image source, Getty Images
- Author, Michael Race
- Role, Business reporter, BBC News
More shoppers are buying Blu-Ray and DVD movies and TV shows despite the rise of streaming platforms, HMV’s boss has said.
Phil Halliday, chief executive of HMV, said the retailer was in “good health” and all its main product areas were growing again.
Mr Halliday said sales of “physical visual” were up, adding that “4K and Blu-Ray are doing particularly well”, but the figures suggested sales were still falling across the industry.
“When streaming first came out, I think a lot of people saw it as cheap and with a huge breadth of choice, but I’m not sure people see it that way now,” he said.
“People are willing to pay for a physical copy of shows or movies they know they’ll watch again.”
The HMV boss compared the rise in DVD sales to people buying and collecting CDs and vinyl records. A BBC spokesman said its “visual category” grew by 5% in the first half of 2024, “with growth mainly driven by high definition formats”.
The numbers suggest that DVD and Blu-Ray sales in general continue to decline.
The industry body added “physical retail” video sales were £169.7m last year, down 18.8% from 2022.
The rise of streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have allowed households to access movies and TV shows without having to own physical discs.
This has led to a steady decline in DVD and Blu-Ray sales over the past decade, with some retailers such as Sainsbury’s supermarket no longer selling CDs and DVDs due to falling revenues.
DVD sales peaked in the early 2000s, and Finding Nemo became the best-selling DVD of all time, Finding Nemo when it was released in 2003, moving 38.8 million copies.
However, there are still people who have committed to buying physical movies and TV shows, so they actually own a copy and can access it when streaming services change their content libraries or remove titles.
“There’s a danger these days that if things only exist in a streaming version, they’ll be taken down. They come and go – just like broadcast versions of movies…. But the home video version is something that can always be there for people to go to they always had access,” Christopher Nolan, an Oppenheimer director, told the Washington Post last year.
Alice Enders, head of research at Enders Analysis, told the BBC that while streaming had become popular, “the physical format never really went away, as vinyl really shows”.
“In Japan, CD+DVD is still far ahead of digital because merchandise is a key part of the live j-pop experience and establishing history at home is the highest honor,” she said.
“HMV is not the only supplier to benefit from this resurgence in print, as seen in books too.”
Canadian music retailer Doug Putman, owner of Sunrise Records, bought HMV in a rescue deal in 2019 after it fell into administration for the second time in less than a decade.
Last year, the retailer reopened its flagship store on London’s Oxford Street after a four-year hiatus. The brand, called “His Master’s Voice”, was founded by English composer Edward Elgar in 1921 and sold gramophones, radios and popular music recordings.
Mr Halliday said the Oxford Street store had been doing well since reopening.
“It was a step forward for the business,” he said. “The store is a big site and it was really fun to work on it and bring it back to life.
“But it’s important to say that we’re not just shops like Oxford Street. To be honest, our bread and butter is that we have so many great shops in communities across the UK.”
“At the moment I think we’ve got really good coverage in terms of the UK location and we’re happy with the way the business is trading right now.”