Gizmo

I purchase episodes of THE OFFICE the day iTunes allowed us to and they can still be played today, some 15+ years later.

Im not that concerned my digital purchases just going poof.

In regards to THE SIMPSONS - yep, still in my library. No rights were lost since I purchased it before

So much paranoia over this when at the end of the day, I can just hop on the ol’ pirate ship and get a movie that was pulled/changed/removed etc. if somehow a handful of movies disappear from my list I likely wouldn’t even know. Much like if I grabbed a Blu-ray from your shelf of thousands. You would likely never know, unless I did that to hundreds of other people of the same movie and someone complained online.

back to the topic - I can’t unload any physical media. No one wants to this stuff for any value. I’ve never seen this type of behavior before. Literally impossible to sell unless it’s OOP or has some random slip cover.

John Galt

Most of these DVDs/Blu-Rays aren't worth the time you're going to put in to try to get rid of. If you're concerned over space, you might as well just throw a huge lot on one of the marketplaces and hope someone bites and you can get some beer money out of it. With Blu-Ray out, I sold all my DVDs around 2008 for $6-7 each. I have boxes and boxes of Blu-Rays sitting in my attic, but backed up and preserved on my media server. I have a few hundred UHDs displayed in a closet with all my home theater equipment, but I'm running out of space there. The days of having media out and displayed in your house are over, so that's where they're going to stay. Like others here, I want the best audio/video quality possible so I'm not going to get rid of the UHDs. I didn't spend $20k on a 9.2.4 home theater to watch a lower bitrate presentation with lossy audio.

Toddarino

I’ll go ahead and disagree with this.

John Galt

You can display whatever you want, but from a general interior design perspective, it's something you rarely see anymore.

dvd-4-life

I've never had physical media stop playing and asked me if I was still watching.

ViewAskewbian

Yeah, me too. I am going in the OTHER direction. I had stopped collecting for some time and then I got a blu-ray player, saw the difference in some of my favorite films, and then started upgrading some. Then I got into MARVEL flicks. Now, with 4k, though I don't own a tv or player yet, I am amazed at the restorations done on some older titles so I have been snagging those as a form of future proofing (but only when they come with a bluray). I actually upgraded my first upgrade last week with my third purchasing of the Back to the Future Trilogy. Discovering Criterion 50% off sales, I've started to snag some titles I've always wanted and upgrade other's like the David Lynch films I only owned on DVD.

Sooooo, this weekend I actually set up a new shelving unit to account for the new purchases.

I can't be saved...

E Unit

Yep this just happened.

https://forum.dvdtalk.com/video-game...l#post14128283

Bottom line, ALL digital purchases do not make them yours forever. Studios reserve the right to take us away if they want. This was known since digital started.

Gizmo

Yeah, I’m sure the dozens of people who used the PS Store to buy random Studio Canal movies years ago are livid.

PS Store, which isn’t even something I’ve heard anyone say they’ve used to buy movies (I probably own thousands across movies and TV digitally Since day 1 and never used), and Studio Canal, which clearly isn’t selling anything a Gamer would buy on their PS4 after playing Call or Duty 57.

But hey, we know discs never go bad. It’s not like we have a running list of Criterion, ya know, CRITERION, discs which failed. But that’s cool. Just go buy another OOP disc. Not to mention the hundreds of others from studios with known problems.

Sky is falling is getting old. It’s been almost 2 decades of digital purchases with a few issues along the way. Let me know when UNIVERSAL pulls all my titles or DISNEY. Until then, I’m not concerned if somehow a $5 digital purchase from 2011 just goes poof. It’s not like I test my thousands of DVDs/BDs/HD DVDs every year to make sure they are not bad.

E Unit

Forest for the trees. In short, it's always a possibility. Don't hang your hat saying you now have these forever. It could be Vudu having to do this with something else in the future.

Gizmo

..:Right. But we have BLU-RAY discs that fail. Why are you hanging your hat on them? It’s the same damn thing, except Discs are more likely to just go bad over time.

Noonan

The only media I buy these days is video games when Amazon dumps the discs for massive discounts. Donated all my movie discs other than a very select few. I still have all my CDs from growing up but they're in boxes in the basement. Not even worth my time to dig them out to donate at this point. They'll end up in the trash.

E Unit

I'm not, that's why I started this thread. But we're both right and wrong. Digital or physical, both can do bad for all of us.

Gizmo

Just make a backup of your movie and move on. I guess when you own thousands losing 1 or 2 isn’t going to make a big difference. I wouldn’t cry if I found a BD that didn’t play or a digital movie that disappeared.

the removal comes from a service that was likely under 1% of Studio Canals digital purchases from a service which closed well over a year ago. Pretty moot point. I’m not falling for the disc of disc when Criterion has dozens of expensive titles that stopped playing.

Anyways, there is no where to sell BDs for more than $1. Best to just stick them in a box and let your next of kin deal with them when you die.

dex14

I have thousands of discs. I am downsizing some. Purchases are mostly boutique labels.

I've been doing some disc to digital for things I had on DVD. I'll sell some DVDs in lots on eBay.
I just sold a lot of 50 for $30... after fees it was $25... shipping was $11. So I net about $14 for 50 discs.

I am getting rid of some TV shows too. I just sold Star Trek: TNG Blu-ray set. Is that OOP or something? I sold it for over $200.

Jay G.

The point is typically running out of space, so it's either toss in the trash or sell/donate in some form.

A while ago, I put all the my BD discs into disc organizers and got rid of the cases, because I literally did not have room to keep all the cases on my shelves. For all the the combo BD/DVD sets where the DVD was essentially a redundant, lower quality copy of the BD, I removed the DVD and put it in a plain paper disc envelope, and my wife took them to work for her co-workers to take. I also activated all my digital copies on UV, then MA when UV died and studios transitioned. If I need more space, I'll probably move the discs of films I have a digital copy of to storage; even when I own the disc, sometimes playing it digitally is easier.

I'm also limiting my purchases recently to 3D Blu-ray largely, since subscription and even most digital copies aren't 3D, so the discs are giving me something I can't get digitally.

Subscription streaming services are fine as long as you aren't wanting to watch a specific film at a specific time. There's typically at least one film or show I'd want to watch on the few services I'm currently subscribed to. It can be a bummer if you get an itch for something in particular, but I'm currently suffering from TOO MUCH to watch on subscription services, not from not enough.

Also, "streaming" includes digital purchases, and shows and movies stay on there almost forever in most cases if you purchase, so that's viable even if you insist on watching something when you want to.

This depends on what one means by "owning the content." In a real, technical, legal sense, actually nobody "owns" the actual content of a movie; in law the copyright owner owns exactly that: the exclusive right to produce copies of the work. But there are other rights regarding the work that the copyright owner never has exclusivity to, and the first sale doctrine confers a lot of rights to any owner of a copy of that work. I think this is what zyzzle was getting at: when you own copy on a physical disc, you actually own that copy, versus streaming services where even when "purchasing" a copy, the terms of the service make it clear you don't actually "own" the copy they're granting you access to.

Which isn't to say that physical copies aren't without their own risks. They can get broken, lost, or stolen, and when they're gone, you don't own anything regarding the content anymore. You didn't purchase a right to the content, just to a disc with the content on it, and when you no longer have the disc, or it's unplayable, you no longer can view the content. I've had CDs stolen before, and I lost that music, something which can't happen with a music subscription service.

Never say never. I recall when music streaming on the web was like 32kbps. Hell, Pandora is still 64k for free listeners:
https://help.pandora.com/s/article/C...-1519949296224

But now there's several music services that will stream lossless audio to you. So as people's speeds increase and costs go down, video bitrates will likely increase as well, and there may be a point where they're on parity with Blu-ray. Not to mention that streaming services can switch to higher quality codecs like HVEC, even for 1080p content, while HD Blu-ray is stuck with AVC/MPEG2 , so streaming could get comparable quality even at lower bitrates.

Getting back to owning/discarding discs, a big issue with me is just the realization that I don't rewatch a lot of the stuff I own all that much. I also don't need to watch special features and an hour+ making-of for every movie I watch. Some merit it, some don't. So I'm being much more selective overall in terms of what I buy on physical disc, vs what I can just wait to see on a particular streaming service when it's available.

Adam Tyner

I've picked up 71 titles so far this year. Looking at this same time period (1/1 through 7/10) over the past decade, it's something like:

2012 - 142
2013 - 132
2014 - 105
2015 - 73
2016 - 61
2017 - 40
2018 - 41
2019 - 89
2020 - 101
2021 - 88
2022 - 71

So down where I've been the past couple of years but not wildly out of step. (See if you can guess at what point in here I got married!) Definitely heavy on boutique titles, comic book-y stuff, and reissues on UHD. (The split for me is nearly 2/3rds UHD and 1/3rd Blu-ray year-to-date.) Noir, horror, gialli, and tokusatsu are a big part of that. I'm trying to shy away from buzzy-yet-ephemeral movies since those wind up being the things I care the least about over time. I don't dislike Winter's Bone or The Wrestler, but the likelihood of me ever watching those again are near-zero, so why clutter things up? If I'm going to have clutter, I'd rather it be something that's at least more interesting.

Mike86

Unless I’m forgetting any looking at my Amazon orders for the year I’ve only bought two discs so far. I’ve got three more open pre-orders.

TomOpus

I've got about 1500 DVDs/blus I'd like to get rid of outside of dumping. I have a few that collectors would want but I really want to avoid ebay. I wish someone local could come with me to my storage and take the dozen or so boxes away. I'm not even looking to make any money. I know that ship sailed years ago. I've already given some away to a friend, he paid shipping.

Alan Smithee

The thrift stores here have been flooded with DVDs recently. It’s pretty sad how worthless they are now, but they really do look bad compared to Blu-ray and even HD streaming. I wouldn’t have bought so many in the past if I had known how the quality wouldn’t hold up, but since I have I’m keeping them.

With stores closing or cutting back on movie stock, it isn’t like I’m going to be adding too many new movies at this point. Anyone who has a local store that still stocks new movies (including catalog titles) should be thankful. I have to mail order everything now.

ViewAskewbian

Yeah, but I don't regret my DVD collecting. DVD is what REALLY got me into movies, especially classic cinema via the release of those amazing Warner box sets. The special features and commentary tracks to many of my favourite films gave me a deeper love for cinema, something I wasn't getting out of VHS.

Considering most blurays ported over those special features with non new produced I have picked and chosen what to upgrade based more or restorations.

Only recently did I get the 4k bug but, again, mainly for older films getting restorations in the format.

DVD I did many blind buys or impulse stuff. Bluray/4k has been more about upgrading select titles (or, some more modern blockbuster flicks) and picking up restored titles I never snagged on any other format.

But DVD was a great gateway drug that may not be worth much to sell now but provided much entertainment. Most of my collection (especially the older black and whites) are still DVD. I've purchased some recently (mainly Disney) for special features discs that are now only available via digital.

I feel once I eventually get a 4k player and good tv to actually play the 4k versions of the flicks I have I may not go to any other format...

...until I jump to 8k.

John Pannozzi

FWIW, you're able to backup digital downloads from iTunes, so that service is alright with me.

stvn1974

Over the last few days I sold every 4K that I owned. I got tired of the them not working properly and will not be bothering with a new player either. BD is fine for me. Actually I kept Unforgiven because it has the remastered BD in it. I put it in the old BD case and threw the rest in the trash. Luckily I kept the BDs of all of my favorite films when I upgraded them to 4K. I have also cut down on purchases this year. I already own my top 50 or so films and 15 favorite TV series. I still spend too much money on CDs, especially box sets.

Brian T

Different story up here. I will donate occasional low-value DVDs to my local Goodwill, but I don't tend to buy many of these in the first place. The library system here (and even in smaller towns) is quite good about stocking common, popular new releases, plus arthouse/indie labels, most newer TV seasons of note, etc. I get a LOT of stuff from there, which means my collection is more about the cult titles others here have mentioned. Even then, I list for sale about 80-90% of the stuff I buy these days. Still have a massive backlog to get through thanks to family issues squeezing me the past few years, but it's so nice to add another disc to the 'sell' pile after I've watched it. Right now, the 'sell' stack on my desk has about 85 titles in it – just gotta make the listings with my pre-made product descriptions. The 'keep' pile from the same period has six titles. Good ratio, I think. And I don't regret buying the vast majority of these discs because I picked up a lot of it cheap in he US (Boutique web sales, Amazon + Marketplace, Big Lots, Dollar stores, wherever).

But I suspect a lot of stuff holds value up here better, which is why I flip them on the Amazon Canada marketplace rather than batching them for pennies on the dollar via eBay, Kijiji, etc.

Some recent sales from June/July (and what I got from Amazon, which means buyers paid even more)
SHE (1935; old Kino 2-disc set) - $76
THE OTHER (Twilight Time obscurity; dude bought five at $45 each; probably planning on flipping them himself, but doesn't realize how long I had them listed) - $197
FOX HORROR CLASSICS (Dragonwyck/Chandu/Dr. Renault) - $48
FUTURE SHOCK (Severin documentary; paid $3.00 in their clearance sale - $25
SKINNER (Severin $5.00 clearance item) - $30
THE VINEYARD (Vinegar Syndrome Blu) - $30
THE INVITATION (Drafthouse Blu; bought for $6.00 in their super-cheap web sale) - $29
CHANBARA BEAUTY (DVD) - $26
BRIDGE AT REMAGEN (old MGM DVD) - $27.50
COWBOY (Twilight Time Blu) - $75
COHEN & TATE (Shout) - $51
NIGHT OF OPEN SEX (Severin; $3.00 or $5.00 clearance DVD, can remember) - $25
ALIEN ANTHOLOGY ($5.00 at Big Lots) - $36
THE BITCH (Kino) - $21
THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE (Olive) - $48
IRON MONKEY (Megastar non-anamorphic HK version - go figure!) - $24
GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER (Twilight Time clearance sale pickup) - $41
SHARON / TERRI'S REVENGE (Dark Force Drive In Blu, from bundle deal, about $10) - $33
SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (Kino; bought in Kino sale around $8) - $24
(Combined order):
CULT MOVIE MARATHON VOL. 1 (Shout 4-pack DVD) - $62
CULT MOVIE MARATHON VOL. 2 (ditto) - $77

Lesser stuff (mostly DVD):
DEAD SOULS (Dollar store find) - $11
SATANIS, THE DEVIL'S MASS (Something Weird DVD; ex-rental in so-so shape) - $19.50
LONG WAY NORTH (Shout; $3.00 at Big Lots) - $15
THE NUDE BOMB - $13
AMERICAN POP (Columbia TriStar, used) - $12
A SEA OF SAND (old VCI DVD) - $13.00
CHILLERAMA - $12.00
TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D - ($3.00 at Big Lots) - $17
BLACK MOON RISING (Anchor Bay reissue) - $11
STEAMBOY (Columbia-TriStar; $3.00 from Big Lots) - $15

These are just a cross section - more were sold in that same time frame. I bought everything listed because I wanted to see them, at the very least, or to upgrade from VHS (or DVD) back in the day. Grabbed a lot of Twilight Time in their 'going-OOP' sales over the years, for example. Same with Severin, Dark Force, Code Red, SAE, etc. Still have way too much stuff to watch first, but I'm fairly certain most of it will end up listed rather than part of the 'permanent collection'. The key point (as per the notes) is that I bought a lot of stuff cheap when it hit the bargain stores and online clearance sales.

Throughout the whole history of home video, I never understood the rationale behind "day one purchases", and still don't. I will admit that some of these boutique labels – especially Vinegar syndrome – have become adept at preying on the FOMO mentality with their limited super-deluxe editions of movies you likely never heard of, never bothered with on DVD even when they hit clearance pricing, and now must suddenly shell out $35 - $60 for on release day just because. Kudos to them if it pads their bottom line, but I refuse to go that route. And even then, they rarely sell out that fast.

The trade off, I suppose, is that using Amazon Marketplace means a lot of listed titles do sit for a loooong time before someone buys them, if ever. But for now, I'll take that as opposed to just dumping them on eBay in cheap bundles so some other savvy re-seller can reap the profits. I also appreciate that some of the titles I listed above may sell in the US for nowhere near those prices. Scarcity is probably a bigger issue up here, and it drives a lot of people to pay top dollar when there are zero other options.

Hokeyboy

^ I love the quoting of the "do"

orangerunner

It's like comparing a traffic accident to someone pushing your car off of a cliff. You are correct, in both instances you lose what was once purchased and thought to be rightfully yours.

Discs becoming defective is not an intentional act on the part of the studio or the manufacturer. Content no longer being made available to the public (via streaming) is an intentional decision made by the copyright holder regardless of the reasons why such as music rights, legalities etc.