Stranger Things

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

I think that physical media has been dying for years, I don't know what it's like where you guys are but around here DVDs just sit there on discount and nobody ever buys them, and I'm not just talking about the movies that suck, even the classics and most popular movies won't sell, they are brand new and usually for 1 to 2 bucks and nobody will buy them.

I have about 1000 DVDs, and most of them I bought from when I was in my teens to my early 20s, and I can't tell you the last time I watched any of them as they just sit in the bookcase. I haven't even had my VCR plugged since 2007, I don't think my kids even know what a VCR is, as it's been packed away in the basement along with a bunch of VHS tapes since before they were born. We still have the DVD player plugged but we don't use it.

I still love my physical media, and I won't ever get rid of my old records, cassettes, CDs, VHS, and DVDs, but I can honestly say that I don't know if I will ever play any of them again. I will occasionally buy something that is older but I don't play it, I just put in the collection. A few years ago I digitized my whole music collection, I couldn't even tell you how many physical albums that was, but I know it was around 17 000 songs in total, and I can now have the entire music library on any device I use and bring it with me anywhere and listen it anytime I want to. With the meteoric rise of digital media, I think that physical media will be obsolete in a few decades, though some might say it already is.

I honestly don't know why anybody would buy physical media, or pay for cable in today's world. I haven't had cable tv in my house for years, but we can still watch anything we want to from tv because there are websites that have every major network and channel you can imagine streaming live online, so there's no reason to pay for cable. It's the same thing with movies, I know that some people don't want to subscribe to a bunch of different streaming services just to watch their favorite movies, and I can only imagine how much people spend on both cable and streaming services every month, but they don't have to.

We live in a digital world now, and there is no turning back. I know that there is nothing that I can't find online, it doesn't matter what movie, show, song, or album it is, or how obscure it is, I can find it, download it, and have a digital copy of it forever.

[Murfreesboro]

Oh, I know the convenience nowadays is amazing, and my older son, a millennial minimalist, doesn't want all the clutter of physical media in his home.

We used to do cable, but quit maybe 20 yrs ago, back when tv was still analogue, because we could get all the stations from Nashville and that was more than enough for us. However, digital changed all that. The digital signals weren't meant to travel that distance, as my husband knows well from his military experience. We'd be watching a show and it would pixilate and disappear mid-viewing. Then the stations themselves started to vanish. I believe a few will come back in the fall/winter, maybe because the trees have lost their leaves? Right now all we can receive are four religious channels out of Lebanon (a town between us and Nashville), and one of those is in Spanish.

We thrive on DVDs and own upwards of 2000, I'd guess. We do still buy them, but increasingly off the internet, since the supply in the stores is dwindling. Sometimes I also check them out from the library, if I'm curious about something I don't think I'd want to own.

We own a smart TV, but my husband refuses to hook it up to the internet. He fears that could be a two-way street, that somebody could eavesdrop on us while we have it hooked up. So it remains a brick in that respect. Meanwhile, my daughter watches a ton of stuff on her iPad.

Not every place in town has as poor digital reception as we do in our neighborhood. We inherited a condo we use for storage and as a sort of guest cottage, and the reception over there is much better than here, although it is disrupted when planes take off and land at a small airport nearby. In our neighborhood, I think we'd have to erect some tall 1950s style antenna to catch the Nashville signals. The indoor digital antennas they sell don't do squat for us.

[MauEvig]

I still prefer physical media myself for most things, especially for movies.
It would be ONE thing if everything was on ONE streaming service to subscribe to, but it isn't. Unless you get a VPN (I think Netflix has blocked VPNS so...) then a LOT of movies are region locked.
Plus I like collecting the DVDs and blue rays of things. I still like to actually own the copy that I own and not have to rely on a service to watch movies. Plus our internet isn't the best, so occasionally those movies can lag. It's annoying unless we can download them ahead of time or give them time to load, but if the internet goes kaput, then we can't watch movies. But at least if it's on DVD we can still watch it.
Plus I like getting special edition collectable editions of movies that I REALLY enjoy, like the Sonic movie for instance. I'm a HUGE Sonic nerd so I had to get the special edition that came with the collectible comic book. Sometimes DVD's come with collectibles in the box too. You can't get that with digital media. Even if you get the digital download, who's to say the movie will always available?
Call me old fashioned, but if we could go back to going to the video store for the more obscure movies, I'd be happy to do so. Renting a movie was one of the first things I did when I got my license. I was sad when video stores started closing down.
Anymore a lot of streaming services just don't have a lot of movies I like. The one up side though is that you sometimes get to see foreign made films that you wouldn't get to see anywhere else. I watched a pretty interesting zombie movie made in Korea with my boyfriend last year. I couldn't tell you the name of it though, I'd have to look it up.
I also feel like I'm the last generation to watch stuff on VHS. We technically have VCR but it's not hooked up. We still watch DVDs though and we can watch blue rays on our Playstation 4.
Games on the other hand...well again that depends. I like using Steam, but at least on Steam I know they're pretty good about keeping the titles in my library as long as I own them. (They have deals around Halloween time too for spooky scary type games, but that's a whole other topic.)
Anyway, I hope Stranger Things comes out on DVD so you can watch it, Murf. That's one of the few things I'll subscribe to Netflix for. And a lot of times I'll just watch what I want to watch and then if I get bored with it, I unsubscribe. And if it means hopping around different streaming services, I guess it is what it is. But I still prefer physical media.
And yes Cable and Satellite was like that too, but at least Cable or Satellite had something on I wanted to watch. (We had DirecTV growing up, but going to Grandma's meant Cable. I lived out in the sticks. There was no option for cable, but we had Satellite and that was better...unless it was cloudy out haha!) And of course back then if you were going to miss your favorite show, that's what the VHS recorder was for.

[Andybev01]

I have become proficient at 'borrowing' streaming content and archiving it on external devices.

It's great as long as the grid holds together.

Of course, if our infrastructure collapses, not being able to watch Gilligan will be very low on my list of priorities.

[Murfreesboro]