In February, VIP+ sounded the alarm for the DVD business, predicting that the once-dominant home entertainment medium would disappear within a year. Now, just past the halfway point of 2024, our hypothesis is looking increasingly correct.

But even before Digital Entertainment Group released its semi-annual “Digital Media Entertainment Report” for 2024, things weren’t looking good for physical media. The site stopped tracking physical rental spend this year, simply saying the industry was too small to even bother, citing Netflix’s closure of its rental business as the final nail in the coffin. With the recent news of Redbox’s demise, it seems DEG may have had a good hunch about the fate of the disc rental market.

U.S. physical drive spending reached $218 million for Q2, down nearly 30% from the same period last year. Thanks to a relatively stronger Q1, physical drive sales have generated about $451 million year to date, which is still down about 22% from the first half of 2023 (and down 52.38% since mid-2021).

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