t true!

They may well be right about consoles. What makes it look like a miss is what streaming has been doing at the same time.

The cheap tiers have filled up with adverts and the quality has been pulled upstairs. Netflix UK’s Standard with Ads is £7.99 and tops out at 1080p with several minutes of adverts an hour; 4K and spatial audio live on Premium, which went to £20.99 in early September. Amazon went further in April, rebranding its ad-free tier Prime Video Ultra and making 4K exclusive to it.

Netflix Premium is now £252 a year. A 4K disc is £25–30 and you keep it. That’s eight or nine films a year, permanently, for the price of renting a 4K tier that can still drop your bitrate when the line wobbles and still hands you lossy audio at the end of it.

When the premium stream starts costing premium money, the premium disc stops looking like an indulgence and starts looking like arithmetic. That is a genuinely better position for physical than it was in 2020, and nobody in the hardware business is doing anything with it.

Which brings us to the players

Because the moment someone is persuaded, they hit a wall.

Say you’ve decided you want the best picture a disc can give you. Which player? The Panasonic DP-UB820 does Dolby Vision and HDR10+, at around £548. The DP-UB150 at £240 does neither: HDR10 only. The Sony UBP-X700 around £298 does Dolby Vision but not HDR10+. Underneath that sits another layer of variation in how completely a given machine handles Profile 7’s enhancement layer, which is deep enough water that the people arguing about it do so on forums rather than in shops.

None of this is on the box in any legible way. There is no shelf label that says “this one gives you everything the disc has on it and that one throws half of it away”. The format’s entire selling point is fidelity, and the buying experience actively obscures which box delivers it.

And the prices are going the wrong way. On 10 September, Panasonic raised US prices across the range: the UB820 from $500 to $649.99, the flagship UB9000 from $999 to $1,299.99, and it’s scarce enough that retailers are asking $1,700–1,800 anyway. The stated reason is memory chip costs, driven by the AI data centre build-out.

Which is a sentence worth sitting with, in my line of work. The same infrastructure boom I spend my days working on is, by way of the DRAM market, making Blu-ray players more expensive.

Why it still can’t scale

The demand side has an argument. The supply side is where the resurgence thesis falls over.

Players are disappearing. Oppo left in 2018. Samsung left in 2019. LG discontinued its entire 4K range in 2024, and its last models, the UBK80 and UBK90, dated from 2018 anyway. That leaves Panasonic and Sony in the mainstream, plus Reavon and Magnetar at enthusiast prices. Four firms, rising prices, and a flagship that’s been in production since 2018.

But the wider hardware story is one-way. Laptops lost optical drives a decade ago. Cars lost them. Consoles are losing them. That’s what January 2028 means. A format whose playback hardware is confined to a dedicated box under the telly cannot become mainstream again, however good the box is.

Pressing capacity is consolidating. The Austrian plant still turns out around 600,000 blank Blu-rays a day, and Sony DADC was careful to correct the reporting here: the expectation is roughly a 10% decline in overall volume, not a decline down to 10% of capacity. Discs will keep being made. They will just be made in fewer places, by fewer firms, for fewer customers, which is precisely how a format becomes expensive.

Vinyl is the wrong analogy people are making. Vinyl came back because the artefact is part of the experience: the sleeve is art you hold, the ritual is the point, the sound has a character people prefer even when it is measurably worse. Turntables are made by dozens of companies at every price from £100 to absurd.

Video has much less of that. Steelbooks are where the comparison comes closest: the artwork is a big part of the appeal, and a shelf of them does the same job as a shelf of record sleeves. On sound, the analogy runs backwards. People choose vinyl for a character they like, even when it’s measurably worse. UHD’s audio advantage is the opposite: it is objectively, audibly better. A disc carries lossless Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio, often with a full Atmos mix, where a stream gives you a lossy, heavily compressed version of the same soundtrack. Through a decent AV receiver and speakers the difference is immediate, arguably bigger than the picture gap, and for plenty of collectors it’s the main reason to buy the disc at all. But it’s a fidelity argument, not a ritual one, and it only pays off for people who own the kit to hear it. Watching a film is passive in a way that playing a record isn’t. There is no ritual to rediscover, only fidelity and permanence to pay for, and those are connoisseur motivations, not mass ones.

What I think actually happens

Physical video becomes the hardback edition. Not the way most people consume films, but the way the films that matter get preserved and sold to the people who care: boutique labels, 4K restorations, proper extras, limited runs, £30 price points, and a slow drift of catalogue titles into the hands of specialists while the majors outsource distribution entirely, as Universal and Warner already have here, to Spirit and Elevation respectively.

That’s not a resurgence. It’s a re-founding on much smaller and much more durable ground.

Three things would change my mind, and they’re worth watching:

  1. Does the single-digit decline hold for 2026? One year is noise. Two is a floor.
  2. Does anyone new build a player, and does anyone market the quality? A new entrant would be a signal. A mainstream box sold explicitly on “this plays the disc properly, all of it” would be a bigger one.
  3. Do the studios keep funding 4K catalogue releases? If the restorations dry up, the collector market has nothing to collect and the whole thing becomes a back-catalogue trade in second-hand steelbooks.

My own position, for what it’s worth: I stream most things. It’s convenient, but I can feel my desire for quality niggling at me. I’m probably going to redo my living room setup in 2027, and I can see 4K UHD discs definitely being part of that home cinema vibe.

I’ve been exploring the format’s setup and capabilities in depth. I even bought both of the discs widely cited as the only high frame rate UHD releases, at 60fps, something the format has supported for years. Those films were Gemini Man and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and the sharpness is delightful to watch!

With AI, I’m thinking of making a DIY disc storage and changer system that would make the format more convenient and usable, giving me the best of both worlds. I can’t beat the breadth of streaming libraries, but being more conscious of what I watch might not be such a bad thing either. The time saved on ads, while owning what I watch, still very much appeals. Even more so with young kids in the house. I suspect a lot of people are landing somewhere similar, each for their own handful of films.

Which is a much smaller business than 2015, and a much more stable one.

My recommendations

Players

Films

TVs

Cables

Written with AI assistance, then fact-checked and edited by me. All figures are linked to source; the 2025 UK numbers come from BASE via Film Stories, and the US numbers from DEG as reported by Luminate and FlatpanelsHD. Amazon links are affiliate links; I may earn a small commission if you buy through them. There are no intrusive ads on this site, so affiliate links are its only source of revenue.