EDITORIAL TPhysical Media vs. Streaming he popularity of streaming movies, which peaked during the height of the COVID pandemic, generated many premature predictions of “The Death of Movie Theaters.” We responded to those dire prognostications in previous editorials, arguing that the competition between streaming and traditional theatrical moviegoing is not a zero-sum game. Despite competition for viewers, both means can coexist. Indeed, we cited statistics showing that those who are among the highest viewers of movies on streaming platforms are also the most frequent theatrical moviegoers. More recently, we have seen similar portentous proclamations about how streaming will lead to “The Death of Physical Media.” To paraphrase Mark Twain’s apocryphal statement, after reading his obituary, both these gloomy claims “have been greatly exaggerated.” We believe that what the marketplace calls “physical media,” and what the rest of us know as DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra High Definition discs, will not be going to die anytime soon. While there is some overlap, these two means of viewing movies appeal to different groups. There is no denying the rapid growth of the streaming audience. By the summer of 2022, for the first time, the number of streaming subscribers outnumbered viewers of cable or broadcast television. Since then, however, many “cord cutters” who canceled their cable subscriptions in favor of streaming have learned that desirable “content” is spread over many different platforms and they have to decide how many subscriptions they can afford. Even worse, today many streaming services are increasing their subscription fees while offering fewer titles, due to the loss of licensing rights or the need to delete underperforming and backcatalog titles, with many films suddenly disappearing from the menu. Netflix, for example, the most popular streaming service worldwide, now offers less than five percent of the titles it did during its DVD rental heyday. Many viewers who watch films on streaming platforms complain that the image is often very dark, with a great loss of visual detail, especially in films featuring low-key lighting (think film noir and horror films), because streaming services, which send their films over the Internet, often use a highly compressed digital file (ten to fifteen gigabytes) compared to those for Blu-ray and 4K UHD discs. Some platforms, such as Netflix, enable streaming 4K files if you have a high-speed broadband Internet connection and pay a higher fee. But knowledgeable viewers have noted that some films are not shown in the correct aspect ratio and are “edited for content” (i.e., censored) for profanity or racially insensitive dialogue, often with entire scenes eliminated. Those viewers who prefer Blu-ray and the new 4K UHD discs—or even the older DVD format for those who haven’t upgraded to 4K players or televisions—do so because they offer a far superior visual and audio experience. The size of the digital file for a Blu-ray disc, for example, ranges from twenty-five to fifty gigabytes, yielding an image of 1920 x 1080 pixels, while a 4K UHD disc ranges between seventy to ninety gigabytes, yielding an image of 3840 x 2160 pixels, so both formats provide an image that more closely approximates the wider color spectrum, deeper blacks, brightness level, and visual detail that the human eye is capable of seeing. Physical media is thus favored by scholars, collectors, writers, and cinephiles, who also appreciate the many supplementary features available, including commentary tracks, making-of documentaries, filmmaker profiles and interviews, deleted scenes, and interviews with film historians. What is particularly frustrating for such viewers, however, is that some streaming platforms, including Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and Apple TV+, do not offer physical media releases. It’s understandable that they prefer to maintain subscribers rather than also releasing discs, which they fear would undercut their monthly subscription revenues. The Criterion Collection has come to the rescue in some instances, releasing Blu-ray editions of such Netflix productions as Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. But too many other Netflix titles remain unavailable in any commercially released Blu-ray or 4K UHD editions. If you’d like to buy a Blu-ray of the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the only option at the present time is to buy a barebones Chinese import Region C Blu-ray on eBay, for which you’ll need an all-regions player. Even though the mainstream market for physical media has declined significantly in recent years—as has the theatrical market—the niche market for the new 4K UHD releases is growing. In fact, this is an auspicious period for those with more than a casual interest in cinema, with longtime industry leader Criterion now complemented by boutique distributors—such as Radiance Films, Second Run DVD, Undercrank Productions, Kino Lorber, Imprint Films, Eureka!, Indicator, and Flicker Alley, to name only a few—which are releasing a wide variety of art films, foreign releases, documentaries, silent films, studio classics, and cult films, often in supplement-loaded collector’s editions. At the present time, one hundred or more new Blu-ray and 4K UHD discs are released each month. Although Cineaste can cover only a small fraction of them, we’ll continue to alert our readers to the most noteworthy new releases, with full-length and capsule reviews as well as the occasional feature article about an important new Blu-ray box set, where we promise not to refer to them as “physical media.”—The Editors Founder and Editor-in-Chief GARY CROWDUS Editorial Board ROBERT CASHILL KEVIN LALLY Contributing Editors ROY GRUNDMANN CYNTHIA LUCIA RICHARD PORTON LEONARD QUART DENNIS WEST Assistant Editors JANET C. BURKE WILL DiGRAVIO DIANA DRUMM CYNTHIA ROWELL Associates PAUL CRONIN THOMAS DOHERTY JEAN-MICHEL FRODON GRAHAM FULLER JOHN HILL STUART LIEBMAN ADRIAN MARTIN LOUIS MENASHE IMOGEN SARA SMITH DEBORAH YOUNG Contributing Writers Adam Bingham, Mary F. 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