@jalefkowit I think there is also a segment of the market of elderly DVD buyers that are not comfortable with streaming options. A lot of 75+ year olds never fully embraced the digital lifestyle.

It makes me wonder if someone couldn’t make a penny stealing a trick from the earliest days of DVD.

When the first wave of DVD movies were released in the mid-‘90s, nobody was really sure how much they should cost. Some studios went luxe with fancy packaging and lots of extras, appealing to the collector market that was then on LaserDisc. Warner Bros. went the opposite direction. Their goal was the lowest possible price for the biggest possible market, and to get there they cut every conceivable corner: cardboard “snap cases” rather than plastic, no extra features whatsoever. Just a disc with a movie on it in a cheap paper case. It didn’t appeal to collectors, but their DVDs were several dollars cheaper than anyone else’s.

The market eventually stabilized a little more upmarket than that, and WB soon met everyone else there with the same packaging and features. But today, if the only DVD customer left is the extremely price-sensitive customer, maybe studios could pad their margins a little by selling that customer a disc in a cardboard case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_case