this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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I love physical media but I also know that if I was buying everything I’m watching on Netflix, it would be way more expensive than my subscription.
Still I love buying dvd’s and blurays.
I would have to sanity check that math, honestly. I am so sporadically in so many of my media subs that if we counted by watched items as opposed to all items you get access to it may break even.
That said, I'd be lying if I said I don't have BluRays still shrink-wrapped that I haven't watched, so I guess it does cut both ways.
For music it's cut and dry. In 2004 I was spending somewhere between 15 and 25 bucks for a an album on CD which might have 1 or 2 discs. I was buying something like 2 to 4 albums a month. How is it possible today you can pay a monthly sub of a single cd 15 years ago and just have unlimited access to all music. That is insane to me. I still buy albums on vinyl a lot, but keep my spotify for convenience and discovery purposes.
I am pretty sure back then when I purchased the box set of band of brothers on DVD around the same period it cost something like 60 to 80 bucks for 10 1 hour episodes and extra. Max today costs 10 bucks a month today.
With music it gets weirder because for some reason we've all accepted that anybody can just upload music to Youtube as long as they're fine with whoever owns the rights reclaiming the ad revenue, which is very weird.
But in any case I think the value calculation gets a bit weird for a number of reasons. TV was indeed overpriced in physical media, but movies were a different story. It's gonna depend on your consumption habits, but I can tell you there's no way my average viewing on each of the services I pay for at 15 bucks a pop (not ten anymore on any of them, unless you're ok with also watching ads) is anywhere close to one movie or five episodes on average. Across the whole lot, maybe, for each individual one? Probably not. Across the whole household... maybe.
Second, a lot of the media consumption was not made physically at the time, either, TV was a thing (and depending on the time period a source of home recordings, which are also fair game). But then those options haven't been technically removed, I guess, so... I don't know, it's hard to calculate.
Which I guess is part of why these services are so resilient. It's hard to figure out if you're over or underpaying relative to the alternatives, and since there's no way to grasp the core cost or value of what you're getting intuitively it's hard to understand if they're priced reasonably, either. Netflix was doing this at a loss in that "disruptor start up" style that broke the 2010s that who knows what entertainment should cost at this point.