The end of Blu-ray

 Thanks to the rise of streaming, Samsung is discontinuing its Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray player lines. That's lousy news for people who love older TV shows and movies.

Over 10 years ago, Samsung released the first commercial Blu-ray video disc player. Within a few years, Samsung and other Blu-ray OEMs had defeated their rival HD DVD manufacturers. They were set to dominate the video world. Then, streaming came along and everything changed.

Blu-ray is dead.

It's not often that an industry's leading OEM quits, but that's what Samsung has done. Samsung had 37 percent of the market, followed by Sony at 31 percent and LG at 13 percent, according to market research firm NPD Group. On Amazon, Samsung had four of Amazon's 10 best-selling Blu-ray players including the most popular model.

With its demise, Blu-ray follows Laserdisc, BetaMax, and VHS VCRs into the second-hand stores. DVDs may soon follow. Ted Sarandos, Netflix's longtime head of content told Variety, even though Netflix still has three-million DVD subscribers, "We never spent one minute trying to save the DVD business."  

Why? It's all because of streaming.

The numbers speak for themselves. According to the Digital Entertainment Group 2018 home entertainment report, we spent more than ever on video last year,  $23.3 billion, up 11.5 percent from 2017. Of that, subscription streaming -- led by Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu -- took the lion's share, with a 30 percent year-over-year rise  to $12.9 billion. We also bought and rented another $4.55 billion worth of online movies and TV shows.

Blu-ray? Even with the growing popularity of 4K Blu-ray, movie, and TV show sales only came to $4.03 billion. That's a 14.6-percent drop from 2017.

At the same time, the far less expensive streaming-devices sales from companies like Roku are growing. By NPD's count, streaming players sales from 33.3 million in November 2015 to 67.8 million in November 2018. A recent Deloitte study shows that in the past 10 years the number of households subscribing to paid streaming-video services has grown by nearly 500 percent.

Samsung is just beating the rush to the door.

Stephen Baker, NPD's VP of industry analysis, speculated to TECH NEWS that Samsung was exiting the Blu-ray business because of low hardware margins and how people are moving to streaming for their video entertainment. "Samsung's exit is likely a combination of all (these) things....declining sales with little outlook for ASP (average selling price) increases, leading to lower margins. The market's increase in streaming and (Samsung's) imminent integration of both AirPlay and iTunes into its TV streaming platform directly mitigates the need for a player."

While this makes perfect business sense, as someone who's been collecting video since the VHS days, this move leaves me cold. I have many movies and TV shows that are unlikely to ever be available on a stream.

Besides, as ReelGood, a company, which tracks streaming services, recently observed Netflix and the like don't actually have that many movies in their libraries. Amazon has the most with 12,764, followed by Netflix with 3,861, and Hulu with 1,646. Even with all those titles there's little crossover between them and what's actually available changes at the beginning of every month.

This means that to make sure you can stream the most popular recent movies, you need subscriptions to all three services. Oh, make that four, with Disney launching its own streaming channel, with exclusive rights to Disney, Star Wars, and Marvel Cinematic Universe films, you'll probably want to subscribe to it as well.