In an era where many films and albums are stored in the cloud, "streaming anxiety" is making people buy more DVDs, records – and even cassette tapes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10491518

Oppenheimer and the resurgence of Blu-ray and DVDs: How to stop your films and music from disappearing::In an era where many films and albums are stored in the cloud, “streaming anxiety” is making people buy more DVDs, records – and even cassette tapes.

  • Corroded@leminal.spaceEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    It was a problem that the film collector Lucas Henkel kept encountering. “I realised that many of the movies I enjoy are not really available on streaming services, or they disappear frequently, so the only way to see them reliably is through physical media,” he tells BBC Culture. So Henkel decided to set up his own boutique home entertainment distribution label, Celluloid Dreams. “As a collector myself, it has a lot to do with the desire to own something tangible,” says Henkel, explaining his own commitment to physical media. “More importantly, it guarantees access. I can pull out a 20-year old DVD and play it any day I want. No restrictions, no extra fees, no subscriptions… just insert the disc and press play. Seriously, what’s not to like about that? And no streaming service can match the quality of a presentation coming from a physical medium.”

    I don’t know if they realize that even discs can fail with time due to things like disc rot.

    Algorithms have been designed to serve us options, but can end up flattening our cultural experience, feeding us more of the same that we’ve already consumed. There are signs young people are turning away from paid music subscription services. A cost of living crisis is a likely explanation…

    I feel like paying $20 for a DVD doesn’t really help if you consume a lot of media.

    Even films that are available could disappear at any moment, as streaming services reevaluate their content libraries or remove titles due to licensing agreements. And when you pay to purchase a digital version of a film or TV show, as opposed to renting it or watching it via a streaming subscription, you still don’t “own” it – you’ve just purchased a licence to watch it. And, of course, when everything is on the cloud, we are at the mercy of a stable internet connection.

    I feel like the whole article is really tiptoeing around piracy.

    • xyzzy@lemm.ee
      0·
      10 months ago

      Disc rot is not a threat to home video media. CDs, particularly CD-Rs, are subject to so-called disc rot, and I’ve experienced this personally; DVDs, highly unlikely and I’ve never seen a verified case of it; Blu-ray discs, not at all.

      Unless we rewind to the early 2000s, no one pays $20 for a DVD, of all things. Maybe a Blu-ray disc.

      Are you sure you’re not projecting your opinion on piracy onto the article? I didn’t get that read at all. Pirates are dramatically overrepresented in Reddit and Lemmy. I’m not talking about your comment, but frankly it’s kind of tedious seeing people brag in nearly every single home media or streaming related thread about how they’re very smart for pirating their media instead of paying for it. Particularly in the home video sub (primarily centered around Blu-ray discussion), they’re always making low-effort comments that add nothing to the discussion.