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Good example. It doesn't really make sense logically to collect these (i.e., vs. just renting them). But I think I understand emotionally why people would want to collect things like this.

Availability. I stopped buying video discs when Netflix's streaming catalog felt like it was going to expand to everything, and well also when Netflix by mail seemed good (and that really did have almost everything), but once you hit enough things that you saw and wanted to watch later that weren't there when you wanted to watch... You start collecting them, so you know you'll have them.

> Availability. I stopped buying video discs when Netflix's streaming catalog felt like it was going to expand to everything

And just think, now it's smaller than ever.

I went over my Amazon Prime Video watch history recently; almost nothing on it is still available. They even managed to somehow lose the rights to a decades-old low-profile Chinese film.

Yes, this was called "The Disney Vault" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault

It continued right up until the release of Disney+

Just caught this reply. Thanks for the link.

this was us!