Not a lawyer but... if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy.
I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 per DVD - and there are tons of deals.
You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.
Get the DVD. Make a legal backup. Keep the physical DVD in storage.
You now "own" the movie (or TV show), not a "license".
In my neighborhood you will often see people selling DVD collections where you get 10-20 discs for $10 or less - varies. I'm sure that is the case elsewhere.
NAS + Apple TV with Infuse app installed = Better than Netflix (and others) imho.
(Note: I do recommend the one-time lifetime license for Infuse app = $99.99)
Also with this approach, you actually have a real collection and it's fun to collect things.
My son has autism and viewed his Netflix homepage as his personal curated collection. But then, of course, Netflix renegotiates licensing deals and entire seasons or shows just go away. And it really crushes him because it's like they were stolen from his personal collection.
So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.
> You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.
The image quality on these is also quite bad, especially with cost cutting resulting in these being compressed further to fit on a single-layer DVD. Often without any indication that it happened, as well. Whether or not you find it acceptable is definitely a matter of personal taste, but it's very much apples & oranges vs. Netflix. Blu-ray by contrast is generally better quality than what you'll get from streaming services.
I cancelled all my streaming, and replaced it with a €20 seed box w/ Plex + radarr/sonarr etc. Have everything I want (and nothing else) and movies/shows don't get pulled without me doing it. Won't be turning back anytime soon.
Physical still has the downside of needing space. I have space for books, but not much else.
I was wondering if there is a DVD service similar to Netflix when it first came out. And of course there is, but pricing seems high!
DVD Inbox and Cafe DVD is $20/mo for 2 discs at a time, with unlimited discs and a 5 day guarantee. 5 days to get your DVD doesn't seem great. They have cheaper plans but limit the number of DVDs you can take out.
Netflix was revolutionary because they shipped very eagerly and they charge $15/mo for 2 DVDs unlimited. And I think their shipping took 2 days. They shipped as soon as you shipped yours back so if you were diligent you could prob have close to a movie every night. Incredible service.
Netflix made a lot of money off me in the early 2000s, the pre-streaming days (and MacOS X, and 10.1 days), when discs were sent out by mail. One could go queue up everything you wanted to watch, have a couple discs out at a time, and get new ones sent to you as watched discs were returned. There was never enough time in the day to watch them, with unwatched discs in my possession for weeks, turning into months. Yet the idea of the all-you-can-eat buffet monthly subscription kept me hooked, kept me paying. The other hook was that you had a curated list of stuff to watch, and the queue would manage itself, as fast as one could watch them.
It's possible I could've saved money just renting 1 movie at a time, no different from how online rentals are now.
I think disc rentals over mail and Redbox machines still has some relevance even today. You never have to worry if a movie's taken off the streaming catalog, then having to research what other streamer has it, then contemplating if you want to go through signing-up just for 1 movie. You found the movie, you requested it, and it's getting mailed to you in hardcopy. It won't suddenly disappear in transit due to rights-holder issues.
My father passed away last year from complications due to Alzheimer's, but for years before he died, he struggled to work streaming services and modern "smart" TVs. We got him one of the few models of DVD players that we could actually still find and a lot of used DVDs because he _could_ use those.
OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky; we ended up replacing it about three times in just as many years. Streaming services are overpriced, but they do _work_ consistently.
I never gave up on Blu-Ray discs, or really I never adopted digital distribution. When I buy a Blu-Ray disc, the rights to watch it are perpetual and transferable, which means I can watch the movie all I want, then when I'm done with it I can sell it, relinquishing all of my rights to the new owner, making it just as valuable to the new owners as it was to me, meaning that the resale value will be pretty constant.
With digital distribution, the license to watch it will eventually terminate, and it cannot be transferred, so without a resale market it is much more expensive.
The best part is that I can go to my local flea market, and buy Blu-Ray discs for a tiny fraction of the retail price. Multiple vendors sell them for well under $1 each. Last weekend, I bought the Avengers 3D bundle and Pacific Rim, for 50¢ each.
Blu-Ray players, in a modern small form factor, are often under $10 at thrift stores, although they rarely come with a remote, but usually do have CEC, so the remote isn't always needed.
At this point, I'm surprised the streaming services aren't grandfathering people into their current plan+rate like the cellular networks do. It would encourage people to keep their subscription active to keep their rate rather than cancelling it and signing up again when there is a specific show they want to watch, while also avoiding the price increase frustrations.
PS: Thanks for the reminder about the price increase, just cancelled my netflix.
Beyond the pricing part of it, just having media that isn't dependent on an external device is so nice.
But for TV series in particular, watching on disc is quite clunky after a decade+ of streaming services, and DVR boxes prior to that. I'll buy them in principle, but ultimately they end up ripped and viewed via Jellyfin.
Streaming subscriptions are the new cable, but with "much better" video-on-demand and much stronger corporate capture.
Instead of having handfuls of locally-owned television stations you could pick up by antenna or a cheap cable subscription offered by your local cable TV provider, we have apps on apps on apps all owned by Disney, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon and Comcast, with local stations being owned by huge conglomerates that are effectively franchisees.
At least it's truly a la carte, which was something cable and satellite providers could never correctly implement.
Actually, I wrote that and realized a few seconds later that that's not actually true.
If you want to watch The Office, some footbaseketball thing, Shrinking and Real Housewives of $CITY, you've got to get Peacock, Hulu, Apple TV, and the "All-Access" packages from MLB, NBA, and/or NFL, with all of them being independent monthly subscriptions ON TOP of your Internet plan that add up to being way more than your old cable or satellite subscription + premium channels. All of those apps come with tons of filler and studio titles that you probably won't watch, just like the "thousands" of channels stuffed into the cable plan you got just to get access to the big networks, sports and HBO.
This outcome was obvious the minute Netflix got out of DVDs and into streaming. And it's so much worse IMO.
It was somewhat better when the streaming studios were dumping entire seasons of content, but they've been walking that back now too.
Netlfix raises its prices for the second time in years. Prime Video ads are so invasive that I honestly can't watch any video without turning it off immediately (I refuse to pay for the ad free tier), and now I'm seeing very long ads in the middle of YouTube videos.
Two months ago I just stopped watching streaming services all together. The friction of enshitification reached such a boiling point that I lost all joy in watching anything. I cancelled those services I personally paid for and stopped watching those that I don't. My life improved in clear ways. I began reading for pleasure again. Each night at 10pm I sit down in my reading chair, get comfy and read 2 chapters of: one book for enjoyment and one book for learning. It didn't hurt that the first book I read was Atomic Habits! I noticed that my sleep schedule and quality of sleep improved. I've also been more dedicated to my passion projects as well. You don't really realize how invasive these things are until you remove them from your life. I had already given up all social media except Reddit a couple of years ago. Even now I stay away from hot bed subreddits (typically news oriented ones) to preserve my mental health. From 2010-2018 I actually did a test to give up a smart phone in favor of a flip phone, but that became untenable.
So thank you to all the enshitified streaming services for helping me restore balance in my life.
I would probably go Blu-Ray at least to have higher resolution content... Ripping isn't too bad (I use make-mkv then re-encode with handbrake). I don't really notice going up from 1080p, but really notice going below 1080p content. I also don't mind h.265's blurry handling of degradation over the blocky/chunky h.264... I haven't really observed enough lower bitrate AV1 to compare.
I have a Shield TV connected through my AVR and it works pretty well for content directly from my nas/cifs/smb via Kodi.
Back when Netflix was $8/month I just had it forever without thinking about it. It was at first a great way to catch up on TV shows. Netflix was after all originally a place for studios to monetize old content, particularly
TV. Even at $10/month, it was fine. But it kept going up.
I think I finally cancelled it at $14-15 but I go back for 1-2 months a year to catch up on stuff I want. I basically cycle streaming services.
I've searched for data on how often people do this. I'm 99% sure it's a small minority but I bet it's growing. There is an inertia with subscriptions of every type. People are lazy to cancel things they don't use. It's the entire basis for the gym model.
So somebody is doing the math in the background of working out how much they can raise prices and lose people to subscription cycling vs lazily not cancelling and it still favors raising prices. I suspect at some point that'll change and, when it does, it'll be too late to do anything abou tit.
My suspicion is that this kind of analysis will be a textbook example of a company making short-term optimizations all the way into extinction.
The only research I've found is on comparing to move to cable to streaming and how many streaming services people have. I haven't found anything about streaming churn. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
I support the idea of physical media 100%. It's much more dependable, and once the discs are pressed the content can't be remotely/silently censored or edited the way it can on streaming services. If you rip the content yourself there's nobody carefully keeping track of when/where/how often you view what you're watching. You don't get as much privacy with DVD/blu-ray players though. Players that are connected to the internet will phone home and report what you watch. They'll also refuse to play some media until you've connected them to the internet to get updates. Some players like game consoles will even store information on what you watch when offline and collect that data when they have a network connection.
The biggest problem I have with physical media is that increasingly shows aren't being sold at all. Sometimes it's older or genuinely obscure stuff, but sometimes even recent and popular stuff doesn't get released. I suspect that often it's intentionally done to drive subscriptions to streaming services.
There are still a lot of shows that can't be legally obtained anymore. Sym-Bionic Titan (2010) is one I've pretty much given up hope on. There are also a bunch of Disney shows like Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Amphibia, and Owl House that never got a physical release.
Prices on physical media are going down which is nice since a lot of companies played bullshit games like releasing "volumes" or "collections" instead of full seasons and you still have to do some research to know which discs have bad transfers, terrible "remasters", and which should be fullscreen vs widescreen. I recently got a really good deal on Star Trek: TOS, only to later realize that they'd replaced all the special effects and shots of the Enterprise with CGI.
I used to pay $30 a month for HBO. Premium cable wasn't cheap, but you had primo shows and there was a big movie release almost every Saturday night. Netflix is disposable background TV. This money will buy you two DVDs a month and 6-8 rentals. I just don't see the point unless you are wasting hours in front of the TV.
Done this a long time ago. It wasn't prices that drove me away from Netflix and Co. It was how old contents started to be "updated" for "modern audiences/values", and how movies/shows kept being moved around between platforms.
Got my Bluray player, I buy a movie once in a while when I consider it a "classic" that I really want to have, otherwise local library has a lot of options. And worst case scenario, the high seas.
Same principles with music and games. I still get/burn CDs.
My wife was talking to someone in her early 20ies and mentioned DVD player and apparently that's considered ancient now. Ahh to be young and blithe about it.
We have a 4K Blu-Ray that gets used every once in a while and the 4K Dune and few other titles looks absolutely stupendous. Local 4k streamed from Plex is pertty close. but nothing supposedly 4k streamed from Youtube or Netflix really compares, the blacks show artifacts and stuttering, even through gigabit fiber. can't beat local playback!
I feel like netflix is definitely very cheap, with OpenClaw or whatever your favorite agent is, it's trivial to subscribe to watch one show and then have it cancel immediately.
I wonder if you could make a bare computer (user provides the OS image) + DVD player + DVD rental company without triggering the public performance clause of copyright law because it is the user that decides what to do with it. Like Aereo or Zediva, which were shut down because they provided a user experience. But if you just rented out hardware and didn’t care what software was running, would that be considered a private playing instead of public performance + transmission?
It just dawned on me the other day that if I add up what I've already spent on apple music/Spotify over the years, it's very likely well above the amount it would have taken to buy a physical copy of all the music I listen to (I'm an album guy, as opposed to playlist people).
Certainly there's some convenience advantages for discovering new music, but it turns out I don't really do that often.
My friends subscribe to one service per month. They watch everything they want, and when they run out, they cancel the service and subscribe to another one.
When they want to watch something on another service, they add it to a shared spreadsheet.
It works really well! They get to watch everything on all services, and it's all high quality media that they want to watch.
I did the same after Netflix dropped movies I cared about.
First I tried playing DVDs straight from PC which is connected to TV. That was horrible quality and UX.
Then I bought a good quality DVD player with hardware upscaling. It provided better image quality and slightly better UX. But you still had to deal with the menus and buch of other slow loading stuff that comes with DVDs... Gave up on it.
"When sales are hot, you can sometimes get amazing deals on physical media - you pay the cost once and own it for good."
Is the author aware that Netflix's original subscription business was sending DVDs to customers and customers returning the DVDs to Netflix all via postal mail. "DVD-by-mail rental service"
My DVD and BR collection has been growing. I just buy used for both and I can usually pick up great stuff pretty cheaply. I also subscribe to YouTube premium for both ad free YouTube and ad free YouTube Music.
YouTube premium also has a number of free movies, the type of stuff you used to see on cable TV. Not the big hits
This was exactly what happened to cable tv. The moment they got the upper hand, they piled up ads and price hikes and made stupid ton of stupid deals that made no sense.
Netflix is really not deserving 9 USD/mo and even less with ads.
My problem is not the price but the amount of garbage you get. Instead of getting access to a vast amount of mediocre at best content I would like to have access to a small amount of good content. Netflix is just not that.
For the past 10 years I found most movies to be unwatchable and not worth the time. Last one I saw was Project Hail Mary at a cinema and it was really bad in spite of a huge budget (more than Interstellar!).
I recently found a Blu-ray player for $7 at Goodwill. It was missing the remote which ended up costing slightly more than the player itself, but for ~$15 I got a working Blu-ray/dvd player with a remote
DVD discs is not good for long term storage. it can get scratch and became unusable. you want a NAS/PC then rip the dvd and use plex or Jellyfin to watch your collection.
Netflix has a lot of non US content which still puts them far above HBO and Disney. I am trying to cut down on my daily dose of American cultural subjugation.
Spotify, Netflix, HBO, Paramount, HULU, MUBI, etc etc etc and a couple of Video Game publishers are making a very strong case to revert back to piracy.
278 comments
I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 per DVD - and there are tons of deals.
You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.
Get the DVD. Make a legal backup. Keep the physical DVD in storage.
You now "own" the movie (or TV show), not a "license".
In my neighborhood you will often see people selling DVD collections where you get 10-20 discs for $10 or less - varies. I'm sure that is the case elsewhere.
NAS + Apple TV with Infuse app installed = Better than Netflix (and others) imho.
(Note: I do recommend the one-time lifetime license for Infuse app = $99.99)
Reference:
- "Backup DVD Copies Legal Says Electronic Frontier Foundation" https://www.eff.org/effector/16/7#I
- "2026 DVD Digital Copyright Laws in US, UK, Japan, Australia..." https://www.winxdvd.com/resource/dvd-copyright-infringement-...
My son has autism and viewed his Netflix homepage as his personal curated collection. But then, of course, Netflix renegotiates licensing deals and entire seasons or shows just go away. And it really crushes him because it's like they were stolen from his personal collection.
So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.
> You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.
The image quality on these is also quite bad, especially with cost cutting resulting in these being compressed further to fit on a single-layer DVD. Often without any indication that it happened, as well. Whether or not you find it acceptable is definitely a matter of personal taste, but it's very much apples & oranges vs. Netflix. Blu-ray by contrast is generally better quality than what you'll get from streaming services.
Physical still has the downside of needing space. I have space for books, but not much else.
DVD Inbox and Cafe DVD is $20/mo for 2 discs at a time, with unlimited discs and a 5 day guarantee. 5 days to get your DVD doesn't seem great. They have cheaper plans but limit the number of DVDs you can take out.
Netflix was revolutionary because they shipped very eagerly and they charge $15/mo for 2 DVDs unlimited. And I think their shipping took 2 days. They shipped as soon as you shipped yours back so if you were diligent you could prob have close to a movie every night. Incredible service.
I guess the economics just isn't there.
It's possible I could've saved money just renting 1 movie at a time, no different from how online rentals are now.
I think disc rentals over mail and Redbox machines still has some relevance even today. You never have to worry if a movie's taken off the streaming catalog, then having to research what other streamer has it, then contemplating if you want to go through signing-up just for 1 movie. You found the movie, you requested it, and it's getting mailed to you in hardcopy. It won't suddenly disappear in transit due to rights-holder issues.
OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky; we ended up replacing it about three times in just as many years. Streaming services are overpriced, but they do _work_ consistently.
With digital distribution, the license to watch it will eventually terminate, and it cannot be transferred, so without a resale market it is much more expensive.
The best part is that I can go to my local flea market, and buy Blu-Ray discs for a tiny fraction of the retail price. Multiple vendors sell them for well under $1 each. Last weekend, I bought the Avengers 3D bundle and Pacific Rim, for 50¢ each.
Blu-Ray players, in a modern small form factor, are often under $10 at thrift stores, although they rarely come with a remote, but usually do have CEC, so the remote isn't always needed.
PS: Thanks for the reminder about the price increase, just cancelled my netflix.
But for TV series in particular, watching on disc is quite clunky after a decade+ of streaming services, and DVR boxes prior to that. I'll buy them in principle, but ultimately they end up ripped and viewed via Jellyfin.
Instead of having handfuls of locally-owned television stations you could pick up by antenna or a cheap cable subscription offered by your local cable TV provider, we have apps on apps on apps all owned by Disney, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon and Comcast, with local stations being owned by huge conglomerates that are effectively franchisees.
At least it's truly a la carte, which was something cable and satellite providers could never correctly implement.
Actually, I wrote that and realized a few seconds later that that's not actually true.
If you want to watch The Office, some footbaseketball thing, Shrinking and Real Housewives of $CITY, you've got to get Peacock, Hulu, Apple TV, and the "All-Access" packages from MLB, NBA, and/or NFL, with all of them being independent monthly subscriptions ON TOP of your Internet plan that add up to being way more than your old cable or satellite subscription + premium channels. All of those apps come with tons of filler and studio titles that you probably won't watch, just like the "thousands" of channels stuffed into the cable plan you got just to get access to the big networks, sports and HBO.
This outcome was obvious the minute Netflix got out of DVDs and into streaming. And it's so much worse IMO.
It was somewhat better when the streaming studios were dumping entire seasons of content, but they've been walking that back now too.
Two months ago I just stopped watching streaming services all together. The friction of enshitification reached such a boiling point that I lost all joy in watching anything. I cancelled those services I personally paid for and stopped watching those that I don't. My life improved in clear ways. I began reading for pleasure again. Each night at 10pm I sit down in my reading chair, get comfy and read 2 chapters of: one book for enjoyment and one book for learning. It didn't hurt that the first book I read was Atomic Habits! I noticed that my sleep schedule and quality of sleep improved. I've also been more dedicated to my passion projects as well. You don't really realize how invasive these things are until you remove them from your life. I had already given up all social media except Reddit a couple of years ago. Even now I stay away from hot bed subreddits (typically news oriented ones) to preserve my mental health. From 2010-2018 I actually did a test to give up a smart phone in favor of a flip phone, but that became untenable.
So thank you to all the enshitified streaming services for helping me restore balance in my life.
I have a Shield TV connected through my AVR and it works pretty well for content directly from my nas/cifs/smb via Kodi.
I think I finally cancelled it at $14-15 but I go back for 1-2 months a year to catch up on stuff I want. I basically cycle streaming services.
I've searched for data on how often people do this. I'm 99% sure it's a small minority but I bet it's growing. There is an inertia with subscriptions of every type. People are lazy to cancel things they don't use. It's the entire basis for the gym model.
So somebody is doing the math in the background of working out how much they can raise prices and lose people to subscription cycling vs lazily not cancelling and it still favors raising prices. I suspect at some point that'll change and, when it does, it'll be too late to do anything abou tit.
My suspicion is that this kind of analysis will be a textbook example of a company making short-term optimizations all the way into extinction.
The only research I've found is on comparing to move to cable to streaming and how many streaming services people have. I haven't found anything about streaming churn. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
The biggest problem I have with physical media is that increasingly shows aren't being sold at all. Sometimes it's older or genuinely obscure stuff, but sometimes even recent and popular stuff doesn't get released. I suspect that often it's intentionally done to drive subscriptions to streaming services.
There are still a lot of shows that can't be legally obtained anymore. Sym-Bionic Titan (2010) is one I've pretty much given up hope on. There are also a bunch of Disney shows like Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Amphibia, and Owl House that never got a physical release.
Prices on physical media are going down which is nice since a lot of companies played bullshit games like releasing "volumes" or "collections" instead of full seasons and you still have to do some research to know which discs have bad transfers, terrible "remasters", and which should be fullscreen vs widescreen. I recently got a really good deal on Star Trek: TOS, only to later realize that they'd replaced all the special effects and shots of the Enterprise with CGI.
Got my Bluray player, I buy a movie once in a while when I consider it a "classic" that I really want to have, otherwise local library has a lot of options. And worst case scenario, the high seas.
Same principles with music and games. I still get/burn CDs.
We have a 4K Blu-Ray that gets used every once in a while and the 4K Dune and few other titles looks absolutely stupendous. Local 4k streamed from Plex is pertty close. but nothing supposedly 4k streamed from Youtube or Netflix really compares, the blacks show artifacts and stuttering, even through gigabit fiber. can't beat local playback!
Certainly there's some convenience advantages for discovering new music, but it turns out I don't really do that often.
When they want to watch something on another service, they add it to a shared spreadsheet.
It works really well! They get to watch everything on all services, and it's all high quality media that they want to watch.
First I tried playing DVDs straight from PC which is connected to TV. That was horrible quality and UX.
Then I bought a good quality DVD player with hardware upscaling. It provided better image quality and slightly better UX. But you still had to deal with the menus and buch of other slow loading stuff that comes with DVDs... Gave up on it.
Is the author aware that Netflix's original subscription business was sending DVDs to customers and customers returning the DVDs to Netflix all via postal mail. "DVD-by-mail rental service"
There was no "streaaming"
YouTube premium also has a number of free movies, the type of stuff you used to see on cable TV. Not the big hits
You can buy old TV shows on dvd box for cheap. There are enough good shows from the past to keep you occupied for the rest of your life.
Netflix is really not deserving 9 USD/mo and even less with ads.
I left when shows I enjoyed were a revolving door, and the UI felt hostile (constantly trying to shove terrible quality original content on me).
So long, Hollywood.