cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/4954415
The digital world, I’m realising, is a bit of a racket. Recently most of my iTunes library disappeared from my iPhone, and I just don’t know if I can be bothered to go through all the different hoops, portals, queueing systems and long forgotten passwords to get them back again. I’ve also had the repeated experience of trying to view a film I’ve downloaded on Amazon, only to get that little square in the middle of the screen telling me that the player’s having issues at the moment, and would I, could I try again later? Meanwhile, the CDs and DVDs reproach me from my shelves like an abandoned spouse. ‘We were once your rock,’ they remind me, ‘And you traded us for tech-tinsel, a piece of cyber-skirt. How are you feeling now?’
I feel what I’ve always felt – that DVDs and Blu-rays were the summit of the film-lovers’ experience, and that progress should have stopped forever after that. Perhaps downloads or streamable films can have the picture quality of a Blu-ray (someone will doubtless tell me they do), but works of art should produce an artefact, something you can hold in your hand and own.
…
So my Blu-ray collecting goes on, but it’s strictly finite. I don’t want any film I don’t actually love (this rules out the collected Tarkovsky or Bergman, things I’d like to think of myself as liking rather than actually wanting to watch). My ambitions in fact are modest: the middle period works of Woody Allen (they’re about £25 a piece and should be), the odd Hollywood classic (the more technicolour the better) and some of those gritty 1960s northern films (the kind Morrissey purloined for his album covers) starring Tom Courtenay and Rita Tushingham. Then, barring the odd hiccup, I’m done.
Of course not. Everyone moved to streaming services. Zero physical media and you get to charge people whatever you want and can increase your prices yearly, while dropping content you love. For me, that’s not working so I pirate everything.
I still have 300+ DVD’s but I’ve downloaded them all once I got my Plex home media server setup and now I don’t even care what streaming services are out there. I got everything I need and it works when my internet doesn’t.
I’m with you. I agree that it’s silly that physical media has all but disappeared. It’s especially sad that it happened right after bluray became affordable. The picture quality on them is astounding. The banding/artifacts you sometimes see on streaming services should not be acceptable at all, but honestly I think a lot of people do not notice them at all!