How do you explain your love of physical media in an era of streaming? (1 Viewer)

[jcroy]

My main criteria for cd/dvd/bluray purchases, is to guess whether I am willing to devote my full attention to listening/watching something on my standalone stereo/tv setup more than two or three times.

If I determine that something is likely only going to be listened/watched once or twice for me, then I'll just listen/watch it on a streamer or even a basic cable/network tv channel. No point in wasting time + cash on getting the cd/dvd/bluray disc(s).

 

[jcroy]

There's the big ongoing joy of owning, like having shelves of books you've enjoyed, & of course your CD collection. All of that is in part the story of your life, your taste & the stuff you enjoy. I suppose it's better for the planet to have none of this & stream it all, but it's not a world I want to live in.

(On a tangent).

My reasons for still getting paper books, is that I find it difficult to read some titles on a computer or tablet. I primarily read books which almost always requires one to jump around sections/chapters in a very non-linear manner, which is not easy to do on a digital ebook even when heavily hyperlinked.

For many such titles I buy, another big reason is that even though I can get the (legal) digital versions for free (or a few dollars), it will frequently be more expensive to print the entire book on my home computer's printer or even at a local Staples. It turns out buying the paper version is less expensive than paying for several black ink cartridges.

 

[Alan Tully]

My mother was an avid reader right up to the day she died (last year aged 90), & in the last few years she just wasn't strong enough to hold a book, so the Kindle was a god send to her. I'm like you, I like to flip back & check things, & I just love books.

 

[dana martin]

The biggest problem I have now is storage space. It is becoming impossible to find room for anything I purchase on disc.

Amen!

 

[TravisR]

My mother was an avid reader right up to the day she died (last year aged 90), & in the last few years she just wasn't strong enough to hold a book, so the Kindle was a god send to her.

I don't know much about the Kindle, etc. but I assume you can also make the font LARGE in any book if needed too.

 

[jcroy]

My mother was an avid reader right up to the day she died (last year aged 90), & in the last few years she just wasn't strong enough to hold a book, so the Kindle was a god send to her.

Sorry to hear about your mother passing.

I'm like you, I like to flip back & check things, & I just love books.

When it comes to reading something which is highly linear for me, I'll just read the ebook version on a tablet. For example, such as generic science fiction or fantasy type of novels.

 

[Jeffrey D]

My explanation for preference of physical media is how long I’ve been collecting laserdiscs, DVDs and BluRays- I started my collection in 1989. Hard to break away from a passion that has lasted over 30 years.

 

[jcroy]

(Going further off on a tangent).

The type of books I usually buy, are highly technical ones.

For example, recently I was reading books on data error-correction codes and mathematical cryptography. These are not the types of books that one would read through "linearly".


The other really annoying thing about some digital ebooks, is that some older titles are just "scanned" from an older paper version. Apparently the OCR program used to scan are sometimes really "dumb", where they mess up non-alphanumeric fonts/characters. For example, sometimes plus "+" signs are not scanned in properly and ends up looking like a minus "-" sign in the digital book. (If you know what the equation is suppose to be, the minus sign is a glaring error).

 

[dana martin]

My mother was an avid reader right up to the day she died (last year aged 90), & in the last few years she just wasn't strong enough to hold a book, so the Kindle was a god send to her. I'm like you, I like to flip back & check things, & I just love books.

Alan, you have My condolences, I had the same last year as well, she was so peculiar and preferred the feel of paper under her fingertips, said it made the story real.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I don't know much about the Kindle, etc. but I assume you can also make the font LARGE in any book if needed too.

Yes, you can. My 85 year old mother has never touched a computer in her life (she even has an old Tracfone flip phone), yet she loves her Kindle -- she's on her second one. I have her device on my Amazon account, so I can manage the device for her and we can share the same library.

 

[Robert Harris]

“It’s clean.”

 

[jcroy]

(Long rant).


I'll discuss my criteria for determining which audio cds to buy. (It is a similar procedure for some of my dvd/bluray movie purchases).


Nowadays I frequently come across "new music" I've never heard before on youtube (or another streaming service). If something catches my attention, I'll listen to the entire album on youtube to see whether I want to listen to it again.

If I believe I might want to listen to it again, I will then listen to the entire album at least two times on youtube via my laptop connected to my standalone stereo/tv. Basically I devote my entire attention to listening to it.


If I end up listening to the entire album more than 4 or 5 times on my standalone stereo with all my attention devoted to it, I will then place the title on my "possible purchase list" of audio cds. Otherwise the title will be dropped, and I don't listen to it again.


However I don't make any immediate disc purchases, where I'll let the title lay fallow for several weeks. After several weeks or over a month, I'll listen to the entire album again on my standalone stereo with my full attention devoted to it. If I only end up listening to it once and/or if I find it tedious to listen to again (after a few weeks of laying fallow), then the title is dropped from my "possible purchase list".

This last act ^ will almost always cut my audio cd "possible purchase list" to zero titles.

 

[jcroy]

In the end, this ^ is easiest way for me to cut down on "impulse buying" of cd/dvd/bluray discs.

 

[kalm_traveler]

In the end, this ^ is easiest way for me to cut down on "impulse buying" of cd/dvd/bluray discs.

thanks for all your 'rants'

Very interesting to see the wide variety of takes we all have on this.

In my case, you uncovered another reason I really prefer to have a physical disc of movies/tv that I want to rewatch in the future is the data space. Although longer-term I plan to set up a huge Plex server with direct rips of everything, that's probably a good 5+ years out and I'll likely need a legitimate industrial-grade storage server with many terrabytes to hold everything.

That being said, as you brought up music as well - since a full CD ripped to FLAC is only a few hundred MB, I've mostly shied away from physical CD purchases for the last few years unless I can't legitimately purchase a FLAC version (recent example being the 1998 Godzilla movie's 'the album' CD... scored a sealed version for $5 shipped on fleabay). I'll rip them myself and store the CDs away since I then have a local FLAC copy and back-up everything to cloud storage in case my house burns down destroying my computer and discs. Much easier to justify cloud storage for a few hundred GB for music than probably a few hundred TB for the movie/tv collection at this point

When it comes to movies/tv or music now... to your point of impulse buying I try to pause and think "ok realistically am I going to want to watch/listen to this a few more times before the end?" and that usually helps me cut back.

I have always loved movies and gained an even greater appreciation for them after doing some background acting when I was younger, being able to see the production side of things but at the same time, there are many movies under 2 categories where I'll never buy them:

• watched once and wasn't a fan
• watched once and enjoyed but didn't love

Trying to cut back on frivolous blu ray buying, I'm finding that there are quite a few that fall into that second category, so that's where the big value of streaming rentals has come in for me. The movie collection still grows but I've been able to cut it back to maybe 4-6 per year if I really stop and think whether or not I'm really going to want to watch this thing a few more times or not. This also helped me trim a lot of the fat as I've been finishing up the upgrade from DVD to blu ray/ 4k blu ray.

Sadly there are still a few titles that haven't been given a good blu ray release but hey there's always hope, right?

 

[jcroy]

In practice, I've found that this "laying fallow" or "cooling off" time period of several weeks (to over a month) between viewings/listenings, is the most important part for me.

This fallow "cooling off" period will reveal whether a particular title was just a temporary "ephemeral excitement" for me. Impulse buying is always correlated to the temporary "ephemeral excitement" for me.

 

[Mr. Handley]

I find buying and owning discs to be a fun hobby. As long as I have my bills paid and I'm not hurting anyone, I will continue to pursue my passion for the foreseeable future. What anybody else thinks of it is none of my concern!

 

[cineMANIAC]

If there's someone around me when I'm receiving a new movie in the mail and I'm unboxing it I always preface any chatter about it with "I'm the only guy still buying physical media" to stave off the ridicule. That usually shuts people up so I won't have to explain anything

In all seriousness, I don't worry about what others think about my collecting habits. I never go into someone's home and say things like "why do you have so many knick knacks?" or "why do you have 3 cats - isn't 1 enough?". OK, that last one is different but you get the idea. It's NOBODY'S business. I accept criticism from family or close friends but only because they're part of my circle. Everybody likes what they like - personally, I don't want to know why my cousin has tons of Super Nintendo game cartridges strewn about. That's his thing - what's it to me?

As to the OP's question, streaming has it's usefulness but I'll never give up collecting physical media just because streaming is the thing now. I love picking out something to watch from my collection - I love the randomness of it. Sometimes I'll have a specific film or genre in mind and all I have to do is stare at my shelves and work out what I want to watch in my mind. It's fun! Last night I revisited Cast Away and had a blast. That movie needs a fresh scan, BTW. It would look spectacular in 4K.

 

[jcroy]

When it comes to movies/tv or music now... to your point of impulse buying I try to pause and think "ok realistically am I going to want to watch/listen to this a few more times before the end?" and that usually helps me cut back.

I have always loved movies and gained an even greater appreciation for them after doing some background acting when I was younger, being able to see the production side of things but at the same time, there are many movies under 2 categories where I'll never buy them:

• watched once and wasn't a fan
• watched once and enjoyed but didn't love

Trying to cut back on frivolous blu ray buying, I'm finding that there are quite a few that fall into that second category, so that's where the big value of streaming rentals has come in for me.

Over the past few years, my movie "possibly buy list" were mostly superhero and some sci-fi type movies. I've been using basic cable or network tv broadcasts to determine whether it is something I would buy on bluray, where many such marvel/dc movies are broadcast on saturday or sunday afternoons.

What I found was that I was willing to watch such superhero movie broadcasts while I was doing something else simultaneously, such as eating, netsurfing, skimming the newspaper, etc ... In contrast, I also found that I had very little interest in watching the dvr recorded copies later on. So frequently these dvr recorded copies ended up being deleted unwatched a few weeks later.

So this is the primary reason why I have not purchased any superhero movie blurays in recent years. It would be a waste of time and space for me. This is saying a lot, as someone who was hardcore into comic books back in the day.

 

[David Norman]

I rented a movie on Amazon last month. The disc is out of print and extremely difficult to find. It was incredibly gratifying to just pay the rental fee and have the movie right there to watch without any hassle.

I liked the movie and would like to own it, but I have my limits. There's one copy of the Blu-ray on eBay, and the seller knows it is rare, so they set the price at $115. That price is too rich for my blood. I liked the movie, but I've never paid anything close to that for a single movie, and I won't. First, I waited around to see if the seller would drop the price. Then, once it became clear that wasn't going to happen, I decided just to do an outright purchase of the streaming version from Amazon. Although I will always prefer physical media, the streaming purchase price was $10. So I couldn't turn that down.

Curiosity up -- what title was this? I'm sure you've mentioned it before in a thread, but I'm blank


And to answer the original question -- like others, i'm too old to bother worrying about the question anymore. Only to my wife or kids I might care to answer it, but at worst I'm spending a tiny bit of their inheritance on this instead of something else.

 

[jcroy]

“It’s clean.”

No tv/cable network logos cluttering up the screen.