David Farnor | On 20, Jun 2014

22 million Brits are still buying DVDs, according to the British Video Association.

The BVA Yearbook, published last week, reveals that more than 22 million folk purchased a film on good old-fashioned discs last year, compared to the 3.3 million people who subscribe to a VOD service, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Video.

The BVA says the stats prove “the overwhelming popularity of Blu-ray Discs and DVDs for watching video entertainment”.

The figures are backed up by recent data from the Entertainment Retailers Association, which found that physical media accounts for a clear majority of home entertainment market sales. However, the ERA Yearbook found that subscription services accounted for just 26 per cent of entertainment revenue in the UK in 2014, with ownership models proving the biggest beast, accounting for 74pc of sales. That includes pay-per-view electronic services, such as iTunes.

But even here, the BVA research reveals that owning a disc “firmly remains” the preference over a digital download, which the BVA attributes to family viewing. Indeed, 92 per cent of consumers’ expenditure is on physical discs and just 8 per cent on digital video, while Blu-ray sales grew 10 per cent thanks to the appeal of HD video and gigantic TVs. (Sales of screens bigger than 50” jumped 21 per cent last year.)

While the hoome movies market may be broadly traditional, though, digital media is certainly growing. Digital transactions totalled £618 million in 2013, a surge of 40 per cent, found the ERA.

Indeed, while 73 per cent of the total £2.24 billion video market remains in a physical format, according to the BVA, most of Britain’s video viewing is “increasingly made up of a combination of disc and digital services to suit today’s lifestyles”.

BVA Director General Lavinia Carey comments: “British people have always been passionate about video, be it film, TV, children’s, music, live comedy or sport and fitness. It is testament to video’s massive popular appeal that in a tough economic environment consumer spend in 2013 remained strong and even grew 0.5 per cent year on year. The nature of video viewing is changing and our Members are rising to that challenge and working hard with retailers and the wider industry to provide audiences with great content on all the formats possible to suit every taste.”

The Yearbook follows a forecast by PwC that the total combined revenue from OTT/streaming services and broadcasters’ video on demand services will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 19.9 per cent, eventually exceeding physical home video revenue in 2018.

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