Man, this is a movie you should OWN already. C’mon now. I’ve got it on Blu-ray AND digital.
I still don’t own a Blu-Ray player and only recently really started buying digital movies after Movies Anywhere made me way less nervous about ecosystem lock-in. I love Google Play, but they restrict the ability to play HD content on desktop PCs heavily (lots of movies play at 480p on my computer), which is where I watch the majority of my content, so being able to buy it there with my wealth of gift cards and credit but watch it through another Movies Anywhere partner in HD is really vital to me.
So suffice to say, my collection of recent (e.g., post-DVD-era) content is very minimal.
All I heard were trombone noises after this.
Isn’t Redbox getting into the streaming game?
They launched in December, but it’s not a Netflix/Amazon competitor. You don’t pay a subscription. You just pay for each movie you watch. So it’s more of an iTunes/Google Play competitor.
I got a Redbox gift card a few years ago. Now I can finally use it.
What’s the difference between owning and streaming, other than availability? I don’t buy because I seldom watch a movie more than once. For every movie I watch, there are five good ones I haven’t seen yet, and they make another ten while I’m trying to catch up on the five I hadn’t seen. Every day I fall behind. People who buy are shameless optimists convinced they are going to live forever.
My girlfriend and I joke about the Cloud. That’s where we are going to watch all the shows and movies, listen to all the music, and play all the games we didn’t get around to while alive. We have a nice cloud waiting for us when we pass on to the next life. It’s full of media.
First, Blu Ray’s have better quality than streaming. Second, you get all the special features on physical media. Third, stuff disappears from streaming all the time, so it’s availability is never fully certain. And four, as I do love rewatching stuff, so it makes sense for us.
Well for one, you can hand your DVD or Bluray to a friend or family member and they can watch it in their own time without you needing to share account details.
I just now got my Dead Like Me set back in the mail after bringing it down to watch with my grandma over Christmas vacation and then leaving it with her so she could finish the show without me.
All that’s cool, but to me more and more TV and movies and music are disposable media. The new stuff comes in so fast that it hardly works to hold onto the old stuff. Sharing is nice, but you can share by recommending.
The only current problem I see is that so much media is gated by different companies. How many gates do I want to buy access too? This is a problem that is currently somewhat solved by the flood of new content at the gates I currently own. Sure, I’d like THAT show but rather than pay to see it I’ll watch this new show that’s out on my current subscription service. Not completely solved, but even then I can buy access for a month to something and binge-watch a show and unsubscribe.
What if malkav’s grandma doesn’t have a streaming service? Or isn’t a subscriber to the one with Dead Like Me on it? You’re okay with making a suggestion that leads to more money they have to spend, wherein you can loan them a set if you own it? Kinda diskish.
Go ahead and own the Blu-Ray and share! I’m not saying don’t. I’m just saying it’s not something I am interested in anymore. I don’t see it as the future. I expect ownership to transfer from discs to the cloud at some point. Even then, I have little interest in owning since I don’t rewatch much.
Perhaps I’m different because I don’t have a collection of DVDs and Blu-Rays. I haven’t spent several hundred and or several thousand dollars on this stuff, so I have no personal investment. If I had, I might see value in continuing to grow it.
Just me.
Or there isn’t a streaming service that offers it, which is certainly true for some shows and films. I guess Dead Like Me, in particular, is on Hulu, though. Not that anyone in my family has that.
On some level, I’m like a weird cross of the lot of y’all. I refuse to pay for a streaming music service- I can’t stomach the idea of paying forever and then not being able to access anything I paid for if I cancel. I want to buy an album, download a copy and keep it forever, playing it on any service (or my own apps) I choose, whenever I want, as many times as I want.
On the same/paradoxically opposite note, I refuse to buy movies/tv online, as then you have to watch it on the service you bought it on- a shitty, anti-consumer practice that’s become the norm. So I pay to stream and own nothing. I accept this probably because I don’t rewatch too many movies, either, but eh. Who knows?
I’m in a similar boat. I don’t buy like… any movies.
Music on the other hand, I buy constantly. Then again they tend to need the support more in a lot of cases.
No one’s album is pulling in a billion dollars in profit.
Oh, they’re still massively fucking up digital purchases of movies in a way music got over long ago, so the only movie I have ever bought digitally (as opposed to receiving as a freebie or a pack in with a disc copy) was Lego Batman when it was $2 on Amazon a while back. Which is a shame, because I am fully digital for every other form of media going forward and I wish I could justify doing the same for video.
I still buy physical books, sometimes, and sometimes on my Kindle. But I haven’t bought a DVD or CD in… probably ten years? I don’t need more physical stuff (besides boardgames).
I pretty much only rent/buy digital movies when they’re cheap or free. Google in particular gives out deals several times a year, and of course there’s whatever Amazon Prime Video provides. (I know, not actually free, but I’m paying the yearly fee anyway for other benefits.)
I don’t buy music or video in any form. I buy some cheap Kindle books. I buy a physical book now and then, often at a used bookstore.
I have Netflix, Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited, so I get most of my stuff that way – music and ebooks and video.
We have cheap ($10/month employee discount) DirecTV, the next to best package. If we didn’t get such a good deal on DirecTV we would probably dump it in a couple of years when the GF’s kid goes away to college. But for $10 per month we will have it until she retires from AT&T and the price goes up. I entertain myself by flipping through channels and not finding anything and tossing the remote aside in disgust.
So, Netflix just released Dirty Money, a documentary series exec-produced by Alex Gibney, who also directed the first episode. You might remember his work from the terrific scientology documentary Going Clear. Watched the first three episodes so far and it’s been really good, taking a closer look at the Volkswagen Diesel scandal, CLK payday loans and Valeant.
I had followed the Volkswagen thing relatively closely and think the episode was a solid summary, enriched with some insights and footage that probably hadn’t been public yet. I didn’t know anything about CLK and only knew some basics about Valeant, so I learned quite a bit during the respective episodes.