This is an expert writeup on the increasingly problematic strategies of video streaming providers but what really is the answer to media ownership? In the streaming scenario, you're at the whim of whatever a certain service has licensed agreements for. You cannot own any individual title, nor its catalog at large but save a limited number of items to a device or cloud-based retrieval service. This is similar to the traditional cable viewing option, except you can record a fixed amount of items to a DVR enabled cable receiver. These streaming subscriptions, like monthly cable or satellite television services, will always have an updating and rotating list of movies and television programs available at any given time. I think people are mostly used to this kind of system. The only issue I see with this is the fact of competing services being owned by providers or networks or studios that own huge back catalogs of entertainment IP's. It now seems more than not, that each studio or entertainment property has its own streaming service. Even among boutique Blu-ray retailers there are dedicated streaming services for streaming those niche titles they release on disk. I never really understood why Arrow or Criterion would need a separate standalone streaming service until I realized it's not for their main customers, it is for the other people who don't want to commit to owning the discs. If this is the case, which it appears to be, the titles have already been scanned for digital streaming, why not include digital copy as part of their premium boxed offerings? I'd bet it's because there's still a percentage of people who will pay for the streaming service for those films for the mere convenience of not having to locate the physical copy, take out the disc from the packaging, put it into the player, go through all the menus, etc.. So they found a way they can double up on some money. I'm sure some of those movies are terribly expensive to restore and get up to the quality demanded by today's viewer and many might not be a financial home run for these small companies every time. I say let them do what they will with their product, free market right? My point is: even the niche studios that release cult films haven't disassociated themselves from video streaming. I can't say for certain but maybe some of them might be seeing sales diminishing and are moving toward a more robust streaming situation. Or maybe their sales on physical media is higher than ever and just appreciate a second revenue source and an added avenue for people to enjoy their product. [This is going a little bit longer than I had imagined but bear with me, I do have a point.] The problem really is with the individual titles that we choose to buy through a standalone service like iTunes, Google, Vudu or even through Comcast video-on-demand. These digital copies which we've paid full price and should expect to own indefinitely, doesn't always seem to be the case. For example, just recently PlayStation decided it was going to remove certain programming from its platform, even when expressly purchased by users. The access to a selection of television shows would have been removed but I believe Sony has now changed direction on this; don't bash me over this, I may be wrong. This is not new, as people have been complaining about books being removed from their Kindle devices or music missing from their iTunes library for years now. Predictably because of licensing agreements that had expired or failed to be renewed. So the age old question, as it seems, queries once more: who owns our digital purchases? Those who have devoted their time, energy and finances towards obtaining personal physical media libraries, seem to believe that this is the only true way to have reliable access to any given title. I am a well-worn member of this tribe who began collecting VHS tapes in my pre-teen years. I remember happily anticipating each coming week when newly released inventory would be added into the previously-viewed bins at all the local video rental stores. Although I no longer collect VHS tapes, twenty-something-years later and I have a Blu-ray collection of over 8,000 titles. So I know the joy of having a personal collection but also the stresses involved. One of many, trying to move a collection of that size even just across town is ridiculously stressful and time-consuming. I recently moved last October, five months later I have not even packed my entire physical collection at the previous place, let alone began to move them. The ones that I have packed and moved are still in boxes in my garage. Every now and then I go through to find titles and it's time consuming and inconvenient. Now it seems that I've gone on to a personal tangent but there was a reason for this as well: to illustrate that I am also a lover of the home video format and an avid collector of movies regardless of their quality, merit or prestige. I've always been one to believe that the more trashy and questionable the subject matter of films makes them tend to disappear and those should be sought after to keep from vanishing- if they ever even make it to streaming. Regardless, I have a ton of the Hollywood-blockbuster-franchise type as well. You can never really know what will find it's way to streaming and what will be blacklisted or disappear entirely, indefinitely. This brings me to my final point: the discs we own are in no way at all, impenetrable to being recalled or the equivalent of having the license revoked. These discs are played within our Blu-ray players. These players are filled with technology that's licensed to the manufacturer of the disc player through licensing agreements. They contain certain DRM lockouts as well as region exemptions based on location, not to mention that they sometimes require certain upgrades to continue working, like upgraded HDMI cords compatible with new DRM encrypted technology to even transfer the video to the screen. There are so many digital walls to climb: format and file type ownership, compression methods or even reading the disc in order to locate the files written on it. There are license agreements just to open the disc, period. A lot of these are owned by Sony, who I believe still owns a big portion of the Blu-ray technology. So here's my question: what if those of us who have amassed these huge media libraries for our personal enjoyment, soon find that our disc players won't read or open the files? That because the structure for or the protocols for Blu-ray players reading the files have been altered so that none of the discs are operational any longer. Then it appears that we have just a bunch of expensive cardboard packaging with no actual media whatsoever. Everyone talks about digital rights vanishing but what if our physical media rights can also be taken away just as easily? [** All it takes is one hardware update to shut it all down. Sure, we could rip all the files and save them on a server but that requires massive amounts of storage, not to mention all the bonus features or alternate cuts of the film. Thus it becomes even more tedious. Nor does this begin to consider the high cost of SSD drives or the impracticality, due to hardware failures of HDD. **] I never hear anyone discussing this and it always is a point of frustration for me. It's not as if it's impossible or even unlikely. If studios are losing more money and they decide they want to make money off their entire back catalog, again, so they shut down all disc access to make people repurchase titles to watch them on a per per view payment plan. Sure I've just taken it to the worst-case-dystopian-evil-capitalist-conspiracy-scenario BUT it's not that far of a stretch is it?
** Added after posting original comment.
