Why I Still Buy Physical Media in a Digital Age

in this day and age with streaming and digital Giants I feel like every time I mention I still buy DVDs or Blu-Rays the world always comes back to me to say hello it's on Netflix you own it you can buy that movie digitally for the same price as the title suggests I prefer physical media now before you bombard me with how much of a fool I am hear me out I'll be going through my own pros and cons to both physical and digital media I will mostly be talking about my experiences with streaming here in Canada in in case you didn't already know where I'm from so some of this video may not relate to you whatsoever I will also not be including piracy as that is the easiest way to own a movie without any actual gain or loss on a side note pay some money and support the Arts you tons of a silly person with that out of the way let's start with my number one reason for owning physical discs which is you actually own it you can hold it in your hands put it on a shelf curate your collection some have amazing artwork or made into snazzy de book or box sets and if you have Criterion Collection titles you get these well-written film essay booklets on each movie unless you give them away sell them have them stolen or literally burn them they're not going anywhere obviously discs can be ruined by scratches but they're really not that difficult to take care of in my almost 20 years of purchasing physical media I have hardly ever encountered DVDs or Blu-ray that have ceased to play properly for example what I believe is my first DVD I ever bought Edward Scissor Hands it still works fine to this day almost 20 years later I watched the absolute smack out of this movie and brought it to many of my friends places to show it to them stop it stop it please I make you there can be the incredibly odd time the packaging is damaged or the disc became loose during shipping I have only had one occurrence of a disc snapping because I was a bit Hasty to get the disc out at the time I'm recording this audio I own over 1,000 movies on a physical disc you might be asking okay out of those a thousand or so movies how many of them have you watched again since you first opened the package watched the movie and bonus features and put it back on your shelf well you sort of have me there a large majority of these movies I haven't put them back in my player since I first purchased them however they are always within Arms Reach and if I ever feel like having my own movie marathon I don't have to waste time jumping around however many streaming services to find them or rent them in terms of cost most brand new movies are the same price buying physical as buying digital though sometimes there are amazing sales on Apple TV and other digital companies the same eventually happens to the physical Edition as well now when it comes to digital as I said at the beginning the most common question I get asked when I mention I own a physical copy of a specific movie is why did you buy that movie it's on Netflix you own it well not really you are paying a monthly subscription for a license to watch these titles whenever and wherever you want until Netflix takes them off without your knowledge y sometimes Netflix does say on specific titles what date it is leaving the service but you actually have to click on that title for it to reveal when it is leaving you know when you have something in your watch list forever but you're never in the mood to watch it when you finally are it's gone happens to me all the time and I almost never know when those titles are leaving while some of those titles do come back onto Netflix over time I'd say most of them never come back again due to everybody and their grandmother making a streaming service speaking of Digit Services removing titles in recent years many TV episodes and movies have either been completely removed or edited it as times change and they can now be seen as offensive today while I do agree we should have intentional conversations about these titles today I personally disagree with removing or altering them while you could instead as some streaming services and physical media have done have well-worded disclaimers ahead of the titles that these are a product of their time and are now seen as wrong going back to physical media I would like to point out that owning the physical Edition with this specific episode scene or movie will of course never be altered well I'm not sure if these titles will be altered for future physical releases I am certain that if you have the original cut on physical media it's yours forever the same could be said for the plethora of different cuts of movies from Studio Cuts director's Cuts unrated Cuts Etc those are not always available on streaming or digital platforms or they only have one specific cut which is usually the theatrical cut the other issue is Netflix's recent decision to revoke password sharing among accounts yeah I was bumming off my parents account like the rest of us Disney plus announced they will also be revoking password sharing and who knows if other streaming services will follow suit but what about movies you purchased on digital platforms you own those right once again you are paying for a license to watch these titles whenever and wherever you want but nothing will stop these companies from all of a sudden deleting titles you purchased there was a lawsuit a few years ago against Amazon claiming they deleted titles people have purchased from Prime Video Amazon stated that users don't actually own the content they purchase per the user agreement big movie studios can cut ties with any digital platform at any given time and your title that you purchased could disappear without your knowledge I wouldn't put it past any of these companies if they turned their entire digital platform into a subscription service to watch all of the available titles and you no longer owned any of the titles you purchased meaning the only way to access your titles is to subscribe there's also the possibility of digital platforms being shut down in mid to late 2019 the digital platforms ultraviolet and its companion platform flickster shut down if you remember from around 2012 to 9 the ultraviolet logo was on multiple Blu-ray and DVD copies of movies and TV to use your digital code sometimes you had the option to enter the code and have your digital copy on what was iTunes Now Apple TV and Google play but most of the time I only had the option to export it to flickster or ultraviolet well to be 100% honest I never used UltraViolets browser to watch any digital copies and I would never have purchased anything digital from this platform if I were to do so which I'm sure everyone thought the same and that that's how it led to its eventual downfall once ultraviolet announced they were shutting down you had the option to revert all of your digital titles to another service for me that was Google Play including several TV episodes I had on UltraViolet I had over 100 titles that I had to individually export to Google Play well this didn't take an incredible amount of time it was still an inconvenience and quite frankly a waste of time the other unfortunate inconvenience was for some reason not every one of my titles reverted over to Google Play and I had many emails back and forth with ultraviolet Google Play and flickster but to no avail these titles were not transported over to Google Play so while the likelihood of Apple TV Google play Amazon Prime shutting down or Studios removing titles is pretty slim overall it's far more likely than say Warner Brothers coming into my house and taking the DVDs of the specific movies they produced off of my shelf there's also the possibility of accounts being deleted whether by accident or purposefully or crashing of devices that could lose all of your digital titles again slim chances but I sleep better at night knowing I actually have these titles on my shelf to view at any given time without worry but what about Visual and audio quality is there really a difference in quality from watching a movie on a physical disc compared to purchasing it on a digital platform is one better than the other yes and no a typical Blu-ray disc takes up about 25 to 35 GB of storage which is obviously far too huge for us to download or Stream So platforms will compress them to somewhere around a tenth of that while the Visual and audio quality can still be equivalent to 4K high definition the codec isn't quite as high quality as a 4K Blu-ray but I highly doubt anyone would be able to notice the difference if you are casually watching on your phone or laptop unless you have yourself a massive 4K TV with the top-of-the-line surround sound you probably won't notice much of a difference between physical discs and streaming the only instances I would say physical media has an edge in overall quality is when your Wi-Fi starts to crap out while streaming and either you're stuck on the loading screen or the visual quality goes from 4 4K or 1080p to the equivalent of a potato in a washing machine or sometimes there are errors not allowing you to watch a specific title or any title for that matter but those are normally extremely rare occurrences and luckily most streaming services allow you to download titles for offline viewing and the quality is superb throughout your viewing [Music] experience from behind the scenes documentaries deleted scenes to filmmaker commentaries bonus features are a Sure Fire way to get the best insight into how your favorite movies and TV shows were made there are times physical copies of movies come with little to no bonus features but the majority at the absolute least come with a filmmaker commentary which to me is basically $20 Film School in the span of 3 hours or less I could gush over my favorite physical copy movies or box hats that have amazing bonus features all day but none of them come even remotely close to the astonishing Lord of the Ring Trilogy the extended editions there's hours upon hours upon hours of behind the-scenes fature rats deleted scenes and the commentary there are four separate commentaries per film with the director and writers the cast members the production team and the design team it seriously doesn't get any better than that looking at digital platforms for bonus features is another story Google Play doesn't have bonus features though in the last decade or so Apple TV has included the same bonus features as the physical disc on a huge majority of their titles though there are still quite a number of titles that have no extra features Apple TV has had exclusive bonus features if you purchase the title through their platform sometimes when I've entered my digital copy codee and chose Apple TV I will as well receive set exclusive extras though sometimes that doesn't always work out when I heard that Apple TV was having an exclusive filmmaker commentary on 2019s Joker I thought I would be receiving a digital code for Apple TV when I purchase my physical copy the only platform I could use the code with was Google Play which as I said before does not include bonus features to put it mildly I was a bit disappointed by that for streaming services there are no bonus features for title on Netflix except for their own produced content which obviously makes sense Disney plus and Amazon Prime have some bonus features on the titles they've produced but my favorite streaming service for bonus features and quite frankly my favorite streaming service period is the Criterion Channel if the title is in the Criterion Collection Library the entirety of the bonus features that would be on the physical disc will be on the streaming service to switch gears the last two topics are what I see as the major downsides to physical media first and this should go without saying is the actual physical space as I mentioned at the beginning of this video I own over a thousand physical copy movies and judging by my wish list on Amazon I will be buying physical copy movies until the end of time obviously one DVD or Blu-ray doesn't take up much space at all it's the accumulation me being in my 20s I move around a lot on average once every year or two to pack up every single one of these movies as a chore and with every move I get more and more angry at myself for owning so many blasted movies with digital space is hardly an issue most digital copy movies are anywhere from 2 to 10 GB that is incredibly easy to either keep on your computer store it on a hard drive or keep it in the cloud at the end of the day it comes down to convenience as to why streaming and digital platforms are killing the market to watch movies and TV you don't have to go to a store to buy or rent such and such a title you can select however many titles to watch from your couch without having to leave your seat to change a disc I honestly don't mind getting up to put in a disc for a movie but if I'm binging a TV show it is a bit of an inconvenience to get the DVD set out and put in another disc every hour or so lots of computer and video game companies have caught on to the digital Market by phasing out disk drives from their products like the PlayStation 5 though there is an option to purchase one with a drive with physical copies being in the biggest decline ever it depresses me when I go to a department or electronic store like Walmart and see what used to be shelves upon shelves of DVDs and Blu-rays be reduced to a shelf or two or a small kiosk style Shelf with only new releases though this could be more of a sign of the times with online shopping rather than physical media going out as when I go to the website they still sell many physical media titles online another company that used to be huge for physical media was Best Buy they announced at the end of last year they would slowly be phasing out all physical media from their physical and online stores the real question is will physical media ever truly go away it's hard to say I mean vinyl records randomly made a massive Resurgence in recent years more and more people prefer physical books than reading on a phone or tablet VHS tapes somehow are a valuable collector's item Criterion Collection movies sell like hot cakes among movie lovers despite them being $30 to $50 per a movie and most recently in the first week of the physical release of Oppenheimer Blu-rays were sold out in many physical and online stores after Christopher Nolan's words on the importance of physical media if you buy a 4K UHD you buy a Blu-Ray it's on your shelf it's yours you know it's yours and and you own it um that's never really the case with any form of digital distribution you're relying on the continued health of the supplier the company who's supplying it you know what have you of course for me I get so much joy out of going to a pulp culture specific store like Sunrise Records or even local Vancouver independent video stores like video cat and video matica and spend a good hour or two just sifting through what they have in stock and more often than not i' come home with something if the products that play discs are still being produced and sold I don't see physical copies completely going out anytime in the near future with streaming becoming more and more unaffordable for the average consumer and basically turning back into cable consumers may find another means of watching content which could be physical Media or unfortunately piracy as long as there are physical copy nerds out there like me which I still think there are quite a lot out there physical media is hopefully here to stay thank you very much for watching my second film essay if you haven't seen my first film essay re-watch movies when you're depressed here's a link to it right here and you can also watch the series that I'm slowly going through which is one film a year since the beginning that's also here I'm currently working on the process of my next film essay so I hope I'll see you then

Channel: The Canadian Expressionist

Views: 24,508

Keywords: physical media, dvd, bluray, netflix, streaming, disney, buying physical media

Id: dnYJnRrizBk

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2024