Actually genre shows with cult followings (and popular creators) are the kind of thing I suspect will always be available via streaming somehwhere. It’s the more mainstream hits that have aged away like Mad About You (which holds up pretty well, given I rewatched its run on FXX recently) or, say, Murphy Brown (which has the added hurdle of music rights) that will disappear.
Almost no one, including iTunes, Amazon or Google, has incorporated digital rights management in their per-track/album sales downloads for a long time now. Virtually no restrictions.
Of course you are not. I try to buy the Blue-Ray/DVD combo packs off Amazon. I figure if anything ever happens and I lose my job or end up in the hospital with huge hospital bills and I can’t afford cable anymore I can still watch TV shows and movies off of the physical platter. I own a lot of TV shows and movies that I have not watched yet and don’t really plan to anytime soon. Cuz I am on a year to year contract so any year I could get let go and have to go cheap as possible but since I buy these when I have extra money I have a bunch to watch in the future.
One of my favorite things to do is re-organizing the movies. It only takes about 20 minutes. I’ll go months and months of pulling movies off the shelf, watching them and then not putting them back. So after a year or so I got movies all over and I’ve also bought new movies so they need to be re-organized. I buy a lot of movies. So I have to end up just re-organizing them about once a year.
I find it fun. It’s like solving a puzzle. Which I love
I still have a working VCR and about 10 or so tapes. One is of when I made it on the local TV news when I helped organize a charity fund for a local girl who was a hit and run victim and I recorded it off the TV but the others have a special meaning so I keep them just to keep them.
I have mine in alphabetical order except for a few directors I really like, like Kevin Smith, and those I put in the “K” section and then put his movies in alphabetical order.
I have 800+ DVDs in my collection. I also have Netflix on my PC. Netflix for $10 a month is great but they choose what to show.
Let me add that I hate TV! Ads every 5 minutes WTF!
My DVD collection has movies never seen on TV or streaming anymore. I have hundreds of keepers. I pick them up at the pawn shops and bargain bins. Some titles where I got tired of waiting for them to show up I bought new.
It’s too easy to cheat the system, and return a different DVD than the one you were supposed to return. So I do think they’ll die out.
I mostly stream, but I also don’t watch all that many movies anymore.
I have no ethical reservations finding an illegal stream of a movie I already own. But I do enjoy the extras, which can be harder to find.
I’m also trying to get a hard copy of some CDs due to the higher audio quality. (For some reason, the digital copies are just 64kbps. I don’t know why they think that’s okay, even for audiobooks.)
Are you aware that the discs contain a 2-d barcode that is scanned upon return? The cases themselves are unmarked. This barcode is the only thing the machine uses to check on the correct return.
If you do “cheat” the system in someway, the next renter will quickly find out they got the wrong disc and report it. Since Redbox has your CC number, you will be charged the full price of the disc. If you were going further to defeat that aspect, then why bother to return a faked disc at all? Just don’t return it.
In short, suggesting that people returning faked discs to Redox is causing any financial hardship is completely absurd.
If you want not the original disc but just a copy, that is so easy it’s ridiculous and there’s no risk of being caught or charged extra.