I get it – every business has to make money to pay their employees, fees, licenses, titles, taxes, and whatever else it takes to run said company.
That’s a universal truth from top to bottom including everything from giant global companies to small businesses like ours.
While I’m not privy to everything that the newspaper and by extension my mom pays for, I know that there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to owning and running a business.
However, I’m really not a fan of paying more for “less.”
In the case of digital streaming services, now that they’ve started including advertisements to offset whatever they feel they’re losing in viewership, I have to confess that the more ads I see between episodes of shows or at the start of movies in my own home are getting pretty annoying.
It also motivates me to cancel said subscriptions and just wait to buy the series or movie on a physical DVD rather than deal with more commercials.
However, I’ve noticed in recent years that there is also a decline in finding ways to purchase physical media across a broad spectrum including DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, and the odd resurgence of vinyl albums.
Last year alone, the Digital Entertainment Group reported a 20% decline in DVD and Blu-ray sales since 2021.
Plenty of blame has shifted to digital and internet-based streaming services for “killing” the industry.
Kind of reminiscent of the song lyrics from “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, right?
I might be an Elder Millennial, but, hey, I know that song and grew up singing along to it!
Over the past weekend, a group of friends and I hung out and they even commented on our DVD collection in our living room.
I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the cabinet was only a portion of the DVDs we were hoarding and clinging to.
Granted, we do rotate out the films we don’t watch often enough and either sell them or donate them, but, that isn’t very much now that we’ve pared down the library over the years.
My preference for physical media content actually started with movies and quickly branched into a vast array of music including a handful of cassette tapes and vinyl records I may or may not have “borrowed” from my biological father and never returned.
But, when it comes to DVDs, they are usually filled with more than just uncut, extended, or uncensored films – you’ve got behind-the-scenes segments like bloopers, director commentary, “making of” clips, and even the occasional music video!
You just don’t get the same experiences on streaming services and are even at the mercy of when they remove options from their online catalog.
I think it even gets worse when I want to watch something like a trilogy of films and they’re missing one of the movies in the series!
Plus, I can’t tell you how many movies we own that I stream through various apps that woefully remind me the uncut versions are better.
Overall, I’m not a fan of the huge digital shift and you can pry my DVD and CD collections from my cold, dead hands!
