Physical Media

And why it's so important

5/15/26

These days, companies are pushing hard for people to use streaming services as their primary method of consuming media. Netflix and Hulu are still around, and they've been joined by a seemingly endless list of other companies that try to sell their libraries through streaming: Peacock, HBO, Cinemax, Paramount, and the list goes on. It puts people into a situation where, if they enjoy a wide variety of TV shows and movies, they might feel like they need to subscribe to 3-4 different streaming services in order to have access to whatever they might want to watch. One of the main problems? None of these services are particularly cheap, and they all keep increasing their prices. Even at the lowest tiers, if you subscribe to 2-3 streaming services, you can easily spend $50+ per MONTH on them, particularly if you either hate ads or need to have multiple devices accessing the services simultaneously. That equates to $600 a year spent for the ability to watch the shows and movies that you want to see... and that's a huge issue. Because there's a giant caveat that a lot of people haven't seemed to realize yet:

You have zero ownership rights for these services.

When you pay for these services, you're paying for a license to watch what these companies are providing for you, for whatever length of time they provide it. That's all. If said company decides to no longer offer that particular title/series for streaming? Then your license is worthless, and you no longer have anything to show for it. "But Zeph," you say, "if I've paid to own a digital copy of a movie, then I'll own it forever!". No. You don't own anything, because you're entirely dependent on it being available to you through whatever storefront you purchased it through. If the distribution rights for that title expire, or if the parent company decides that they no longer wish to offer access to it? Congratulations, you now have a useless license. It's happened before, and it'll keep happening!

Sadly, it's not just movies/TV that are dealing with this issue. From about 2006 onward, many game systems have heavily pushed digital games through their storefront. It really took off with Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's Playstation 3, and Nintendo's Wii, and digital sales have steadily become more and more of a focus for companies as the years have passed. In 2009, Sony released a handheld system called the Playstation Portable Go, a modified version of their popular Playstation Portable (PSP) system. The difference between the two? The PSP Go had no ability to read physical media. All games and movies had to be purchased directly through Sony's digital storefront. It was presented as the ultimate in convenience - being able to access your entire library of games and movies at any time, since they were all stored on the system. In reality, the PSP Go failed for a variety of reasons, including things being wildly overpriced, incomprehensibly overpriced accessories (including memory cards), and an inability to resell things that you no longer wished to own. Consumers rejected the concept, but it didn't go away. It only got delayed for a while. Modern video game consoles have a variety of digital-only versions, and the entertainment industry has successfully convinced people of the benefits of such a system. Sony was just to early in trying to implement it.

I know a lot of people who have discarded their entire libraries of physical media because of this "convenience". One of my exes loved the TV show Friends, and she had the entire series on DVD. But she ended up getting rid of it because Netflix had the entire series available for streaming. But in 2019... oops, it disappeared off Netflix, because the parent company pulled it to instead feature it on HBO Max. Now, unless she wants to pay another monthly streaming fee, she has two options: find the DVDs (again), or sail the seven seas. Another popular TV show, How I Met Your Mother, also got pulled from Netflix in December of last year. Still other series don't even migrate to a different service - they just disappear, sometimes never to be seen again. It gets worse for gaming libraries. Once the storefront servers for older video game systems go offline, generally speaking, it's difficult (if not impossible) to redownload titles that you may have purchased a digital license for. That means that as long as your hard drive/storage media in your system stays in good shape, you can likely play them - but if anything ever happens to that storage device (or sometimes, even just the system), you'll lose access to those titles forever.

This is where the beauty of physical media comes into play. When you have the physical copy of something, as long as you have the hardware to run it... you have access to it. You don't have to worry about it getting delisted from an online store. You don't need to worry about having an internet connection (in most cases) to verify ownership. You put the thing in the system, you push a button or two, and you're good to go. This is as it should be, and this is exactly why so many of the entertainment companies are working so hard to get away from this model - because once you pay once for the access, you have it, usually until you choose to get rid of it. Companies don't like this. From a financial side, it makes sense - would you rather sell a thing once, or sell the idea of a thing for a smaller amount of money that gets paid indefinitely? What's more, because there's a thriving secondhand market for physical media, the parent companies generally don't see any money past the initial sale of an item. No wonder they want to push streaming services so hard! But it's a system set up for the benefit of corporations and companies - not the consumers.

So what are the complaints about physical media? The one I hear most often is the need for space for the media, and it's understandable. The unfortunate thing about physical media is that it is, well... physical, and so you need to have some semblance of space dedicated to holding it. But depending on your circumstances, this is something that can usually be solved fairly easily. I personally want my physical media to include the original cases (and manuals/documentation if it came with it). Because of that, I've had to devote a lot (.... a LOT) of space to my physical media. I have shelves and shelves in my library devoted to this - by my last count, I have over 1,000 items in my movie/tv show collection alone. It can be intimidating sometimes. But to me, it's worth it to have the original artwork - partially because that makes me happy, and partially because if I ever want/need to sell any of my collection, I know I'll be able to get the best possible price for it. But what if I didn't have the space available for all of those cases? It would be pretty easy (and relatively inexpensive) to buy folders/cases that hold DVDs and load them up in there. The most important things (the discs) would be safe, and it would take up a fraction of the space. The same thing goes for my video games. Again, I keep everything as complete as possible, but I know plenty of people who have binders of discs, storage boxes full of small cartridges, and the end result is the same - they can be accessed and used.

The last aspect of digital media that I'll touch on is, I think, one of the most important things - preservation of media. There's a lot of stuff out there that's at risk of becoming "lost media" because it's not available for streaming anywhere, and physical copies of them are hard to come by. A lot of older movies fall into this category, but there are plenty of games that do as well. One shining example of this is a Wii U game called Affordable Space Adventures. It was a game designed and released for the Wii U in 2015, and it was built around using the Wii U's unique gamepad controller as you played the game. Because of this, it was never ported to any other systems, and because it was developed and published by independent parties, it never saw a physical release of any kind. In 2023, Nintendo disabled the ability to make any new purchases off the Wii U's e-shop. This means that consoles that purchased the game can redownload it for as long as Nintendo keeps access to the servers up, but eventually, the only copies of this game will be housed digitally on people's systems. That's one example, but there's a wide variety of movies and other works that exist digitally and are at risk of being lost to time if servers crash, are corrupted, or otherwise become unavailable. Having physical copies of media ensures that it will survive (at least as long as the media itself does). Even if there's little to no general interest in the active consumption of media of some kind, having the option to see it endure over the years is one well worth taking advantage of.

Companies are doing everything they can to take things away from consumers - from money to other things. Having physical copies of things you love means that's one less thing they can take from you. Support physical media!