You can't even make a backup of the shows and movies you "buy", which just means "license", today.
You can't even make a backup of the shows and movies you "buy", which just means "license", today.
I still use Internet based services, for example I might find a new band because someone on Instagram posted about them. Or maybe I listen to an album on streaming before deciding if I'm buying it. Oh and some live music venues have Youtube live streaming (e.g. Smalls jazz club). With movies, of course I might watch a movie trailer or a review on YouTube.
Speaking of movies, the situation is different because unlike music, I can't actually find most of my favourites on streaming services. However more often than not, you can rent them online, so I might rent (but never buy!) a movie through Apple, YouTube etc., then if I like it and think I want to watch it again, I will buy a Blu-ray. But I kinda gave up on pure streaming services such as Netflix etc. since their catalogue is so shallow.
This obviously doesn't work for everyone, if your way of listening to music is just "Hey Alexa play a smooth jazz playlist while I cook" then of course streaming is the right thing for you. Same if you just like to watch movies casually and you're not a film buff, in that case Netflix & co. are OK.
Im seeing prices now around $10/TB for storage. Not fast, sure, but with 8 x 16TB disks, you get 128TB storage, and with RAID6 96TB. And thats only $1300
And if you architect the storage server right, you can use NFS on that and do all your exports to various docker containers and VMs. Proxmox makes setting this up pretty painless.
And if you have money to burn and want screaming fast, go with some of the NVME drives and combined cards. Then you can do this near-solid state and also reduce your form factor a LOT.
We're in the middle of basically every major "service company" enshittifying or already done so. Services are getting worse, costs are going up, and they're slow-boiling everyone to extract as much money from both customers and businesses. So, running this stuff yourself is the only way to retain your freedom and control.
Personally I _never_ wanted to watch same movie twice, but I can understand some would. I guess most are still accessible in some archive somewhere for a small fee. I'd guess that fee is far less than you hoarding it for 4 decades.