I’m an old fart, and the minute I can digitize something, I do it. I’ve had thousands of 45s, LPs, CDs, etc, over the years, but most have gone by the wayside.

I still buy physical media, often at gigs, or online, but once it’s ripped it collects dust, seldom to be handled again.

I buy FLAC files on Bandcamp. I have the highest quality at a cheap price, and it hopefully won’t rot if stored properly on my NAS.

I got caught up in the vinyl revival, so I enjoy collecting that media. But even then, I consider it more of a novelty.

Generally speaking though, I prefer locally stored digital media without DRM over physical media. It’s just more practical.

That being said, I’m glad that physical media exists and hope it continues to be made. Choice is good.

I always rip my CDs and blurays so I can stream them from my server. It’s much more convenient and I don’t have to worry about the disks getting scratched. The disks are only used as a backup or if I want to re rip with a different video codec in the future.

I will not buy digital media if access can be taken away from me.

I own physical copies of whatever I can. And I have a Jellyfin server that hosts all my media. Owning it yourself rather than renting it from a corpo is the way to go.

I rip physical media and then store it for legal reasons. my nas is much better than trying to find whatener disc.

About a year ago, I started buying DVD’s from thrift stores. I rip them all and put them on my Plex server. I recently aquired a Bluray player and starting to collect those too. Since those take up MUCH more diskspace, I only watch bluray with the physical disk (storage in Europe is unfortunately more expensive than in the USA)

I also started collecting CD’s again (mostly from thrift stores too). I rip these to FLAC and also put them on my Plex.

The beauty of this system for me is that I still have to physically flip through stuff to build my collection. Since it takes up physical space, I limit myself to stuff I actually really want to see/listen to. But by digitizing it, I have the advantage of having acces to that curated content everywhere. The added timesink of ripping and metadata correcting gives me more satisfaction and appreciation for what I bought. A sense of pride and accomplishment, if you will.

So I buy Physical to make sure the collection stays curated and manageable, but digitize most of it for the convenience.

Due to the appreciation of my collection, I now watch more movies and listen to more music than when I had acces to netflix or Spotify.

The biggest problem I have with physical media nowadays is that the players are slowly getting enshitified

You can’t buy a tape deck anymore you can hardly find a reasonable quality record player that’s not audiophile level.

There’s very little choice in DVD / Blu-ray players now. I don’t expect that media to be easy to maintain forever so drm free digital is a much better choice.

This community pops up on ALL from time to time : https://feddit.uk/c/homevideo

Nowadays I buy digital music (mostly via Bandcamp but there’s also HDTracks, Qobuz, etc.) & play the music that way. Can also stream my own music library if I want via Jellyfin or other applications.

re: physical CDs, yes I’ve got a ton of those too from before you could buy digital music but have already ripped them. Haven’t had a need to touch the physical discs in years but still keep them in CD binders just in case.

Also not sure if it matters but for me I’m always living in small apartments/rooms so I absolutely avoid collecting physical items, there’s just no space for that.

I have a 50 terabyte NAS for storing my movies and TV shows. And access it from any of the TVs in my house.

For music…I have a music streaming subscription for convenience, but also have some vinyl records for the small-ish number of albums I want to keep forever.

Buy physical. Because you have a physical backup, you can watch it without Internet, and they can’t change the media. Like removing scenes or episodes.

I’ve recently been buying a lot of blu rays and mp3’s so I own the media I like. I used to steam a lot with Spotify and Netflix and was very happy for a long time. Then Netflix did that password sharing garbage and I started just finding my shows online. I hate that there are so many streaming platforms as well so I would have to chase the movies I love to watch them again, because they would constantly get moved to different platforms. Then a few years ago I bought a used blu ray player and started picking up my favorite’s. The quality is fantastic and I don’t have to wait for buffering. Best part is whenever I want to watch again I can just pop it back in the player and it doesn’t cost me any more money than I did to watch it before.

The streaming age started out great, but I think physical media could make a serious comeback. Not like I care if it does come back though. I would rather keep getting my blu rays for a few bucks on eBay. I would hate if blu rays became like the retro gaming market where the price of old games can skyrocket

Physical media can have certain bonuses that digital content cant/wont. Album art, bonus features, easter eggs, etc, but also the analog sound of vinyl.

The main thing I see these days though, is that the content cant be edited, censored, or modified in any way. Locally owned digital content also benefits from this.

I much prefer physical books, and have quite a big library. But most of my textbooks would be either hard or outright impossible to get in paper, so they go onto my e-reader as DRMless pdf and djvu files.

As for movies and music - I don’t see much appeal in physical, since there is no difference in experience between playing from a CD/DVD or from my drive. I still keep my DVDs from childhood, but no longer have any device that can play them (removed the CD drive from the old laptop a while ago). However, I would never rely on streaming like you mentioned either. Only local, DRMless collection. Streaming is just for discovery.