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.
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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.
I’m going to assume youre on the younger side of things based on your view. If I’m wrong here, my apologies.
But having a physical copy of media that you control is very useful. You can view it whenever you want or need. Power is out? Generator, TV, media player. Soaks up a lot less juice than a PC. Internet goes out? Still got entertainment to pass the time.
From an economic system point of view, it used to be you’d pay for something and then it was yours. That system was quietly abused and without “consent”, it’s now you pay for something you rent. So from that perspective, fuck the system. Owning is better. I bought it. I didn’t rent it. And I certainly didn’t rent it pending 6 other subsystems being able to function and some arbitrary usage agreement between corporations, who more often than not, are working together against me to just make money.
I am sadly quite old already, but no worries.
But to me, modern home consumption media is like going to the cinema. I don’t own a movie if I paid for a ticket to the movies. I just watched it once. Streaming is a monthly less-than-one-ticket and of course the quality of the presentation is lesser, but in return I also get some upsides: A selection multiple orders of magnitude than at the cinema, ability to select the time I watch, and freely pause and resume.
Neither is a way of oncsuming movies in a way where ownership is relevant to my consumption, and long before home media was a big thing going to the movies worked perfectly fine. Plus let’s not delude ourselves here (and now apologies if I assume you’re older than you are 😛): In the times of VHS, we owned very few actual movies on tape. We copied them all, and of course re-used the tapes when we no longer needed the movie around, tapes were costly. Our library was - mostly - ephemeral then as it is now.
That being said, being able to watch without internet is a concern of course. And I suspect if my go-to form of entertainment for such times were movies or shows, I would be more into physical media, yeah. It isn’t, so that’s little problem to me (like I said above I read instead) but I can see that as a very good reason to own media in an offline format.