New US report: DVD sales fall by 86% in a decade

by Simon Brew | November 12, 2019

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The sales of DVDs have fallen off a cliff in just over a decade, as people spend on streaming services instead.

A new report in America has identified that sales of DVD have fallen by over 86% since 2008, when the format was pretty much as its peak.

In the States, the market hit a height of $16.3bn in DVD sales back in 2005, but the format initially found itself at the mercy of the global financial crash. Sales fell 26% between 2007 and 2008, and haven’t recovered since.

When the economy did recover, digital downloads were slowly coming into vogue (although Blu-ray snapped up a little bit of market share too), and more recently, it’s been streaming that’s taken people’s dollar. Streaming platforms in the US are now attracting $12.9bn in annual spending, and that’s still on the rise, up from zero in 2011.

In the UK, sales of DVD are similarly continuing to fall, as more people shy away from physical media. That accounts too for the declining amount of extra features on discs, as for many companies, it’s no longer worth the financial outlay on anything but a premium title.

In brighter news, boutique and collectors’ disc labels are flourishing. But there’s little getting away that the picture for the DVD format is a grim one.

Here’s the full report at CNBC. Do note that this is for the US market only.