The future is self-hosted digital media. I've got no qualms with pirating media. But I am an advocate for buying digital media from artists directly.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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AI music has entered the chat
Great sentiment but still optical media bad
I like to think that if streaming didn't take over, the industry would have shifted to selling USB sticks with the media/game. Even if they did something goofy to "lock" it, at least being on a thumb drive would be more durable, compact, and have faster read time.
Imagine a nicely organized self of DvDs turned into nighmare pile of flash drives of different shapes and sizes as each movie tries to make theirs stand out to make up the lack of a cover.
Nintendo sells essentially a SD card variant in a case for the swtich. So you're not far off :)
A system of organization would be invented. Idk maybe a wooden stepped board with USB sized holes that you store/display your collection in, just to use the first idea I pull directly from ass. Actually make it silicone for the grippy, already improving it, then sell the wood as a fancier looking one, and inlay a few with idk brass or something for a "pro" version, boom, marketing.
My wife is "xennial" and her music tastes skew younger. Lots of younger artists are selling cassettes and CDs at their merch tables. We have more tapes and discs in our house than I ever had in the 90s.
I wish blue ray 50 GB discs were more used.
They have really good shelf life and it would be awesome for things like yearly backup of your photos or some shit like that.
I have bad news for you - Panasonic, Sony, and Samsung have all stopped production on BR-R discs.
they might bring it back with HDD drives going AIxtinct.
Not to ruin people getting off of streaming, but the biggest bang for buck in storage will be regular old hard drives unless you need to backup like >500Tb of storage (then tape drives).
DVDs are cool but they only have a 4/8Gb capacity.
BluRay pushes it to 70/100/120gb which is great for one 4K movie lol.
Yeah, my vinyl collection is a decoration. The 20TB of storage connected to my PC is where the magic happens.
Most people don't burn lossless quality music or extreme high bitrate 16k movies
Just make sure you back them up. Bit rot is real.
Blu-rays are great, DVDs not so much unless it's an old title that was never released in 1080p
Or classic 2d animation.
1080p simpsons vs 720p Simpsons look really close
*480
even then, many bluerays are just cheap upscales with no other changes. I made that mistake once with a boxset only to find that it was a very obvious DVD. this after I was roasted on reddit for complaining about that being a possibility and everyone angrily promised me that it was not that. it was that. I'm still bitter
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..... No they aren't. Way more are just keeping their own digital media on their own storage. Even more are still just streaming. The least are watching DVD and Blu Ray.
Most people are braindead and mindless consumers across all generations, but there's a really large portion of people who are more conscious about the value of personal property. Weird that most of them are the communists and socialists while liberals and right wingers in general basically all want big corpos to violate our anuses with as much brutality as possible
probably the same reason I refused to leg it go.
I actually own it, control it, and can use it at my wimsy.
vs streaming, which I could buy it and still have it taken away from me cause you never own anything when its streaming/digital download.
Its not just DVDs. I switched to all local mp3s for music and i get a lot of them by scoring cds from second hand stores.
Local library is another great source to get those CDs to rip mp3s
This has been the biggest and dumbest take I've seen come from the GenZ/GenA crowd. Polaroids were a big hit a few years ago and I can't help but wince at this stuff. Yeah it's cute or whatever to hold it in your hand, but in 1, 5, 10, 30 years...when that photo or DVD is bent/scratched/lost, you'll be kicking yourself in the ass for even bothering with it.
Just pirate your content, take photos with your $1000 phones and print the photos out, and learn to backup your own shit. Buy a 2 bay NAS and backup your shit to it. And then backup your NAS to a cloud like backblaze.
My dad has been doing this since the early 2000s. We have our family photos AND videos from 1990-2026 all backed up on a NAS, which syncs to backblaze. ~600GBs of data. And the cloud backup on backblaze is $7.25 a month for that data.
Literally anyone can go buy a a $200 2-bay NAS, then grab two 1TB hard drives for $40 each. $280 for a NAS that will last you YEARS. And then figure out whatever service you want to backup to for a cloud backup.
easy with that logic, killer.
While I agree with the general idea, your example prices are no longer valid since storage costs are now through the roof. The best defense of kids using DVDs is that you can borrow them from the library for free.
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