The deception of “buying” digital movies

This is a totally uninformed question. Are you sure the bad quality from the discs is the fault of the discs rather than your blu-ray reader? I'm assuming you've had good quality from the reader for other discs??

What part of a streaming movie is a physical item? It is even further removed and a worse analogy than my concert ticket is like a streaming movie license. With one you physically have a few thousand-pound piece of metal in your garage with a title from the government of ownership, the other you have a limited license on an account maintained by the service provider.

If you "buy" a car, and don't get a title, then yeah sure I guess the title holder can take it away. You didn't own it; you never had the title for it.

When I had a 28.8k and eventually 56k modem and had to download individual songs off of Napster and then Kazaa, of course it made sense to have a local download because that was the only viable option. I could download music while using AIM or IRC, but that would eat heavily into the limited bandwidth that I had.

I eventually convinced my parents to upgrade to a 1.5Mbps cable connection when I was a senior in high school. That was when Oink's Pink Palace was a thing. I downloaded tons and tons of music and basically filled up the what was at the time absolutely massive 500gb hard drive with music. If something had a lot of people leeching I'd download it just to get my seed:leech ratio up. If I liked a single song from an artist I'd go and download their entire discography.

Unfortunately that all came crashing down when that hard drive failed and I had no backup (maybe smarter/richer kids had backup drives, but I did not). I realized then that the whole thing was silly. I hadn't listened to half the music I downloaded. It was more an addiction to collecting music rather than listening to it.

Eventually Spotify came around and that basically killed my desire to hoard music. I currently use Apple Music for the majority of my music listening needs. If there is something that I cannot find on there I might still download it. I've even added some songs with Apple's service to host your files on the cloud so I can listen to it on all my devices. I feel much freer to explore music rather than spend my time figuring out how to download and store it which is wonderful.

I know that movies are not the same as music and the services are frankly much worse. It doesn't take nearly as much bandwidth to stream high quality music than it does to stream movies, especially with all the various technologies like Dolby and what not. Still, I do think that it is unnecessary to maintain massive collections of them in formats that are degrading sitting on your shelf or as digital versions taking up a ton of space and care to ensure data integrity. I know there are people that download movies and shows onto their home servers just to have them or just in case someone who has access to their plex wants to watch it.

DVDs, CDs and Blu-Rays have a limited shelf life. If you take care of them they may last long enough for you to pass them on to your children, but you're just placing a burden of leaving behind a ton of things that aren't really important to you or them. Having recently gone through trying to clear my grandparents' house full of junk, I would not want to place that burden on my future children. If they are really meaningful to you then by all means, keep them. But I don't think most of them are. Maintain a small collection of the genuinely important ones. Make sure to get copies that aren't beholden to the whims of licensors/distributors... but maybe don't stress too much about the rest.

In this analogy, it is the case that the store won't let you take the pliers home, or only lets you take the pliers home under the supervision of an employee, and also that if you want to take the pliers with you on a road trip to Mexico, that isn't allowed, even if the hardware store has a branch in Mexico.

Oh, and if the hardware store goes out of business you can never access the pliers again because it turns out they were leased from the plier manufacturer.

Frequently when streaming content providers say "download" it is more accurately described as downloading a pre-cached version of the stream that only works on proprietary software which is reliant on a semi-regular internet connection. For example, you can "download" netflix/amazon/youtube content, but it can only be viewed on the app, and the app must be periodically reconnected to the internet.

I don't think we'd recreate film grain, but I think some form of artifacts would exist and people would eventually grow a taste for them.

Modern digital music can be completely clean and flawless. But it can also have some weird artifacts that can only exist digitally, like aliasing, stuttering from a corrupt file or skipping CD player, compression artifacts while streaming or from very low bitrate sources.

And nowadays we're seeing genres like Hyperpop, Glitch Hop, and Future Bass which all play with these artifacts.

Flume even has a song[0] where you can hear the distinctive whine of an improperly grounded USB audio interface. It's inserted into a silent part of the song, so it is 100% intentional and not an accident in the recording. I like to think he's giving a little wink-wink to other music producers.

It's on the "My Name is Flume Mixtape" album, which itself is a great example of intentional digital artifacts in a creative use. There's lots of aliasing on things that shouldn't, and things that "should" alias like square waves sliding into the 10khz range are perfectly alias free.

[0] Amber at 1:51. The ringing sound that comes in after the first bass hit is also some sort of ground noise, but very distorted.

https://youtu.be/RM2cNhVep40