On 7/22/18, Stephen Paul Weber singpolyma@singpolyma.net wrote:
Blu-rays and DVDs are essentially dead tech
This depends highly on the region.
Most fictional media still grossly depends on the sale of DVDs and Blu-rays, where-ever marketing for such merch turns out effective. (i.e. Japan, major cities with relevant clubs, etc)
Consider how much film still doesn't exist on streaming services, and only get royalties from broadcasts and DVD sales. Many truckers for example most of whom stay many nights alone in motels between drop-sights, feel perfectly obliged to surrender an hour's wage to a convenience story in exchange for a promising unacclaimed feature film to fall asleep to once or twice a week.
https://www.the-numbers.com/weekly-dvd-sales-chart
The monetary contribution per fan, can swing an absurdly wild standard deviation. The very concept of merchandise means subsidizing an art with the sale of trinkets which creatively remind of that art. The cycle can be self-perpetuating when other's who are reminded then go and feel they need more reminders. This gets to be were collectable clocks, dolls, posters, mugs, postcards, shirts, blankets, backpacks, etc, gets wildly overdone.
At the end of the day, this is just a throwback and re-imagining of the old DVD/VHS shelf. A physical location a person would go to see their options of what to watch side-by-side, to pick them out, to look at the cover and decide if the mood fits the situation.
Instead of a shelf, these sticks could go in a pot in on a coffee table, in front of a couch, next to a bed, or, if someone was feeling particularly disruptive and monetarily carefree, next to the front door to give away or tossed to an audience at a convention, or perhaps over or under the main counter at a library.
I just want to take a moment to appreciate how wasteful the consumerism I just described is, from packaging to raw minerals to predictable global drama maintaining game theory which enables sourcing of these materials from "pre-warp civilizations". I'm not condoning this type of economic behavior, however merely commenting this is how global culture is and, if we want to minimize that, we have to start "similar but different" and move gradually where we would like to be from there.
The tricky part is that every attempt "similar but different" before has been historically co-opted and lost its original sense of direction. (which few people appreciate the risk of losing themselves to the sheer complexity of the world, even when conclusions derived from naivety ironically turn out more accurate to reality than conclusions derived after having encountered many more parts of the world already [ this can be since the more naive one more easily takes the role of an isolated observer, than one who has talked personally or had personal dealing with many different cultures. Much like the blind leading the blind. ])