by XvGojira » Sat Apr 11, 2015 9:41 pm
I'm a fan of both physical and digital media. I haven't bought a physical PC game in years. And I rarely buy full albums, let alone physical discs.
But digital movies have some hurdles before I start buying them. For me there's almost too many options. Look at : iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, Amazon, Verison, XBox, Disney, Playstation Video, Barnes and Noble Nook, M Go, Cineplex. And I'm sure each and everyone has different rights and abilities for the files, not to mention selection of movies.
Now I don't want a monoploy, but at the same time if I have a digital collection I don't want to have to access a different system for almost every movie.
Another issue is, and I quote The Digital Bit's Facebook page, "If you encourage people to move away from physical media and buy digital content instead, once they purchased that content in digital HD, WHY WOULD THEY EVER PURCHASE IT AGAIN?"
We know they love double, triple, quadruple dipping and this would negate that. Unless they switch digital platforms and to get your movies back you'll have to repurchase them (if they're feeling generous it'll be at a discounted price).
But at the same time, if I could have the same experience I have with buying and using games on Steam with movies, my movie collection would be triple or more what it is now. Living in apartment with 3 other people, space is sparse. Soon enough I'll have to start trying to mix my movies with my figures (or vice versa).
There are some movies that I haven't got because I'm not sure if their worth is equal to their space. Like if I could get the on some fantasy universal platform, I would. Only a few of the movies are "worthy" of physical copies (1,2,3 and maybe H20), but the collector in me doesn't want to be missing the other movies.
I've traded and re-bought movies to get smaller packaging. I've bough blank multi-disc cases to house big series (but what do I do with the old packaging? Toss to save space? Keep it in case I become rich and have a full movie library room). I have forsaken any and all over sized and odd shaped collectors editions.
Digitally, it can be as easy as swapping .jpgs to get the cover you want. If I want a good cover to something, I have to hope some one better at photoshop already beat me to the punch, if not cobble together something halfway decent myself, and then try and get my printer to correctly print it without emptying my ink cartridge with failed attempts.
And I get that there are some people with crap net that makes digital distribution a crap shoot at best. But as streaming entertainment becomes more and more common place the push for better and faster internet gets bigger more wide spread. And honestly it isn't happening fast enough in my opinion. Wasn't there one of those rich millionaires trying to make a world wide wi-fi with suborbital satellites or something?
With HBO coming out with a digital platform divorced from cable packages, I could see many other premium channels following suit. The Death of Cable TV might be closer than the death of physical media, but that's getting a little bit off topic.