DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The local charity shops sell movies for €1 each, and boxed-sets of TV-series are typically no more than €5 each. I even managed to pick up a decent DVD player to sit under my TV for €25, used.
Before this I used to stream to a chromecast, with VLC, but it was always a bit of a pain. Now I can pop in a disk, or tell my child to do the same, and hit play and everything just works.
Streaming services are pretty, but you can't rely on them for keeping content available, and it's risky to get sucked into a new show that might get cancelled after one, or two, series. Much better, for me, to watch all those other shows that are complete, or nostalgic.
the funny thing is most of the time I use firefox on linux with pretty much default settings, I let them give me all the cookies they want and a few sites still think I'm running an ad blocker. hehe whatever, the modern web is getting to be pretty trash anyways.
Or one of the DNS blockers that have been pretty consistent too.
It may be a game of whackamole, but it's virtually invisible to end users of these tools.
At least I could (thanks to DeCSS etc) rip the content off and write it to a blank disc to improve the experience... There are probably ways to do the same with Netflix content these days though, I guess.
There are but it's not something most end user will be able to do - because the DRM is something that can be realtively easily updated pirates tend to keep their hacks private. Ripping Blu-Rays on the other hand is quite available to anyone interested and gives you better quality than overcompressed streaming sites - but of course the discs are more expensive.
Edit; I don’t think I mean ‘producer’ here but I do not know what the word is; for books I guess publisher?
Like the Alien for example, some parts are on Netflix, some are not. Meaning i have to buy like 5 different subscriptions to be able to watch everything i want.
Or even better one, Dr House. I don't think we had it streamed in our country, so the only way to watch it was to pirate.
Its bad how the platforms are right now.
It's like a loot of good content is missing, but instead they're trying to make their own content that is mostly average and sometimes just bluntly bad, not even laughably bad.
Music is way better, I recently switched from Spotify to Tidal, and there were only two tracks missing from my playlists.
The other thing is that the original version of an album is replaced by a remastered version. Usually the new version has additional songs but the remastering and songs change the experience.
Although still imperfect as an ownership mechanism the analogy to DVDs is purchasing the content from say Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV. You can “own” a much broader catalog, the ownership rights aren’t super clear or stable over time, but the DVD / streaming video is licensed to you permanently and sits in your library.
Using contemporaneous language Netflix is to HBO as Amazon Prime Video ownership is to a DVD.
Original programming more or less started much later after they were well established and seeking marginal growth.
Torrenting has for some media become the only way of acquiring it at all.
In X years time when humanity is struggling to rebuild civilisation in a radioactive wasteland I don't think the main problem will be the inability to find a copy of "Dumb And Dumber To". The real heroes will turn out to have been the contributors to Open Source and Open Access projects - Linux, Wikipedia, etc.
There are better things (often unpaid) developers could be doing than implementing DRM but also much much worse things.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but it is factually incorrect to state that willful destruction is the same as hindering someone from making another copy of a work.
When the user is in control you can't push anti-features like e.g. Chromecast or Samsung TVs are full of.
It's not always about piracy, especially when buying used discs has become so cheap.
But ultimately the publisher will stop selling new movies on DVD or Blu-ray, etc, so it wont save us.
Good luck getting rental rights.
The very reason modern streaming sucks so much is that every other production company wants to be a streaming distributor; pulling rights from other streaming services.
Just holding a DVD does not give you the rights to lease it out. At least, that's if you believe the legal spiel on the disc.
It's possible the OP is from another country with slightly different IP law?
I don't recall if they said how many mailings a disc would typically survive, but they also had a lot of back and forth with the postal service to get a mailer that qualified for lower price postage, but they had to drop their cardboard insert that helped with longevity of the discs.
There were some series where the early discs tended to be broken, which made it harder to stock, especially if the sets were out of print.
Then you've got things like recent shows may not even get a release on disc at all.
It's honestly the best way to watch things today, and probably the best way to watch things in all history (although Netflix DVD was cheaper if you watched more than 3 movies a month). It's cheaper than video rental stores used to be and no more expensive than RedBox, but you don't have to go anywhere.
That's why RedBox is dead. Of course RedBox wasn't killed by Netflix -- Netflix doesn't compete with them at all. It's Amazon/YT Payperview that killed them, I assume.
Yeah, streaming sucks, but a la carte pay per view is amazing and underrated. And I emphasize again, it's cheap -- it only seems expensive compared to streaming, but it's cheaper than rentals used to be in video stores, which IIRC also cost $3, but that was 25 years of inflation ago.
No need to fiddle with buying additional devices to hook up to your tv - anything with an hdmi cable will play an mp4 directly on your display of choice. You already have a desktop, or a laptop, or a tablet, or something. No worrying about scratched discs. No worrying about regions or whatever.
DVDs were a stopgap and they deserve to die, in my book. “DVDs vs streaming” is a false dichotomy when “local file playback versus streaming” already exists.
Using physical media is so heavily alternative, that you can almost feel being superior to poor streaming people. Especially with 4k blurays.