This was known about HDDVDs a few years back too. I pulled my Harry Potter collection out for my kids and their friends to watch and evntually concluded that every single WB disk was bad, even some that weren't even opened. It was unique to WB, other companies disks continued to mostly work.
Some people online at the time mentioned WB replaced a few of their disks with bluray's but I never managed to get WB to respond to my inquiries.
I ended up flying the jolly roger, I mean I own a legal copy, so its just format shifting...
Yeah, it would seem if they're not responsible for providing a disk that as a documented and known longevity, there's really nothing you're buying but a license to view the material and that's unrevokable.
Ah, I bet this is what happened with my boxed set of extended edition Lord of the Rings trilogy. I bought it years ago, finally opened it a few months back to show my kids—only to find that several of the disks failed half-way through. That was a really frustrating experience.
It's been a couple of decades, but I believe that was the one that had an issue at time of purchase (which they replaced). The replacement worked about five years ago when we last watched it.
Beyond personal images and documents of important, this was the second reason for establishing a home NAS with 3,2,1 backup [1]. Physical media fails, so you better have a plan for dealing with that if you care to maintain access.
I don't think it's obviously reasonable unless you also get (or pay for) a 100 year manufacturer's warranty.
Yet the comments here talk like we have norms that don't exist. The actual norms we have are that you're SOL if your product breaks after the warranty, even due to a defect, and even for things that cost 1000x the price of a DVD.
And that's what WB is offering, isn't it? A replacement. The question is whether you should expect to own and use something for almost 20 years, then get a refund. It'd be nice if they provided one, but I wouldn't say it's obvious to me that they must.
When no replacement discs are available, that's a more interesting edge case where they should feel obligated to do something to make it right in some other way, and I'd say a refund should be on the table.
I wouldn't expect refunds for a product, but I would for a perpetual license to a copyrighted work that I couldn't access anymore. They can't have it both ways.
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Some people online at the time mentioned WB replaced a few of their disks with bluray's but I never managed to get WB to respond to my inquiries.
I ended up flying the jolly roger, I mean I own a legal copy, so its just format shifting...
[1](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/)
At some point, things just don't work anymore, even if two decades is significantly less time than other DVDs.
When your media is advertised to last for 100 years, it is reasonable to want a replacement when it lasts less than a quarter of that time
Yet the comments here talk like we have norms that don't exist. The actual norms we have are that you're SOL if your product breaks after the warranty, even due to a defect, and even for things that cost 1000x the price of a DVD.
When no replacement discs are available, that's a more interesting edge case where they should feel obligated to do something to make it right in some other way, and I'd say a refund should be on the table.
Heck, I have DiscoVision discs from the 70s that still work.
DVDs from 2006 should definitely still work.
Also, storage conditions can deeply affect how well a medium lasts but that's no excuse for defective discs.
It would be like if you had a known batch of badly-bound books that fell apart prematurely even under good storage conditions.
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If I can't pirate it, then I expect it to be replaced, this is the system they demanded.
I would for my cello if a repair or replacement wasn't doable because it came with a lifetime warranty against defects.