I would still make fun of you for hoarding physical media. Mine now lives on my NAS, a black box of spinning HHDs sitting in my living room, to which i have saved copies of everything i care about. My music exists as files which i coppy to my phone's music folder, my movies as files that i can stream to my tablet without any mention of clouds. With recent improvements in storage tech, short of a raging fire, "my" media is safer there on my personal server than it is with apple.
My nas has moved to a new house now three times. Even before i have internet setup in my new place, if i want to rewatch some old movie i dont check to see whether Apple or google still has it, i just open up VLC and find it right where i saved it on my nas a decade ago.
I did the same: tended to use Apple services then when I hit poverty I was able to use my NAS copies of music and videos after cancelling subscriptions. Had a "so why was I paying for years?" moment especially with all the enshitification issues
You are indeed correct. I'm the type of person who watches movies once and rarely goes back to re-watch them. But there are just a few things I truly wish to support and will go back and enjoy years later.
I went from a 0 movie collection to buying a higher end Blu-Ray player and purchasing UHD movies. Which is deeply ironic because I'm losing the ability to purchase movies locally with stores like BestBuy discarding them to Wal-Mart only having a few and none I wish to own.
Nothing I hate more than "where can I watch X" and the response is "you can't".
I appreciate the attempt, but have never seen the point personally.
That is, many physical media collectors do it to have nice box sets to display, or in an attempt to have off-line copies of media, but I have never met anyone who goes to the effort of ensuring long-term readability - which is understandable, it is a huge hassle. Unless you are copying the content to new physical media every so often it will eventually rot and become unplayable.
For example, for optical media the expected lifetime is only a couple of decades depending on the type of media [1]. I believe commercially pressed DVD and blueray are somewhere around 10-20 years.
Outside of manufacturing defects you can expect HTL blu-rays to last for more than a hundred years when stored properly. Some estimates are as high as 300 years. Don't buy the cheap ones or store them outdoors and you'll be fine.
Some archival grade disc's are estimated to last 700 years or more and dont cost THAT much more.
DVD's and CDR'S used organic dies that broke down quickly. Blu-rays mostly use inorganic dies that last forever. Cheap LTH disc's being the exception.
MOST manufacturers like Verbatimm do not even produce the organic die LTH disc's anymore as people stopped buying them. There are still some floating around for sale, so avoid them.
Not necessarily as even the factory produced optical discs have had issues with de-lamination, oxidation etc. Of course a lot of that had to do with companies cheaping out on manufacturing in order to make that last tenth of a cent of profit as they tend to do.
People made fun of me for continuing to hoard physical media all these years. I predicted this hellscape might come one day. Man I love being right.