[Taikonerd]

> With this news, I have to wonder how much longer bluray will live.

I hope that physical media sticks around. DVDs and Blu-rays often include something that digital releases don't: director's commentaries, "making of" featurettes, and other extras.

For me, it adds a whole new layer of fun to movies I already like.

[TFNA]

The heyday of commentary tracks and extras was long ago, over a decade ago. Except for a few boutique labels like Criterion, distributors found that adding such extra features often wasn’t worth their while in the face of declining physical media sales. So, increasingly one just got the film and little else.

[projektfu]

I assume they only did it to explain why the DVD cost more than the VHS you might already have. Even with Redbox you probably didn't have the DVD long enough to get a chance to watch the extra content.

[saturn8601]

I am very annoyed by this with the recent surprise smash hit of the movie 'Obsession'. This is a new director made popular by his devoted fan base and they just announced the blueray. One director commentary, a tiny 'featurette' and then just the film.

I remember back in the heyday of physical media(2010s) directors like Edgar Wright took curation of physical media extremely seriously: Multiple commentaries by not only the director but with the cast, production crew, sound designers etc. Deleted scenes, multiple featurettes and even picture slideshows.

I wonder how much the design of Blueray menus is hampered by the tech choices used in the format. DVDs were video files that repeated with tiny overlays that the player would just draw. Bluray seem to be entire Java applications of which most studios develop one generic version and reuse for every release.

[jaggederest]

I wish companies would release these for promotional purposes on e.g. youtube or equivalent.

[lathiat]

Apple includes these in digital purchases from the iTunes Store. It’s part of “iTunes Extra”.

But I never see them anywhere else. Especially streaming. A real loss.

[chocochunks]

Even then they don't include everything on the disc. If you buy anime on Blu-ray or DVD it's really common to get both the original Japanese audio and the English dub. Even on iTunes they are often separate releases (although it looks like that's finally changing.

[account42]

Personally I'd rather see those bits spent on a better encode of the main feature.