When you think about the history of home entertainment such as the television, there are many important events that stand out showing the change from physical to digital entertainment. In the year 1999, the DVR (digital video recorder) was invented; this began a momentous change. Here was a device that would let people record programs, watch them when they wanted and skip through commercials. Although the DVR was very successful, in 2007, Netflix introduced video streaming and is now growing more and more popular since then, looking at the consumer spending between physical devices and digital devices. Now, services like Netflix, Hulu, and RedBox allow us to digitally download, stream, and rent.
The access to digitally watch movies and episodes can save time but can be distracting, as freshman Rebecca Kerns stated, “Having Netflix is a good time saver when it comes to finding movies but once I get hooked into a show, I will sit for hours watching it with my family.” Before Netflix was brought out into the world, people had to find the time to go out and purchase DVDs and movies and it could be difficult to find the movie you were looking for. Now, with a click of a button you can open Netflix and see a menu with hundreds of choices of movies and series to watch, and if you can’t find the movie you wanted you can search for it in the search box.
According to the Mid-year 2015 home entertainment report released July 31 by DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group, home entertainment spending remained the same in the first half of this year. In the first half of 2015, at $8.76 billion, there was a slight rise on consumer spending from the first half of 2014 which started at $8.72 billion. A large amount of that growth is from digital entertainment buyers including Netflix or buying movies and TV shows on the internet.
The second quarter of this year marked that consumers spent more on digital delivery options than physical media ($2.1 billion for digital vs. $2 billion). Video-on-demand rentals and video-on-demand subscriptions accounted for 52% of all home entertainment spending in the second quarter. The first half of this year as a whole, physical media marked more than 50% of the marketing, which held $4.4 billion and digital held $4.3 billion.
According to Brian Robbins, the founder of AwesomenessTV and a provider of YouTube channels states, “The next generation, our audience and even younger, they don’t even know what live TV is. They live in an on-demand world.”