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The home video industry has managed to record its first rise in consumer spending in years, as both Blu-ray and the booming streaming market helped revenue to rise 2.5% for the first quarter of 2012, according to figures composed by DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group.

While disc based sales were still down, the decline seems to have stabilized, with discs sales down only 1% compared to a year ago. Blu-ray revenue was up 23%, which helped to offset most of the losses from DVD sales. Overall, consumers spend $2.06 billion on disc buys in Q1 2012.

But the real star was subscription based streaming, dominated by Netflix, and to lesser extents by other players including Hulu and Amazon. Revenue rose a spectacular 545.5% to $548.6 million. Video-on-demand services also posted a rise in revenue, but at a much slower pace of 6.8%.

The cloud part of the silver lining was largely caused by the brick-and-mortar disc rental industry, with a decline of 39.4%, and Netflix disc rentals, down 48%. Revenue from Redbox and other kiosk rentals, on the other hand, were up 30.1%.

So the overall pictures points to consumers embracing the new, at the expense of the old, with streaming and VOD playing an ever more important role in video delivery. Even the much maligned UltraViolet cloud based movie storage service managed to increase its number of subscribers to 2 million.