I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 per DVD - and there are tons of deals.

You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.

Get the DVD. Make a legal backup. Keep the physical DVD in storage.

You now "own" the movie (or TV show), not a "license".

In my neighborhood you will often see people selling DVD collections where you get 10-20 discs for $10 or less - varies. I'm sure that is the case elsewhere.

NAS + Apple TV with Infuse app installed = Better than Netflix (and others) imho.

(Note: I do recommend the one-time lifetime license for Infuse app = $99.99)

Reference:

- "Backup DVD Copies Legal Says Electronic Frontier Foundation" https://www.eff.org/effector/16/7#I

- "2026 DVD Digital Copyright Laws in US, UK, Japan, Australia..." https://www.winxdvd.com/resource/dvd-copyright-infringement-...

DVD Inbox and Cafe DVD is $20/mo for 2 discs at a time, with unlimited discs and a 5 day guarantee. 5 days to get your DVD doesn't seem great. They have cheaper plans but limit the number of DVDs you can take out.

Netflix was revolutionary because they shipped very eagerly and they charge $15/mo for 2 DVDs unlimited. And I think their shipping took 2 days. They shipped as soon as you shipped yours back so if you were diligent you could prob have close to a movie every night. Incredible service.

I guess the economics just isn't there.

Physical still has the downside of needing space. I have space for books, but not much else.

With digital distribution, the license to watch it will eventually terminate, and it cannot be transferred, so without a resale market it is much more expensive.

The best part is that I can go to my local flea market, and buy Blu-Ray discs for a tiny fraction of the retail price. Multiple vendors sell them for well under $1 each. Last weekend, I bought the Avengers 3D bundle and Pacific Rim, for 50¢ each.

Blu-Ray players, in a modern small form factor, are often under $10 at thrift stores, although they rarely come with a remote, but usually do have CEC, so the remote isn't always needed.

It's possible I could've saved money just renting 1 movie at a time, no different from how online rentals are now.

I think disc rentals over mail and Redbox machines still has some relevance even today. You never have to worry if a movie's taken off the streaming catalog, then having to research what other streamer has it, then contemplating if you want to go through signing-up just for 1 movie. You found the movie, you requested it, and it's getting mailed to you in hardcopy. It won't suddenly disappear in transit due to rights-holder issues.

OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky; we ended up replacing it about three times in just as many years. Streaming services are overpriced, but they do _work_ consistently.

Is the author aware that Netflix's original subscription business was sending DVDs to customers and customers returning the DVDs to Netflix all via postal mail. "DVD-by-mail rental service"

There was no "streaaming"

PS: Thanks for the reminder about the price increase, just cancelled my netflix.

But for TV series in particular, watching on disc is quite clunky after a decade+ of streaming services, and DVR boxes prior to that. I'll buy them in principle, but ultimately they end up ripped and viewed via Jellyfin.

I have a Shield TV connected through my AVR and it works pretty well for content directly from my nas/cifs/smb via Kodi.

The biggest problem I have with physical media is that increasingly shows aren't being sold at all. Sometimes it's older or genuinely obscure stuff, but sometimes even recent and popular stuff doesn't get released. I suspect that often it's intentionally done to drive subscriptions to streaming services.

There are still a lot of shows that can't be legally obtained anymore. Sym-Bionic Titan (2010) is one I've pretty much given up hope on. There are also a bunch of Disney shows like Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Amphibia, and Owl House that never got a physical release.

Prices on physical media are going down which is nice since a lot of companies played bullshit games like releasing "volumes" or "collections" instead of full seasons and you still have to do some research to know which discs have bad transfers, terrible "remasters", and which should be fullscreen vs widescreen. I recently got a really good deal on Star Trek: TOS, only to later realize that they'd replaced all the special effects and shots of the Enterprise with CGI.

I left when shows I enjoyed were a revolving door, and the UI felt hostile (constantly trying to shove terrible quality original content on me).

Two months ago I just stopped watching streaming services all together. The friction of enshitification reached such a boiling point that I lost all joy in watching anything. I cancelled those services I personally paid for and stopped watching those that I don't. My life improved in clear ways. I began reading for pleasure again. Each night at 10pm I sit down in my reading chair, get comfy and read 2 chapters of: one book for enjoyment and one book for learning. It didn't hurt that the first book I read was Atomic Habits! I noticed that my sleep schedule and quality of sleep improved. I've also been more dedicated to my passion projects as well. You don't really realize how invasive these things are until you remove them from your life. I had already given up all social media except Reddit a couple of years ago. Even now I stay away from hot bed subreddits (typically news oriented ones) to preserve my mental health. From 2010-2018 I actually did a test to give up a smart phone in favor of a flip phone, but that became untenable.

So thank you to all the enshitified streaming services for helping me restore balance in my life.

We have a 4K Blu-Ray that gets used every once in a while and the 4K Dune and few other titles looks absolutely stupendous. Local 4k streamed from Plex is pertty close. but nothing supposedly 4k streamed from Youtube or Netflix really compares, the blacks show artifacts and stuttering, even through gigabit fiber. can't beat local playback!

Certainly there's some convenience advantages for discovering new music, but it turns out I don't really do that often.

First I tried playing DVDs straight from PC which is connected to TV. That was horrible quality and UX.

Then I bought a good quality DVD player with hardware upscaling. It provided better image quality and slightly better UX. But you still had to deal with the menus and buch of other slow loading stuff that comes with DVDs... Gave up on it.

Netflix is really not deserving 9 USD/mo and even less with ads.

So long, Hollywood.

if you buy any smart tv, you can just install streamio and pirate any movie/tv show you like

I dont really see a reason why someone still pays for netflix.

The competition in the space is going to zero and that is why NF and Disney are raising prices.

I just turned a refurbished Dell Optiplex into a home server.

It is an excellent vessel for sailing the high seas and streaming the loot.

I think I finally cancelled it at $14-15 but I go back for 1-2 months a year to catch up on stuff I want. I basically cycle streaming services.

I've searched for data on how often people do this. I'm 99% sure it's a small minority but I bet it's growing. There is an inertia with subscriptions of every type. People are lazy to cancel things they don't use. It's the entire basis for the gym model.

So somebody is doing the math in the background of working out how much they can raise prices and lose people to subscription cycling vs lazily not cancelling and it still favors raising prices. I suspect at some point that'll change and, when it does, it'll be too late to do anything abou tit.

My suspicion is that this kind of analysis will be a textbook example of a company making short-term optimizations all the way into extinction.

The only research I've found is on comparing to move to cable to streaming and how many streaming services people have. I haven't found anything about streaming churn. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.