Streaming and Physical Media

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I mean yeah that's how like selling stuff at retail works in general.

Obviously doesn't apply when you buy something used but buying stuff new? Yeah, they get money from it.


Honestly I really can't think of any legit reasons to not also eventually offer your streaming original shows onto home video (or even make them available for purchase and digital download).

Like keep them exclusive to your streaming service for a while, maybe a year or so, but eventually just release them physically, y'know?

My guess is that if they release them on physical media, the studios will have to split some of the money made with the store that sells them. For instance, I don't think we've seen any physical media copies of, say, "The Mandalorian" in stores, have we?

With streaming, the studios can keep all the profits for themselves.

That + (especially for studios that run their own streaming services, which is borderline all of them nowadays) wanting to keep people in their own ecosystem.

You wanna watch the Mandalorian? You gotta subscribe to Disney+ and be part of the Disney ecosystem.

But what if they decide to pull that from their streaming service? You don't really have a choice.

Yeah, I think I will start investing in buying physical copies of my favorite movies on bluray or DVD...

Streaming kind of overrated.

There is also the issue of when they announce that they're going to pull their physical media, as Disney in particular has been wont to do, and kind of shaming people for not buying when they had the chance. Disney did this all the time, as this video shows:

That stinks that you had your physical copies stolen. In general it's still better to have them, rather than trust corporate bureaucrats to not just remove access from everything or require constant repayment.

Well, there's also the issue of having to find out-of-print physical media, which can run upwards of $50-$100 or more.

I bought a Synology NAS and uploaded my physically media to it. I can then stream it to my own devices.

It's not just media being yanked, but sometimes they get Lucased. Trimming the bedroom scene from For Your Eyes Only with the young Skater is probably just as well, but making Han shoot second changes the character fundamentally. Not to mention the future of deep fakes ads in movies.

A lot of people complain about changes made to streaming service versions of stuff, as opposed to physical media, but doesn't the Blu-Ray and DVD releases of, say, the original Star Wars trilogy have the alternate versions and not the originals? Where are the complaints about that?

Now that Disney owns it that might be the case, I haven't bothered to check as we're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 years for that to happen and several different versions of the movies in the mean time. Some of which differ substantially due to the way the films were re-edited later on.

The problem is that there are changes that are made to films via various cuts and sometimes it does make the movie better. For example the director's cut of Leon The Professional, has all the actual plot added back to the movie that was cut.

But, when this happens, the movies aren't necessarily the same experience from years earlier. Sure, there are times where it is an improvement, but it can really screw with your memory if the changes were a significant portion of what you remember from the movie.

People do complain about that, all the time.

The fact that the only way for people to watch the unedited non-Special Edition versions of the Star Wars Original Trilogy through an official release is by buying the out-of-print 2006 limited edition rerelease of the 2004 DVD release of the Original Trilogy that included bonus discs with the original theatrical versions of each film on them is a constant source of complaint.

Especially so considering that this release was absolutely awful. It was just the same masters used for the 1993 LaserDisc release of the original trilogy just with the Episode IV - A New Hope edited out of the opening crawl of the first movie, since that wasn't part of Star Wars when it was originally released in 1977. It was also non-anamorphic widescreen, which if you don't know what that means it means that this release wasn't actually 'proper' widescreen. It was 4:3 and the black bars on the top and bottom you get with proper widescreen was actually part of the video file itself. The effect when watching this on any modern TV? You're gonna get an extremely small video with black bars all over because it's a 4:3 video. You can 'rectify' this by using the zoom function on your TV, but that just ruins the (already poor) video quality (again, it's literally the 1993 LD masters. Obviously standards for home video mastering advanced between 1993 and 2006) and makes it impossible for you to use subtitles because the subtitles appear in the black space at the bottom - the black space you can no longer see if you zoom in to make the actual film fit your TV screen.

So yeah the fact that this is literally the only way to officially watch unedited version of the Original Trilogy (at least via a format that most people probably still have a player for, whether that's a DVD player itself or a BD player - I'd say most people by now have either gotten rid of or put their VCRs in storage and LaserDisc? Well, that was a niche format at best outside of Japan and a few other Asian countries.) is a still a common source of complaint among Star Wars fans.

Of course, there do exist a few fan edits and restorations of the original theatrical cuts that circulate online that Star Wars fans are well aware of, so that may be why it seems complaining about the lack of an official release of the theatrical cuts of the Original Trilogy isn't a common thing anymore. For the Star Wars fans who would be the ones who complain about how the original versions aren't available on BD or whatever, they're obviously going to be the ones aware of these fan restorations and watch them - so most of the complaining nowadays is less that there's no way to watch these films as screened in theatres in a quality higher than the 2006 DVD release, but more that there's no way to officially watch these films restored in high-definition.

There is also the issue of when they announce that they're going to pull their physical media, as Disney in particular has been wont to do, and kind of shaming people for not buying when they had the chance. Disney did this all the time, as this video shows:


You say that it's cheaper to buy physical media than to use streaming. But when something goes out of print, it becomes a lot more expensive, say, $50-$100 to buy it. So how can physical media be cheaper if it's so expensive?

Also, when they announce that they're going to pull the media after a certain day, don't they pull the stuff that doesn't sell off the shelves and throw them away? I was under the impression that they did.

I only download. Yarr!

In fact, I went straight from VHS/Cassette to downloading. I was never enamored with optical media. On computers it was always slow and CDs tended to scratch to oblivion (or get sun damaged). As for streaming, I'm often in the boonies so it's not even an option. There is still nothing more convenient than having a few terabytes of videos on a hard drive. If media companies would make things even more convenient than that I'd consider using it, but they're too focused on control.

I'm really not sure why you keep bringing up the Disney Vault, the Disney Vault as a concept died with Disney+.

And no, just because something goes out of print doesn't mean it's going to shoot up in value and price, it just means it's gone out of print.

Let's use the 2006 Star Wars Trilogy DVD release as an example. There were actually two different releases of this release, a widescreen version and a fullscreen version (although this only applied to the Special Edition, the theatrical cuts on the bonus disc were the same) but that fact is really irrelevant since both versions had the same MSRP of around $30 (reviews of these releases I've found from 2006 give a list price of $29.98 for each of the three films + an archived listing of a bundle of all three films on StarWars.com's now-defunct online shop has a list price of $59.99 and them promoting this release as 'about $30 off the suggested retail price if purchased separately' and $59.99 + $30 = $89.99 and $89.99/3 = $29.99)

Meanwhile on eBay nowadays, you can find people selling all three DVDs for anywhere from $60 to $100. Not that far off the original price when they came out back in 2006. And that's people selling all three films together, you can find each individually for anywhere from $10 to $25.

Also, no, when something is discontinued or goes out-of-print, they don't pull it off store shelves and have the stores return unsold copies to be destroyed or discarded. To use a video game example here, the video game Super Mario 3D All-Stars was only available from 18 September 2020 until 31 March 2021 as part of the 35th anniversary of the original Super Mario Bros game. After 31 March 2021, Nintendo delisted the game from the Nintendo eShop and you could no longer buy the game digitally, but the game was also available physically. While Nintendo was no longer manufacturing new copies of the game, I would see plenty of copies of this game at stores like Target or Walmart for months after its discontinuation. Making stores return unsold product just because it's going out-of-print is not a thing that happens, all that really happens is once they sell out of it, that's it. They're not going to get any more stock.

If the product is out of print, then I would think that it would be harder to find, so yeah, I would think that just by it being harder to find, the value goes up.



The ads make it seem as though once the out-of-print date shows up, they will literally pull all remaining copies from the store shelves. This sample ad's wording indicates as such:


Here's another example of an ad whose words appear to indicate that they all taking away any copies that don't sell after, in this case, January 31, 2007:


Also, I'm hunting for a VERY out-of-print and often VERY pricey DVD called "Mickey Mouse In Living Color":


On eBay, it can run as low as $20, if I'm lucky, or as much $60-$100. And forget about Amazon, as it is $103 there. How is that less expensive than streaming?