If streaming does manage to bring more films that where swept under the rug by many various physical format changes back into distribution. Then as a film fan i endorse this change. But the question is will ownership become irrelevant?

I don't personally see the elimination of ownership being a bad thing. It will eliminate piracy, and as long as they offer good deals for monthly superscriptions. That meet the expectations of hardcore film watchers.

Quoting Silence_of_Lambs:

Quote:
Just like with the CD.

But taking into consideration the much bigger amount of data it may stiil take some time until DVDs (and BluRays) get replaced by downloaded content.
The day that everyone has HighSpeed DSL access (100 MBit+) will be the end for physical media though.

I just seen flying pig out my window. My internet comes through a 1960's telephone system thanks to me living in an area, populated by a bunch of old tossers who swear by there BT contracts.

So in other words my internet sucks 

Streaming is making basically zero gains as anything but a rental replacement. DVD is mostly declining because it's being replaced by Blu-ray (and also because there'as no more A-list catalog to release). The total physical disc market is declining, but only barely and that's largely attrributable to the declining sales to rental outlets.

People get very upset when something they have is removed from their lives. At best, we tolerate change. If what we have changes into something better, then we tolerate the change more and object less. I was born when there were only two TV stations serving my hometown, both from San Francisco. My grandfather assisted two brothers get loans and permits to build a combination auto service station and Philco dealership, so we bought our gasoline from them and they got him a TV at dealer cost, so I remember the third network station starting up.

If we wanted films, only schools had 16mm sound projectors. We had an 8mm camera and projector and a couple of silent shorts on 8mm (Keystone Kops, etc.) and some soundless cartoons (Woody Woodpecker, Andy Panda, etc.) I was a father of two before home video equipment was affordable. So we then got to time shift, archive TV shows and movies from TV, and spend $60 each for video cassettes of a few films. I agreed to buy a new TV with my first VHS unit (I had a 3/4" UMatic I bought used from my college before that) but only if the dealer gave me a new (unrented) VHS tape of Citizen Kane.

DVDs offered higher quality, but until expensive DVD recorders arrived, eliminated time shifting. Hard drives are better still, but still (like DVRs) require mechanical moving parts, so mechanical wear will force replacement or repair to maintain usefulness.

What I wish for is twofold: instantanious downloads of every film and TV show I want whenever I want it, and flash memory storage (and distribution) of everything I want to keep. In the highest quality possible... and without a limited lifespan because of crippling DRM. When I buy it, I want it forever, and transferable to any TV or computer.

What the industry wants is for me to pay for new rights every time I want to watch something and to add advertisements that I must watch. We are at odds with each other.

I note that in particular current television series are often provided online, for example also by Amazon. Since the publishers already have a tendency to bring out only a few seasons on DVD, if the sales are expected to be good enough, they must be reducing the potential market, and bring out even fewer seasons in the future.
And apart from wanting to own a hard copy, those online sales (Amazon, iTunes) are not even accessible for customers that are not located in the US. So we are not talking about a replacement, but about taking away.

I thought digital copy was pretty cool when it first came out because it afforded me an opportunity to reaudit a profile, for the most part, without having to put the physical disc into my computer. I could also check other contributions in the same way. Then I updated my system to Win7 RC1 and added another hard drive. Guess what, my digital copies were no longer usable and of course you can't get them reactivated. So needless to say, any money I spent on buying a Blu-ray with digital copy was completely wasted. I have to stop now, so I don't go off like a bottle rocket and embarrass myself.

One final note about digital vs. physical. Most people cannot afford the kind of system it requires to house all that digital media with redundancy and offsite backup storage to ensure minimal impact in the event of a disaster. By disaster, I mean something as small as loosing a $100-$150 2TB drive holding all that data. Cheap to replace the drive, but the lose of time and data make it not fun anymore.

Off the soapbox now.

Quoting LJG:

Quote:
I have about a 1000 dvds, give or a take a few. I have almost 2000 books. I couldn't imagine how much space that would take. Add in my CDs

NewEgg has 2 TB drives for $80.
Will also need a decent RAID controller and an
external drive enclosure.

Utilizing RAID5, you can get 6 TB of data storage with 4 drives. Assuming an average of 6 GB for a DVD, that should hold your entire DVD collection.  You could reduce that even more if you take efforts to just store the movie itself and none of the extras.

I have 8 1.5 TB drives ($69 via sale) and that RAID controller arriving tomorrow and I plan to put it in my existing 8 bay external drive enclosure and creating two RAID 5 arrays for a total of 9 TB of storage.

Wow, I guess space has really been reduced in price. The last time I looked at prices for drives, they were a lot more expensive. But to be honest, at this point, they're still out of my price range.

I still wonder what happens when those drives fail? You do lose the time you've spent adding your media on to it. A lot of stuff I have has never been offered online so I'd have to manually put it on. You might be saving space but are you really when you still have to keep the discs in case of failure? You still have to store them somewhere!

Someone mentioned Netflixs. I know that on their instant streaming they often lose rights to films/tv shows. Say you want to watch a particular movie, put it in your wait list and the next time you have time to watch it, it's gone because they've lost the rights. I admit I don't have this service, but I do know that happens fairly often.  If I buy a dvd, the company may lose the rights to it, but I at least have the dvd and can still watch it at anytime.

I have several digital copies I can't use because the code expired. When they first came out, I didn't have a device that I'd want to play it on and now that I do have an iPod that I could, most of them don't work anymore. Seems silly to even have included them on a disc in the first place if the company wasn't willing to allow the buyer to actually use it if they couldn't use it right then. Obviously they want the person to re-buy it...and re-buy it...and re-buy it.

To be honest, I do see positives for digital media. If people travel, it's great to have something portable you can take with you to entertain yourself be it movies or books or music. In the car with your kids? It's a lot easier bringing one thing than several little discs to choose from. But overall, I'm in the hard copy camp. I still see too many problems with digital only.