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DVDs look absolutely awful, I’m not really sure why there is this lingering hope or expectation that they should stick around. As the article states at the end, newer forms of physical media are still selling at similar or improved rates:
Toward the bottom of its report, DEG notes that sales from physical 4K UHD catalog releases held steady since 2023, while spending on titles released with “premium steelbook packaging” grew in 2024. No specific percentages or dollar totals were included, but it leaves a small glimmer of hope for the holdouts who still champion physical media in an increasingly digital and subscription-based world.
Having local media, whether disk or a copy on a nas drive, is a must for me.
Plus it’s nice to have stuff to watch if my ISP loses connection for a day or so, which happens quite a bit.
People will quibble over the definition of “physical” but here’s what I think the reality is:
I have a solid state drive. It’s full of pirated media. It’s a physical object with media on it. I have a physical copy of my media.
Piracy is the last way that leaves you in control of your own media and with a “physical” copy of it.
Hell, if I wanted to, I could be burning them to Bluray, but Sony for example stopped producing writable BR discs, making it harder to find such media.
Whereas an SSD is just a faster medium with more efficient use of physical space.
People need to make peace with the idea that a file stored on a drive is still technically a physical object just like the words stored inside a book. We think of them as ethereal data that is just magic or something, but it is not. Destroy the drive, you destroy the data. Ergo, data is always on physical media.
That’s not really got much to do with the article. Its about the changing landscape of the media industry.
Like you, I keep a library of media. But I always try to source Blu-ray rips for max quality. If Blu-rays go away, so does that top quality option, which would make me sad.
Another thing that i am already missing, since it usually isn’t included in those Blu-ray rips, are the movie extras.
I see people coming back to DVD’s now. They don’t cost much, and you can just share them with friends instead of having to wonder which streaming service to use.
As someone who has collected physical media for years, it is becoming harder to find physical releases for most stuff released to streaming. I sometimes end up ordering bootlegs from China, because big providers in the US refuse to print them….
