“Did not come to pass”? A million disc rental customers quit renting discs - prematurely. Sure, Netflix is doing an about-face, but 7 digits of people have now given up physical movie media outright. Between the kids destroying discs and me sampling “anything, now, for at most a few bucks” I’m dropping discs outright, along with a lot of others.
This along with a new generation used to not possessing physical media. Had a lunchroom chat with co-workers about the future influence of CDs: one looked on a bit puzzled for a while, then observed she hadn’t purchased any CDs for 10 years - all music obtained by paid downloads. Likewise, discs (DVD, BluRay, NextUberFormatHere) will pass as instant cheap access will be preferred, accentuated by the realization few people watch any given movie/show more than once or twice, cheaper to rent and easier to not store.
Looking more like an analogy where Coke convinced a vast segment of their customers that water was better & cheaper.
That was more tied to the price hike than anything. Which is actually OK in Netflix’s book. The whole plan for them has always been to be all streaming eventually, discs are incredibly expensive on every level for them, buying them, sorting them, mailing them, buying them again when they get damaged. The primary reason they even considered the qwikster thing was because people weren’t fleeing from the DVDs fast enough. All this thing really proved is that this thing they always planned to be temporary has more life in it than they hoped, but with the new prices things stay profitable.
Discs still have some stuff to draw people to them. Not the least of which is permanence. With the vagueries of the streaming world the movie you want to watch might not be available when you want it. You own an MP3 even if you didn’t get it from a CD, you don’t own the stream. As anybody watching a Starz series on Netflix has learned, if your stream provider and the distributor decide they aren’t getting along anymore you’re SOL. Where as people who owned their favorite Starz series didn’t care, they owned it.
Actually bottled water is more expensive than coke, but it’s OK because the biggest bottled water brands on the shelf are all owned by coke. Go ahead and stop drinking coke because dasani is healthier, the boys in Atlanta don’t mind.