Let’s Get Physical

Originally released on October 18 on Substack. Well, this was supposed to be a short, well-planned out episode of the Emerald City Video podcast… but I guess that you all know us better than we do. We went longer than expected. This week/month we start a new series of newsy discussions on the state of physical media. This is the Emerald City Video Podcast after all, we started this whole thing based off of working at video rental stores obsessed with movies that we could hold in our hands. The past month has had it’s ups and downs when it comes to movies in a tangible form - Netflix ditched its DVD rental site but at the same time we’ve seen the largest number of discs be made ever. It’s an odd time for the Luddite movie appreciator. According to the report, the total number of titles released in 2023 is on pace to be over 28,000 -- that's more than 5,000 more than last year...which is the current record-holder for the most titles ever released on disc. The number of titles has been creeping upwards since 2016, with the pandemic marking a big increase. Looking at a chart included in the story, it appears the high water mark for official releases was 2006, just prior to the release of the Blu-ray format. The numbers crept downward after that, before suddenly getting markedly higher beginning in 2021. Well, I won’t tease too much of the episode here, other than to say physical is here to stay. The links we mention in the show are below. I do apologize for not really reading that one oped well enough to see what they were going for. You’ll understand what I’m talking about when we get to it. We’re now uploading every episode of ECV on YouTube with video - whether you like looking at our ugly mugs or not.

You can listen to Let’s Get Physical online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Let’s Get Physical is an episode from Emerald City Video by Russ Burlingame.

This episode is 108:29 long.

This episode was published on Nov 21, 2023.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Emerald City Video when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.