I cant tell you how much this rings a bell.
ever since I was 15, Ive been a HUGE DVD collector and Then moved to Blu ray in 2010.
I have over 3000 Blu Rays and DVD...I've always enjoyed Owning the Physical copies and Especially The cases they come in.
From 2012 until 2016, I didnt even bother D/Ling my "digital copies" that came with The purchase of my Blu Rays...
I wanted no Part on The New "Digital Movement"
My movie hobby was an extension of my music hobby. 45's, 33, vinyl with a nice sound system. About 3,000 albums which I still have but only play when the mood strikes me. Started my movie collection with VHS (No beta) and smoothly, but expensively moved into Laserdiscs. Had a home theater and spent an unholy amount for the best front projector system for that time, $8,000. The advent of CDs and DVDs was a godsend and an irritant for me. Laserdiscs obsoleted my VHS tapes and BOTH were over priced.
1st Issue: Do I re-buy CDs of Vinyl that I already own? Do I buy Laserdiscs for VHS tapes that I already own?
In some cases I did. For most, no of course. Laserdiscs were expensive as hell then.
2nd issue: Cataloging and storing. In the beginning I stored everything alphabetized by genre. Like you I needed physical media because of liner notes and any extras. That rationale is still valid for me to this day but I will touch on that later.
3rd Issue: Divorce. Wife put my Vinyl in the garage and my Movies in storage. It took years to finalize the breakup and the division of who gets what. So I am sentimentally attached to my media collections as they pre-date my marriage.
As the years passed I always wanted to transfer my media to Digital so that I have my own copy. Disk storage was expensive then and media copying was made as difficult as possible by the content owner. DRM was NOT my friend. Plus that takes a whole LOT of time and I wasn't going to pay a service to do that for me.
Finally, bought a homer server, copied a ton of CDs. Movies was going to take me more time. Apple came along and made iTunes. I too didn't download the physical digital copies that came with purchases at the time for DVDs but I did like the VuDu, Ultra-Violet, MovieAnywhere access but was not fond of the resolution and you needed a good internet connection to really enjoy the service.
One reason I bought some media was for my two kids. We attended movies once a week and if it was good rather than pay additional to see it again in theaters I would buy the media and then we would re-watch then when we wanted. It was kind of our "Thing" as a family.
I'm not sold on the industry determining when and how I can consume entertainment. I'm also not sold that streaming won't have it's price consequences. Netflix streaming didn't become viable until bandwidth increased for most homes. But you're paying for it now and i wouldn't be surprised when throttling and bandwidth demand and buffering doesn't again rear its ugly head. My Blu-Rays have the ultimate sound quality and video quality that streaming is still struggling to compare to.
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