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> Happily. I have more access to content now than I have ever had before; we live in a golden age of access to video content. I can't imagine a rational argument for going back to the era of physical media.

Please show me where I can access The Witches (2020) by Robert Zemeckis?

Or the Willow TV show from 2022

Or Final Space

Or Star Trek: Prodigy

Or Westworld

The shows and movies just disappear off streaming because some executive did the math and they'll save money by just taking things off the internet.

This is why you buy anything you want to see again or even show to your kids later on as a physical copy. (Or do the yarr-thing and hold on to the digital copy on your own hardware)

Sure: The Witches is $3.99 on Apple TV.

The Willow TV show is a perfect example of something that would simply not exist without streaming. Also, as a member of a family that celebrates Annual Willow Day in early January, you're not missing much.

Streaming also killed the mid-price movie, because there's no long tail of DVD sales any more.

Now we only get "indie" movies with tiny budgets and massive AAA blockbusters with billion dollar price tags.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/26/entertainment/mid-budget-...

Look, I don't agree with GP, but to measure 'owning' as 'locking yourself into a particular library' is dumb and uncharitable. IMO, when you consider people that only have the budget for one streaming service you see who is _actually_ locked into one particular library today.

Streaming didn't win this round because it saves us shelf space... it won because it's instant and the average internet goer didn't consider the downsides. Most people in my circle now are pretty bitter with the state of things.

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All of that said... flash memory is just better than spinning media.

Not only are we locked into a particular library, but that library is constantly changing based on somebody else's whims. It feels like every time I start watching something it gets pulled off the next month.

> we live in a golden age of access to video content

It's the very opposite of that!

Yes, mainstream and a few sigmas from mainstream is easier to access than ever (if you have all the subscriptions, that is).

The obscure stuff? Good luck today. Try to find someone with the DVD or VHS.

In the VHS days you could find video rental clubs with a vast library of niche movies (such as local productions that never got distributed widely). Today those are not available anywhere, unless they happen to be selling the DVD somewhere.

No: I have more access to obscure stuff than I did in the DVD era. I read Tarantino's book a few months ago and went to go watch Escape From Alcatraz. No chance in hell that Blockbuster would have had it in the 90s, took 15 seconds to pull up online. The Kurosawa films. Come And See. People have weirdly either weirdly idolized or motivated perspectives on what was easy to get access to in the physical media era.

Whatever weird niche local productions you had access to back then with "video rental clubs" I put up against Vimeo, certain that it's unlikely to be much of a contest.

Tarantino isn't exactly an obscure persona. But in general, perhaps your obscure stuff is known to the streaming platforms.

Was coincidentally just talking about this last weekend with some people. A lot of regional indie movies that we remember from youth are not available for streaming anywhere at any price. Movies that reached the theaters but only locally (one city or a few neighboring cities).

At the local video club places there used to be a whole rack dedicated to these local movies. Now, they're gone forever.

Occasionally someone finds an old VHS in a storage box and takes the time to upload it to youtube and things resurface, but that's the only hope.

I didn't say I went looking for a Tarantino movie!

Good luck watching a show that got pulled iff as a tax write off.

https://www.thegamer.com/hbo-max-infinity-train-ok-ko-mao-ma...

Good luck finding the DVD for it! Net net, the current configuration affords drastically more access than the physical media era ever did.

This argument is especially ironic because the shows we're talking about would never have existed outside the streaming era.

We watch Elf each Christmas.

Before December starts it's is consistently moved off any subscription service and the price is jacked up.

My DVD has been the same price to view after the initial purchase for a long time now.

I pay to stream Elf like, every other Christmas, when I forget that I bought it on iTunes over a decade ago and don't have to pay anything for it at all.

It's not a meaningful amount of money, is my point. To anybody. It's $3.99 on Prime Video. It's like price shopping for chewing gum.

I'm pretty sure I watched it on HBO Max two of the last three years, both times in December.

Edit: in fact I'm quite sure - I have it on letterboxd from December 24, 2021 and I know we watched it on Christmas Day this year

Groundhog Day anyone?

When I find it, I can get it.

If you find on a streaming service, who knows if it's still there when you want to watch it.

> Good luck finding the DVD for it!

You're missing the point. If you bought the DVD, you have it. Forever.

No licensing change, or rights dispute, or publisher whim can ever take it away from you. In the streaming world things disappear in a puff all the time, never to be seen again.

They weren't still selling it in 2024, the "obsolete" designation means they stopped selling it 7 years ago.

I don't buy many movies, just ones I want to watch more than once (and don't want to deal with the disappointment of finding it's moved to yet another streaming service whose additional monthly payment I can't afford). What I do much more often is rent DVDs, or borrow them from my local library.

Believe it or not, it's still more convenient for some of us in the year 2024 C.E. to go out and borrow a physical copy of a movie or TV show than deal with the hassle of giving out payment details to the streaming service flavor of the month. And this laptop is among the last to enable that convenience without being shackled to an external drive. It's old news but (apparently) some people still care.

Digital media can also disappear. There's Doctor Who episodes that are missing from streaming services as well because the licensing for the music also ran out. Spec Ops: The Line was just pulled from various games services because the license for the music ran out as well. Thankfully they didn't make the pull out retroactively existing libraries. But I do worry that the next time it happens, that the lawyers may see that end users still having access to digital copy of some media is undesired.

As you say, having a DVD drive on everything may not be a priority. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that there's no value in owning physical media.

Stuff can absolutely disappear. But stuff got impractically difficult to find in the physical media era too, and, much more importantly, we have vastly more access in the normal case to stuff now than we did then. The thought of going back to a time where I can watch whatever is in my zip-up DVD case or what's currently broadcasting on TV is almost suffocating --- that's how much better off we are now.

How could the music rights run out? That seems like a horrible way to license music for use in a TV show. I find the idea of this very upsetting.

This was the case also for Beavis and Butthead on MTV.

Movies and shows are pulled from steaming services never to be seen again. Sometimes really good shows. Sucks for fans AND the people who created them