It was Sentai Filmworks’ Matt Greenfield, then at ADV Films, who uttered the magic words to me at a party in 2001: “The next format is no format.” And for many of you, watching anime on a laptop screen in your bedroom, streaming it straight from the interwebs, that prophecy has come to pass. What surprises me 17 years later is that it’s still not true for so many of us – the anime market remains a healthy niche in the entertainment business, possibly because anime fans were some of the first to notice that online streaming sites were anything but permanent archives.

But anime fans without a Blu-ray player may soon have little choice except to knuckle up and buy one. Companies all over the globe are giving up on DVD, and with the likes of Sentai Filmworks in the USA, and Madman in Australia not even bothering to burn DVD masters any more, this inevitably affects those companies that rely on them for materials. Now, in Britain, MVM’s Tony Allen announces that his company is releasing Flip Flappers only on Blu-ray, because DVD masters were not forthcoming from his overseas partners.

This column reported way back in NEO #95 on the decision by Bandai America to give up on DVD. If it’s taken another six years for everybody else to catch up, it’s because Bandai trusted other companies to take up the slack by licensing the products for DVD themselves. This latest round of cancellations reflects the fact they have stopped bothering.

Even though only 15% of the UK public seemingly owns a Blu-ray player, roughly 60% of anime sales are on Blu-ray. It well be that the true figure is significantly higher, and that many of the DVDs “sold” in dual-format packs are little more than throwaway coasters to purchasers who don’t need them – we can’t say for sure.

But American Blu-ray sales peaked in 2013 and have been plummeting ever since. Last year, Den of Geek observed that Cameron Crow’s Aloha (2014) didn’t even go “straight to DVD” in the UK, but went straight-to-streaming. Could it be curtains for all discs…

“Packaged goods”, as they’re known, still form a crucial part of the anime market, because without a physical disc containing the film, it’s impossible for a distributor to sell you the box that it comes in, with the foil on the box, and the special foldy-out thing, and the liner notes, and all the other things that create value in a collector’s edition. So Blu-ray is here to stay, at least in anime, at least for the immediate future. There can be no flip flapping on that.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #179, 2018.