Did people really watch movies/shows on DVDs that forced them to watch ads before even starting? Like you go to the store and pay for a movie disc and when you go home you have to sit through like 10 minutes of ads. Did people really have to watch ads before they could even watch the movie they paid for a copy of?!
𝙏𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝘿𝙞𝙨𝙣𝙚𝙮 𝘿𝙑𝘿 𝙞𝙨 𝙚𝙣𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙙 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝘿𝙞𝙨𝙣𝙚𝙮’𝙨 𝙁𝙖𝙨𝙩𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙮. 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙢𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙖 𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙛 𝙗𝙤𝙣𝙪𝙨 𝙛𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚𝙨 𝙬𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙗𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙣 𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙤𝙢𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮. 𝙏𝙤 𝙗𝙮𝙥𝙖𝙨𝙨 𝙁𝙖𝙨𝙩 𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙮, 𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙘𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙈𝙚𝙣𝙪 𝙗𝙪𝙩𝙩𝙤𝙣 𝙖𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙮 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚. 𝙁𝙖𝙨𝙩 𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙮 𝙬𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙗𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙣 𝙞𝙣 𝙖 𝙢𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩…
Even on VHS there were ads (you could fast-forward through them though), and Blu-Ray also has ads despite being a "more modern" standard (it's not it's just HD-DVD with a different branding). Also you can't even use the disc without paying for a special disc reader that reads that shit for you (tbf a lot of devices came with a disc reader, but it still persisted despite the fact that USB storage was far cheaper and more efficient). You'd also have to navigate the terribly slow menus just to get to the part you were at.
Also if you buy a DVD/Blu-Ray whatever the fuck they call it nowadays in one part of the world and you travel to another, say you have family that lives in one country and you live in another, you can't play that disc because it's "region-locked."
Ok maybe it's region locked because different countries probably use different displays/standards or whatnot. NO! It's region locked for NO MATERIAL REASON besides "ensuring copyright distribution of the holder". This is even more mind-boggling for "blu-ray" the supposedly new format.
Also most Blu-Rays don't even come with all the goodies that normal DVDs had like behind the scenes/deleted scenes etc, so it's not like Blu-Rays have any other advantage besides being incompatible with your dvd player. "Just buy a PS3" yes I will buy the SONY product to play movies on a disc also created by SONY.
How is it considered physical media when the devices to play it are not being sold anymore? I'm sure there are a lot of Sony walkmans being sold nowadays. I can totally pick up a VHS player right now at the store and enjoy my treasure trove of vhs tapes that haven't already withered to dust.
People older than me (I was born after Al Gore lost the election) are having nostalgia for the "age of physical media" when really it was an age of physical bullshit compared to streaming bullshit. It's always capitalism, capitalism will burn down all art if it means that someone didn't get to skip paying for it. Here's what I say, just pay a couple a dollars a month for a VPN with port-forwarding and just torrent all your media. Your torrented file has done more for media preservation and archival then any DVD bullshit ever did. The only use for physical media is to digitize it and share it.
The bootlegged Cinderella movie sold in the Global South has done more for media preservation than Disney ever has. A seedbox in Russia is more of a art library compared to any video store.
Don't get me started on video games. Where every generation of devices there's a new standard and new way to do things. Nothing says media preservation like buying a disc from a store and then waiting an hour for your device to download updates online.
You just made me imagine a world where you buy a blu-ray and it downloads an update to the movie, changing the ending. A vile thought.
I think the real challenge of media preservation is the fact that every high-capacity storage medium decays far too quickly. Indeed even if capitalism didn't require the nonsense like region blocking, there would still be no incentive to not only keep the same formats, but also continually make perfect copies of original masters. To that end it becomes the peoples' duty to get the highest quality available and use technology like torrenting to constantly keep a version in circulation.
But even then, it's quite likely that the media will be lost to time eventually. Unless we start drilling the compressed binary into stone.
There are magnetic tape backup systems used a lot in the server world. I think they'll continue to be used and manufactured and improved into the future. You can google magnetic tape storage and find articles are all sorts of stuff about it. I remember that GitHub occasionally backs up the entire contents of GitHub to magnetic tape and stores it in some remote location as a PR thing (and I guess as an actual backup too).
I guess the question I have is whether every company out there has good backup practices for all of their data. And whether there could be a scenario where the backups would become inaccessible.
It also feels really sketchy to rely on things like archive.org to back up various kinds of public domain media. There should be more done to back up and make things accessible and easily replicable.
Magnetic tape only lasts 30 years, and that's pushing it. It is an option (if you host data on AWS, they offer a magnetic tape storage option) but in the end, a lot of that data will be lost in our lifetimes.
I'm sure they're already doing this live on streamed media, but with how much they love engineering malware they could probably do this as well.
Shadow libraries are the only way that capitalist hegemony over human creation is thwarted. More people should be aware of P2P and less on being a Good(TM) person.
If selling discs weren't profitable then they still wouldn't do it in 2024 for new movies, there are enough people earnestly buying them and the myth of preservability.
This has been done to streaming versions, but thankfully it's generally not possible with discs. The blu-rays you buy are pressed, not burned. They are read-only. Changes are only possible with re-releases, and this has happened. For example, the Criterion edition of Miller's Crossing is a different cut from what you would have seen in the theater, though they don't make that very clear.
Store the change on the Blu-ray player's storage. Or, in this alternate world they simply design them with this in mind from the beginning.