Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means I earn a commission at no expense to you. Affiliate links are marked with the asterisks (*)
I remember 10 years ago when I moved to Canada — yes, it’s been a decade! — and people told me that I was dumb for buying a Blu-Ray player. Physical media was a dying form of entertainment, and I was just holding onto something for the sake of it.
I allowed them to say it and bought the Blu-Ray player anyway. I brought some Blu-Rays over that I knew would work over here — my DVDs from the UK wouldn’t work, but most Blu-Rays would — and kept buying physical media.
As soon as Game of Thrones* came out with their full shadow box set, I bought it. I have the entire collection of The Handmaid’s Tale* and SEAL Team*, and I will continue to get movies that I enjoyed at the theaters (or if I enjoyed them enough on streaming). Nobody was going to change my mind, because I knew physical media was going to make a comeback.
Gilmore Girls Leaving Netflix Has Started to Change Everything
When Netflix announced that it was losing Gilmore Girls in the United States (it’s now on Prime Video!), the comments made it clear that physical media is still popular. Many commenters made it clear that this was why they had the discs.
With a physical disc, it can’t be taken away from you whenever the licensing agreement changes or when a company decides that it just wants to wipe your account.
This isn’t just about TV shows and movies, either. There are more people turning to physical books despite having a Kindle or another type of e-Reader. There are stories of companies just removing a book, even though it’s been paid for, usually because the author has started to take down their content or because an author’s whole library has been pulled by someone as big as Amazon.
Video game companies are also going to start seeing rebellion. After years of being the company that marketed people could share discs with friends to play games at each other’s houses when Xbox started to go digital, Sony is now announcing that buying games isn’t quite owning. It’s getting the license to play a digital copy on the PlayStation. And now, new PlayStations aren’t going to come with a disc drive.
We’ve seen the move with computers and laptops. They no longer have the disc drive in place. You have to get an external one if you want to do things the old-fashioned way — and yes, I still have an external Floppy Disc drive for those that I still have!
People Get to Own Their Physical Media
I’m hearing a saying a lot recently. “If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.”
The simple fact is people think that if they’re only getting to buy a license to play a game that can be taken from them at any moment’s notice for the slightest perceived infraction, then it’s fine to pirate.
Against a multi-million corporation, I can see the argument. Sony is doing things out of greed. Netflix and Amazon can withstand some of the losses that piracy brings, but it’s not the big corporations that are going to suffer from this move.
Authors are already making it clear that they make pennies on their books, and that pirating them just leads to a loss of income. TV show and movie creators and actors are affected by piracy.
The problem is that it takes smaller people to feel it first for the bigger corporations to change for the better.
But instead of pirating, it’s possible to own the physical media instead. This is why it’s going to start making a major comeback. People will go out to buy the discs and the books, because they can’t be just taken away at a moment’s notice. Those who can’t buy will be able to rent from libraries.
I never stopped believing in physical media. It’s why I have a good hundred DVDs and way more books on my shelves. The move is coming, with more people doing the same. Is it as convenient as having everything on our phones? Not at all, but it’s a change we need to force if we want to see companies switch back to respecting us as consumers.
How do you watch TV shows and movies? Do you read physical books? What do you think of the recent changes with Sony? Share your thoughts in the comments below and let’s get this conversation going.
