As much as I hate that this is happening, I think once you turn to digital media, it’s incredibly difficult to go back. The convenience of having your stuff at a click of a button is just too good.
That said, if you’re into movies specifically, i’d personally still go the route of buying a disk, and ripping it to your local storage, but that’s both expensive, and inconvenient in terms of space
Storage is cheap for what you get.
A DVD movie ripped to MKV is 3-5GB.
A 12 terabyte drive is ~ $100. That’s… 2400 movies (if my math is right). My current movie collection is about 300 movies, 500GB of storage (I’ve ripped some stuff to MP4).
Having a backup of 12TB would cost perhaps $100/yr (Im paying less than that for backup of my 4TB storage).
Alternatively you can replicate your library with friends and family, pretty simple to do. Drop a mini pc with a drive in it running Kodi/Casaos/Freedombox, whatever, behind the TV at everyone’s house, for less than 20w of power you have a replicated media player.
But getting a DVD just to rip it is very inconvenient. Not only can there be scarcity issues with out-of-print disks, but also you’d either deal with the disks you never use lying around, throw them out or bother reselling, which I’d prefer not to do. I’d prefer having just hard drives of my media.
I’d have no issue with digital media if there was a way to actually own it. Everything is either streaming only or ridden with DRM that can only be played within their app. Blurays, assuming you can decrypt its DRM bs, are the last bastion of media ownership left.
You’ve essentially described exactly what the issue is. All these companies want you to continue subscribing, so you owning anything isn’t in their interest
The convenience of having your stuff at a click of a button is just too good.
Except when you go to find your stuff, discover it’s not there, and yearn to be able to just stuff a DVD in a player.
You can still get the best of both worlds with piracy. Click of a button to watch media and it’ll never disappear unless you want it to (or drive failures).
Oh, absolutely! But I do feel you’re trading a level of convenience for the privilege (and what a privilege!) - even something as simple as pirating one movie is already a much bigger hurdle than getting a Netflix subscription, for instance. Let alone setting up a Jellyfin server, backups, getting external connections / reverse proxying going, and so on.
