zlacker

>>qainsi+(OP)
With prices of all streaming crawling upwards, and often multiple services being required to cover the catalog of what you want to watch, purchasing† has become a compelling option again. Realistically, if you're paying for Netflix, Prime, and Disney+, you're looking at a $45/mo bill. With seasons of shows costing around $10-15 to buy, are you better off with streaming? I personally don't watch more than a full season of a show in any given month, and I've just started considering this. One notable benefit - most streaming providers have a larger digital catalog for purchasing than for streaming, meaning you can centralize more.

The obvious downside though is at some point the show may just magically disappear from your purchased library, if negotiations between the platform and the creator go south††. I'd love to see some laws in this area where "a purchase is a purchase" to prevent this, but for now it's a risk (albeit one with maritime workarounds).

† or license leasing if you're buying digitally

†† ie https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6449826?sortBy=best

>>jjcm+md
I’m back to buying physical media for exactly these reasons. It’s unfortunate that a lot of things aren’t getting physical media releases these days, or are still only getting dvd releases, but even for Blu-ray the quality is far superior to streaming in most cases, and 4K is even better. Since we’ve started migrating to physical media we no longer have to worry about streaming ability, losing our license to a show, or even network outages.

>>rebecc+ee
Disney announced they were going to stop selling physical media in Australia. Media companies are salivating at the thought of forever controlling distribution.