Back in February, VIP+ heralded the end of the DVD business, predicting the demise of the once-dominant home entertainment medium within a year. Now, just past the halfway mark of 2024, our hypothesis seems increasingly accurate.

But even before Digital Entertainment Group released its 2024 mid-year Digital Media Entertainment Report, things weren’t looking good for physical media. The website stopped tracking physical rental spending this year simply because the sector was too small to care, citing Netflix’s closure of its rental business as the final nail in the coffin. Given recent news of Redbox’s bankruptcy, DEG seems to have had the right guess about the fate of the disc rental market.

Physical disc spending in the U.S. reached $218 million in the second quarter, down nearly 30% from the same period last year. Thanks to a relatively stronger first quarter, physical sales have so far totaled around $451 million, still down about 22% from the first half of 2023 (and down 52.38% since mid-2021).

Speaking of last year, DEG lumped 2023 sales and rentals together as “physical product” and didn’t disclose the exact breakdown. (Starting in 2024, physical products are just sales.) But with the new report and some basic math, we now know those breakdowns for the first half of 2023, and physical sales fell below $300 million for the first time. Rentals, meanwhile, were stagnating in the $80 million range before Netflix even shut down its mail service.

To be fair, this year’s second quarter was slower overall due to a 10 percent decline in box office receipts for films released for home theater in the second quarter. DEG points to the first quarter of 2024 to illustrate the key role of theatrical releases in home entertainment spending, citing the boost from major films hitting the home market in late 2023, including “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning,” “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”

It’s worth noting that these films were also the last major releases before the Hollywood strikes brought theatrical releases to a halt. As VIP+ anticipated in February, we’ll likely still see the delayed impact of the strikes on home entertainment later this year.

Still, catalog titles continue to be a bright spot for physical media. Collectible disc formats for older releases saw a rebound in the second quarter, with spending on SteelBooks up 44% and 4K UHD Blu-rays up 16%. For physical media purists, these numbers are promising signs of the DVD’s rebirth as a specialty product alongside vinyl. Still, these increases may not be enough to convince Target or Walmart to reallocate shelf space to DVDs and Blu-rays.

But while DVD continues to enjoy support from movie fans, its impact on the home entertainment world is surprisingly small. The $218 million generated by physical products represented less than 2% of the $12.8 billion generated in the second quarter.

By comparison, streaming subscriptions generated $11.6 billion during the same period—over 90% of total spending—continuing a decade-long trend of streaming single-handedly supporting the American home entertainment market.