Pretty much all my delivery is on CD / DVD. I put some church recordings online as MP3, but anything commercial they want the shiny spinny disk.

I find that for anything that isn't trivial or transient, people tend to want optical media.

That way it can sit on a shelf and in a few years they (or their audience grouping) can see it and be reminded that it exists, and maybe want to see or hear it again ..... rather than disappear into the oblivion of an over-crowded or long-lost folder or URL.

geoff

Thanks for the replies guys.

Geoff, this is what I was thinking. I find that with the home videos in iTunes, even though they are easy to access, I find that I we never think about watching them. But ever now and then we pick up the CD/DVD/Blu Ray book of discs and throw something in to watch.

Now if there was support for 1080 60p on Blu Ray that would be awesome!

For my clients, that is all digitally delivered via the internet.

This goes along with the "Advice from DVD Sellers / Death of Optical Media" topic a few months ago.

I still burn DVDs. We send out approx. 250 disc every week. This is for church sermons.
As for selling the church does not sell anything. We work on tithes.

For selling, my brother and I set up a company to sell some of the special programs where we do both order the made and burn them also and print the labels on the disc.

You mentioned Adele. Actually, a good number of people are even buying her album on vinyl. It's the whole retro thing.

As for me, doing a lot of weddings, I deliver 4 DVD's, 2 Blu-rays and 1 USB thumb drive with all projects. That covers all bases except streaming.

I do a lot of amateur theatrical performances and they're all delivered on DVD. It's not reasonable to put them on YouTube because they are so long.

I work for a local community college and most work projects these days are uploaded to YouTube to be seen by anyone who wants to.
If it's a theatre play, special awards banquet or graduation ceremony, I'll burn several DVDs for those who still want that format.

Mike

There are more recent threads about this:

Subject: Is Physical Media REALLY Dying?

Subject: How many of you are getting requests for 4K?

Subject: how do you store your footage?

VMP

Absolutely. My main interest is in creating archival storage for future family members. I use M-Disc DVD Video, M-Disc 4.7 for raw video files, and M-Disc BR 25gb for desktop players and raw video file storage. I include as much information as I can as to who is in the video, when and where it was shot, and the video format used. The purpose of this on-going project is to pass on these memories to future generations. There is no guarantee that this work will last, but I can't think of any other way right now. Any suggestions are always appreciated. Thank you in advance if any of you can suggest a better method.

Jim K.

Till last month i was delivering DVD and Blu-Ray. Now i deliver DVD, Blu-Ray and a video in MP4 format on a pendrive.

Pretty much all my delivery is on CD / DVD. Most of my stuff is for Family. I still think Physical is better than electronic but I can see a need for both. If for example a Family member wants to stream something, I can setup a link to a DropBox folder for them, but most of my stuff is still on DVD.

I still prefer physical audio CD's so I can rip them to the format I choose. Plus, if a newer "better" format comes along, I can then re-rip the audio cd to that new format.

I am a person who likes to get something Physical. I make a lot of backups as well using physical media. I am tempted to try the M Disk archive to see how well that really works, but I'm pretty sure I will not be here in 1000 years. If the media can last 1000 years, why are most optical drives still using a rubber-band type of gear? I would have thought optical drives should be using all gears and no rubber-band type of motors.

Just my thought.

Still DVDs for us. We do theatrical, school, and dance events. A very few people have told us recently that they don't even have a DVD player anymore, but only a very few so far. Could get bigger, I realize.
Our main problem is that so far there's not a secure business model to take the place of DVD sales. If we delivered as an MP4 file or a similar format, people could extremely easily copy the file and give copies to others instead of folks purchasing their own copies. I know it's also possible to make copies of a DVD, but it's more of a techno hassle than most people would take the time to do.
We can't put the shows up for purchase via streaming, because the show licensing usually says that video copies can be sold only to folks who were involved with the show (performer-kids, Mom & Dad, etc.)
We're watching for the emergence of a new bizmodel...

I also don't see the model.

A performance or wedding takes place and it is recorded. It still seems to me that a client would want something physical to put on a shelf for storage. Long ago it might be movie film, then videotape, now optical disk. But with the performance on flash media, now what? Label the thumbdrive and stick it in a drawer? Copy it to a big server and assume that you will have that server on-line for many years? Or put a bunch of performances on a BR disk? Then how to label the disk? And isn't there a lot to be said for having the performance on its own medium with its own graphics label and the option of additional supporting printed media inside (i.e. a DVD case)?

So to me it looks like just because one CAN deliver on a thumbdrive doesn't mean it makes that much sense. But I've never done it this way, so perhaps I'm overlooking something. I can certainly see how perhaps a DVD or BR could be packaged together with a thumbdrive so the best of both worlds. In fact, that's not a bad idea.

I see the current trend amongst younger people as scary. They seem to attach no value to anything - actually valuable things tend to get caught up with the transient and disposable scenario. Probably because they got it for free in the first place, and chances are most of it is actually disposable rubbish, but the rest get caught up..

Not meaning necessary 'material value' , but artistic, emotional, and possibly historic value. Just no longer seems to exist.... ;-/

geoff

I agree that there is something about having a physical item that cannot be replaced.

If there is a movie I am interested in, I might rent it from iTunes etc. But if it is one that I love and would watch over again, then I would buy it on Blu Ray.

Same with music, I signed up for Apple Music, but I feel that even though I have access to almost any song I want to listen to, there is something missing. With the CDs I buy, I rip as Apple Lossless and listen from my home stereo connected via my Apple TV. But I know that I have the disc, so I can still pull out the CD cover, have a look at the album artwork, looks at the liner notes, and read lyrics.

Nice to actually have something of value.

"I see the current trend amongst younger people as scary. They seem to attach no value to anything"

In the context of audio/video media, i wonder how much of that is due to the serious over-glut of material available now. When i was a kid i had about 15 8mm cartoon movies that we loved to watch every chance we got. Saturday mornings we got to see a couple hours of cartoons, never to be seen again, until they finally came out on DVD 45 years later. There were maybe half a dozen or fewer shows our family found worth watching on TV, and maybe a good movie 2 or 3 times a year. These things were precious to us.

Today's kids have access to millions of movies/shows/cartoons at their fingertips at all times. I know kids who spend 6+ hours a day watching things. There's simply too much for them to find any significant portion of it "precious", so it all becomes vapid, and mostly meaningless the moment they move on to the next thing.

Just ignore Geoff. He's an old geezer that likes to make knee-jerk broad characteristics of younger people.

I was going to continue with the CreateSpace route for nature videos, but a competitor spilled his beans and said that he makes more money off of monetizing his Youtube channel and is ditching BD/DVD.

It depends on what you are offering?

With just a quick look at these posts, I didn't see anyone mention that BluRay at 25mbps is absolutely stunning. Try uploading that kind of quality online. DVD architect does a fantastic job with this.

Also, its easier to find chapters and special features this way. There are SOME things you don't want to publish online but you can control this with optical media.

I have a couple projects that I need to backup... I have a bunch of BD-R (25GB) laying around. I am wondering if backing up to BD-R has benefits over say a USB external hard drive.

The hard drives that I use cost about $0.04 per GB, while the BD-R media that I use costs about $0.04 per GB (assuming that all 25 GB on the disk is used). While I have a half dozen USB to SATA adapters, I rarely use them to transfer backups. I usually just put a hard disk into a internal SATA connected "hot-swap" adapter. It's a lot faster to move the data to hard disk running at native SATA speed.