> I wonder how much physical media I could acquire if I was to spend the same money that is not being spent on streaming platforms. I bet within a year, I could build up a pretty decent back catalog from used and $5 bins.

This has been the play for a while. I remember when the xbox game pass dropped for the first time. All the younger people were going crazy about how good of a deal it was, and all the tech-weary people could instantly tell that the price will get jacked up again and again and by the time you bail you'll own precisely nothing.

It's not necessarily wrong to take advantage of VC subsidizing you in a bid to gather an audience, but you should always keep in mind that the goal is to have the captive audience so you best have an escape plan, once the prices rise beyond any reasonable point. For movies in particular I struggle how the super-fragmented streaming landscape is worth a damn even if you don't want to sail the seas.

Don't forget your local library. They've often got decent selection especially if you're in a denser area.

Not if you move countries. I moved from the UK to Canada, updated my payment method and all UK purchased content was gone from my itunes account

And yes, there is some elaborate workaround to create a brand new account and share the original with the new but fundamentally I could no longer access what I purchased because I moved. And no, I didn't get a refund for the years of purchased content.

I have recently started doing this too - I prefer r/iTunesMovieDeals for discovering stuff on sale. What I have been trying to optimize for is a low cost per hour and a high critical rating.

For example, I recently got the entire bundle for HBO's Rome for $9.99. That is ~50 minutes per episode (22 episodes), or $0.54/hour, which is not a bad deal! For a casual viewer like me, who might spend <6 hours each week watching TV, this should last a little more than 3 weeks. Recently, The Sopranos went on sale for $29.99, or $0.38/hour.

For streaming vs. buying to work, you just have to be patient about nabbing ~1-2 purchases per month and not be tempted to buy every single day.

The best part is the reduced cognitive load - you don't have to spend time browsing for content every day, and there are no ads, too.

Yeah, my iTunes library is over 20 years old and it's more valuable to me now than ever. The iPod halo effect lives on.

Once or twice a year during the holiday sales season I'll buy some new shows/seasons from iTunes. These are always downloaded and backed up, so I never have to worry about license changes, etc.

For old shows (20+ years) I will either rip the old DVDs or torrent guilt free.

When I travel, I load up my iPad or an SD card with my latest queue of shows so I can stick to my weekly TV schedule..

And I spend nothing on streaming.

iTunes is more trustworthy for this, but keep in mind not every service where you can buy things will be. Sony did just revoke movies this year and I wouldn't really rely on Google or Amazon for it at least

> buying Movies and TV on iTunes. Yes you don't "own it" and yes there are the rare occasional license revocations but it's not often enough for me to care about that--They still remain in your library anyways.

agreed : have been doing that since 15ish years ago, works fine, no time squandered on stupid ass "ask your doctor about ___" ads, and that time saved is hugely valuable.

The underlying principle is also more important than ever.

Laws and morals are not the same thing. What is legal may be immoral. What is illegal may be moral.

More and more I'm politically frustrated by government leaders and society just openly ignoring the law--although, I guess I did sort of argue that's sometimes okay in the last paragraph...

I guess it comes down to this. What laws do you elevate above others? What laws do you consider acceptable to ignore, and what laws do you consider morally valid?

There are some who commit moral atrocities because it's the law, we know it's sad but the law is really important and must be enforced, and then in the next breath they start an illegal war of aggression and bomb hundreds of kids. I guess the law was never really their greatest concern. Sorry if I'm being a bit too on the nose.

Yes and on top of that governments don't care enough about my personal information, so until this is fixed I'm not going to care about any IP or copyright laws either.

Further, big AI companies don't care about copyright laws, so I assume this is the current reality.

Laws only make sense if they are fair and applied equally.

Yarrr! The high seas are full of physical disks and have very few ads!

Yup - my take is this is coming for absolutely everything. (it's already mostly here for tv).

Rent-seeking behavior is too good to give up, so companies will move all content to streaming only services (games, movies, tv, music, books, etc...) in the majority of cases.

Physical media will only be available at very high prices, for a very limited selection of content.

We will go from "doctrine of first sale" around content licensing to the utterly crippled "you own a temporary, non-transferrable, and ephemeral license to stream this content from us on exactly this service using only approved devices until we decide otherwise".

The moral action in this case is to simply stop paying. Period.

Long term - we should be fighting to enshrine a new flavor of "doctrine of first sale" for the digital age.

Ex - maybe purchasing any content license sold with the word "buy" should enshrine your right to use, transfer, sell, or otherwise consume in any reasonable form that content for the duration of the copyright + 7 years. And we will not enforce copyright for items that can't be bought (only rented).

Local stores around here no longer carry blu-ray media since sales have fallen off and few people even own the players. Bought a bunch of clearance discs last year but that might be it.

See SONY pulling out of the Blu-ray player market.

My partner and I started doing this to replicate the blockbuster experience. Show up on a Friday, wander through the racks, see what jumps out. It’s been a lot of fun and I like supporting the local library.

And if you want Library Streaming, check out Kanopy. Also has an AppleTV app.

I have about 100TB of Linux ISO's for precisely this reason. I think of it like the doomsday prepping of storing canned goods for the collapse. Instead I store media on hard drives so if the landscape of the internet changes in 10 years at least I can rewatch Frasier for the rest of my life.

I'm mildly short on HDD space right now due to hardware prices, but I want to hoard some local LLM models as well, again not for a current need, but just in case something changes.

They already did that in the 2000s, it didn’t work.

It is amazing the number of variations of Linux distros that people are willing to try for such a short amount of time before switching to the next.

My TV doesn't have a camera?

(but yes... https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTlYlSF... )

You are only screwing yourself by doing this, it trains your brain to have a shorter attention span due to the constant context switching.

McDonald's!

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Do you get a perpetual use license when you buy this way? Are they DRM locked so you’ll lose access if someone shuts down their server?

I've been buying used DVDs from local charity shops (here in Finland) for the past couple of years.

I've noticed that there are fewer new releases, but apparently people are increasingly buying physical media (that statistic might be squewed by counting vinyl releases).

But that said most of the films/TV I watch is old stuff anyway, and every time I visit a large store I walk away with 5+ disks.

Just yesterday I bought a physical copy of Fight Club for €1, alongside Trainspotting, Blade, and a boxed set of black and white St Trinian's movies. Definitely enough media to keep me entertained for the next week or two.

Aren't even the "high quality" 4k streams like 15GB/movie? So at $20/TB that's ~$0.30/movie at streaming quality? And you could still have probably better than DVD quality that people used to pay $20 for for like ~2GB, or $0.04.

Transcoding is always the bottleneck with these, right?

720p is good enough for me so... can we all just use that and give up on transcoding?

What cost?! I have jelly installed on an old optiplex I got for around $20, i7 16ram (it’s actually proxmox, that would be too much for jelly alone)

You absolutely don't need a Mac Mini - Plex/Jellyfin runs great on a cheap Intel N100/N150/N95 Mini PC (with hardware transcoding). Prices are still up from two years ago - but you can find them for $250 if you know where to look.

Pretty sure "the hardest part" is populating the downloads dir with quality downloads (including navigating the maze of public and private trackers, dealing with ad spam, trackers that don't actually download anything), finding subtitles that match your download, naming files according to Jellyfin's conventions, using a VPN to cover your tracks (probably one that supports port forwarding if you don't want to be limited in the content you can actually download), etc. It's not insurmountable, but it's not easy. I can find Mac Minis all over Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace.

This is why we used to have blockbuster!

> The higher cost of the DVD/Blu-ray discs can be amortized over multiple repeat viewings.

For now. Physical media is being phased out. Sony just quitted the blu-ray player business after others also did and Disney already stopped releasing new discs in Australia.

That's why I stopped buying physical media years ago. Once I watch a movie, I've seen it. I don't really want to watch it again. And each viewing is a diminishing return, where I feel more and more like I'm just wasting time by doing it.

Music somehow is different, but movies, sporting events, dramatic series, etc. where the hook is that you don't know what's going to happen I can really only enjoy watching once.

I get most my physical media from the library. It really doesn’t get any cheaper than that.

A smaller portion comes from used bookstores. For TV series in particular it’s still very cost effective on a money per viewing hour basis. Especially for kids’ media because my kids do want to watch the same thing over and over.

I also do some à la carte rentals. Maybe 3-4 movies per year, so the total cost is low.

That said, you’re absolutely right, this only works for me because I don’t particularly care about new shoes and streaming exclusives. If you’re willing to take the view that media doesn’t need to be new to be good then we currently live in a post-scarcity society where video entertainment is concerned. Which isn’t to say that people who prefer new things are wrong, but I am genuinely impressed by the amount of enshittification that people will tolerate (maybe after some grumbling, but still) in the service of that preference.

Only possible if you are fine missing an arbitrary 1/3 of live sports events.

What's popular with kids and toddlers that's not Disney right now?

After spending all day looking at text on a screen, the last thing I want to do is spend time reading text in a book or eReader. I really enjoyed the part of my life where I was an avid reader. Yet another thing to regret about my choice in career.

You seem to imply current day Disney has some sort of ownership over prior art.

Time = money