A few years ago I was in a Blockbuster when they all began closing and selling off their inventory of DVD/Blu-Rays. While I was browsing, there was a early-20ish couple a few feet away doing the same. Well, almost. The girl was browsing through the selection while the guy was just haranguing her about how "streaming is the only way to get movies/TV" and that she was "wasting her time and money on physical media." It was pretty brutal. (Naturally the guy looked the "soy boy" part long before that became a thing.)
I remember thinking what a short-sighted douche bag this guy was. When you own the physical media, you own it and can enjoy it as long as you own a player. If you have a video tape and a VCR, you can still watch those movies. As long as that girl still owns those DVDs/Blu-Rays and a machine on which to play them, she can enjoy them for years to come. She can rip them to digital and move them to a digital device. She can store them on her computer and use something like Plex to stream them to any device in her home. Hard media is freedom.
I still have hundreds of CDs that I can do ANYTHING I want to do with them and don't have to worry that iTunes/Amazon is going to decide someone is now "racist" and will stop offering those songs. Maybe at some point they'll banish someone like Ted Nugent and Damn Yankees, for example. However, if you own those CDs, you can tell Amazon/iTunes to piss off.
I often regret not intervening and telling the guy off (not just because he was being a complete asshole to his girlfriend in public), but the fact that his girlfriend completely ignored him the entire time gives me the idea that I didn't have to. I doubt he would have gotten the point anyway. He's probably sitting in some Starbuck's today wondering why he can't watch something on Netflix/Hulu/Amazon that they were offering last week and still hasn't put it together that his, probably long-time by now, ex-girlfriend was right.
A few years ago I was in a Blockbuster when they all began closing and selling off their inventory of DVD/Blu-Rays. While I was browsing, there was a early-20ish couple a few feet away doing the same. Well, almost. The girl was browsing through the selection while the guy was just haranguing her about how "streaming is the only way to get movies/TV" and that she was "wasting her time and money on physical media." It was pretty brutal. (Naturally the guy looked the "soy boy" part long before that became a thing.)
I remember thinking what a short-sighted douche bag this guy was. When you own the physical media, you own it and can enjoy it as long as you own a player. If you have a video tape and a VCR, you can still watch those movies. As long as that girl still owns those DVDs/Blu-Rays and a machine on which to play them, she can enjoy them for years to come. She can rip them to digital and move them to a digital device. She can store them on her computer and use something like Plex to stream them to any device in her home. Hard media is freedom.
I still have hundreds of CDs that I can do ANYTHING I want to do with them and don't have to worry that iTunes/Amazon is going to decide someone is now "racist" and will stop offering those songs. Maybe at some point they'll banish someone like Ted Nugent and Damn Yankees, for example. However, if you own those CDs, you can tell Amazon/iTunes to piss off.
I often regret not intervening and telling the guy off (not just because he was being a complete asshole to his girlfriend in public), but the fact that his girlfriend completely ignored him the entire time gives me the idea that I didn't have to. I doubt he would have gotten the point anyway. He's probably sitting in some Starbuck's today wondering why he can't watch something on Netflix/Hulu/Amazon that they were offering last week and still hasn't put it together that his, probably long-time by now, ex-girlfriend was right.