The DVD’s demise leaves many films gone with the wind | Hacker News Reader

The DVD’s demise leaves many films gone with the wind

wsj.com

5 pointshhs11 comments

Seems some people equate the apparent dvd demise with Netflix not offering this service any more. This might be true where they still offered the service, but IIRC their Australian based dvd rental offshoot, that posted dvds within Australia died a long while ago, recalling people I lived near at the time lamented losing access to it, but could be I just misunderstood their situation.

Like the loss of the VCR rental market, so many movies never even made it to DVD, with film production companies figuring it just wasn't worth the effort. Often the fight is the legal side of (re) negotiation music rights which brought any ideas of printing a DVD out of the question, or only in Region 1.

Steaming wont fill the vast void either until there's a universal library of everything ever filmed and crafted into a movie, mini series or tv series, that a steaming service can have access to for special customer requests ... even if I had money to burn, I wouldn't be subscribing to a multitude of steaming sites.

The article laments top grossing films, but there's so much that were simply underrated. Same went for tv series and mini series.

I've got over 400 films in my NF DVD queue, and the vast majority aren't on their streaming service. Which rarely has much I care to watch.

I'm really hoping that NF will either sell the DVD service, or update their streaming service to include all the DVDs.

So much yes. Streaming is a huge threat to the right of first sale world. We rapidly have accelerated towards a new Dark Ages where content is again vastly unavailable to the future, where DVDs or other real media aren't made.

These movies still exist in private collections all over the world.

And if they don't, were they worth preserving?

"worth" is subjective. A loss of culture is a loss of culture, whether you see value in that lost culture or not. It's a part of our society's history, of which many people usually contributed to across a wide variety of skills.

How do you know if they're worth preserving or not if you can't see them?

And "worth preserving" is a term that can be seen from a myriad of perspectives. Whether it's good or not is only one factor.

A film or television episode might be worth preserving because:

* it's an early work or appearance by someone who would go on to be significant

* it's a product of its era displaying the context, fashions, language, politics, events and attitudes of the time

* it's actually really bad, but demonstrates what bad film-making looked like in that time

* it's a cherished childhood memory of someone who mentions that in their autobiography, and so scholars may wish to have access.

Probably loads of other reasons why something is worth preserving beyond a basic question of "is it any good?".

The BBC destroyed and disposed of a large number of episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s, and a lot of time and effort has been put into recovering and restoring copies of these because they are a part of the ongoing narrative of the evolution of British television.

> Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription

Anyone got the full text of the article?

https://archive.is/aG3dZ

Just makes it easier to dismiss them as offensive relics of an oppressive white supremacist patriarchy. No-one under 40 is going to miss what they don't want to know about.

Are you hopeful that all books written more than 40 years ago are purged too?

Not at all; My comment was entirely facetious. I'm opposed to destroying the past to appease the present. That's why I scour used bookstores for older copies of challenged books. I've had to add Roald Dahl recently, but someone has to remember the past.

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