I recently got into Broadcast the Net through a friend of a friend and it is infinitely better than any streaming service in combination with the *arr suite and Plex. I had almost forgotten how much better piracy is until Netflix pulled their no account sharing bullshit. Now they get $0/month from me and that money goes to BTN.
Think of The Pirate Bay, but you have to get an invite to make an account to be able to leech/seed.
It's a private torrent tracker with strict rules (you must seed every show you download for at least 24 hours, and every season pack for 5 days, both within 2 weeks). If you break that rule you get a mark on your account, and after enough of them you get banned. As a result of these rules just about every torrent has download speeds above 500 Mbps, and almost every TV show you can imagine is on there. It's also full of people ripping new shows as soon as they come out, so new episodes pop up day of release.
It's almost impossible to get into without knowing someone who's already in.
I be fearing the media executives may decide my DVD purchases be cutting into their plans to sell me streaming services. If they keel haul DVD sales, I've no mind what I could be doing about it. Arrr. It be a mystery as deep as the high seas.
Fellow lemmings, I, for one, agree wholeheartedly with the premise of this article, which is why I will be using this opportunity to buy the collector's edition of the Golden Globe winning movie, Barbie, on Blu-Ray, so that I can watch it whenever I want to.
In fact, I will be buying multiple copies, one for every room in my house, because you just never know.
We don't need physical media, we need DRM removed and the ability to buy tv/music/movies in a format we want at a reasonable price to use as we see fit.
I've been buying physical media (DVDs, BluRay) and ripping them with MakeMKV + Encoding them with HandBrake and use my cloud storage + a mix of Kodi and Infuse Pro to stream my shows.
I'll rip a thousand DVDs before I let this company physical media die!
I use the same set up. It works great. The $5 bin at Walmart, garage sales, and good will are great places to find great deals. Although the latter two have way too many full screen cropped versions. Why we ever decided pan and scan was preferable to black bar widescreen is beyond me.
I stopped buying physical discs when they started adding unskippable commercials at the beginning. Not sure if they still do that.
I did however receive a number of Blu-rays for a gift recently and I was able to redeem codes to add them to my iTunes library. Pretty cool… until Apple decides to not support it.
No need for physical media when it comes to file sharing. But if you really hate the environment so much, I guess yeah... sure, physical media accomplishes something.
I haven't deleted any downloaded content in about 17 years now.
But yes, you are correct. I still feel it's important to remind people that the only alternative to streaming isn't like DVDs or vinyl records or something.
To be frank, any mention of "physical media" almost exclusively means DVDs/blu-rays/etc. But people really should talk more about hard drives as physical storage. It's essentially the same concept as those mediums anyhow. The only physical difference is storage size and the practical differences (no ads, locked content, quality limits, etc) are huge.
Why the hate on your post. Physical media has its downsides as well, like polution you mentioned but others such as degradation over time, region locking, especially optical disks. There isn't a best solution since I believe the preservation of media should be a mixture, I like having physical copies of my favourite media and then soft copies of the rest