Real world article
(written from a production point of view)
Star Trek: Lower Decks - Season Three is a Blu-ray Disc release featuring the complete third season of Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Blu-ray back cover
While in a very few cases still being marketed as region-restricted, this release is in actuality region-free as it had become commonplace for the Blu-ray format by 2021 – explaining the unified contents for all regions. For this particular release though, this became especially pertinent for the below-mentioned reasons. The same reasons have also come into play for not having this outing also released in the limited SteelBook® variant.
Disc contents[]
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| 1 |
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| 2 |
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Background information[]
- The Star Trek franchise has selected this release as its first one to experiment with the "manufactured-on-demand" (MOD) only format, meaning that no stock for retailers (the so-called SKUs – Stock Keeping Units) was produced. This was not motivated by a lack of interest in Lower Decks, which has proven to be quite the fan-favorite, but rather with generic societal trends which has seen a rapid decline in interest of owning home videos in physical formats – and thus declining disc sales – in favor of digital availability. Still, for those customer fans still preferring to own their home video productions in physical format, the on demand option was introduced at selected online retailers, Amazon.com in particular, to have a Blu-ray disc format professionally manufactured to industry standards. Nor was this restricted to customers in the American home market alone, as it was also applicable worldwide, which resulted in a truly region-free release with unified disc content for all markets. [1] It was an obvious experiment by the franchise to see what cost-saving effects this release strategy could realize, and as part of of this, Blu-ray copies came without the cardboard slipcover, retail stock copies were usually endowed with.
- This was not the first Star Trek-related High Definition title released in the MOD format; eight years earlier Amazon had already employed the format for the non-franchise William Shatner Presents: Chaos on the Bridge release, when they offered their clientele a HD version option if ordered at the company.
- Remarkably, the MOD format was not applied to the DVD counterpart release (which came with a slipcover, incidentally), because DVD releases only enjoy an one-time-only pressing in the current market – meaning that once sold out, no new DVD batches are manufactured afterwards.
- Still, the MOD experiment for the Blu-ray format seemed to have ended less than a year later as more traditional 2024 releases took place in European Region B territories.
- This particular release is one of the few individual Star Trek releases followed by the professional industry site The Numbers and for which domestic US home video format sales are known; The Numbers has reported that by April 2025 domestic sales had been realized of US$766,000 for both this and its DVD counterpart releases. [2] The for a highly popular Star Trek production seemingly disappointing sales can only be explained by the generic societal trend issues at play, which had nothing to do with the show's reception, additionally explaining the diminishing sales of physical home video formats. (see: main article)
External link[]
| Previous release: SNW Season 1 Blu-ray |
Star Trek: Lower Decks Blu-ray |
Next release: PIC Season 3 Blu-ray |
| Previous series release: LD Season 2 Blu-ray |
Next series release: LD Season 4 Blu-ray |
| DVD • Blu-ray • Digital |