Summary
- Owning digital movies is like renting, not truly owning. So what’s the point?
- You can lose access to different versions of films with digital purchases.
- Digital movies lack quality and extras, and are often more expensive than physical copies.
I prefer buying physical movies, but due to a mix of rare sales and (most of the time) convenience, I have bought some digital movies on platforms like Apple TV. For now, these movies are safely in my cloud account, but over the last few years, I’ve been avoiding digital movie purchases, and recently I’ve decided to stop buying digital movies completely.
Why? Well, there are a number of reasons, but for the most part it feels like buying digital movies, as opposed to digital rentals, streaming subscriptions, and physical media, is simply pointless and a waste of money. Basically, I’ve realized that buying digital movies is silly.
If They Can Take It Away Any Time, It’s Not Really Yours
When you subscribe to a streaming service or rent a digital movie, you’re getting exactly what you paid for—temporary access to the content. That’s perfectly fine by me! I don’t have to drive out to a rental store on a cold Friday night, and then have to go back on Monday morning before work to return the movies I rented. That’s exactly the sort of situation where the convenience of digital justifies itself with bells on.
However, when I pay a higher price to buy a movie, I expect to have effectively permanent access to the content. If you look at the terms and conditions of digital movie purchases, you’ll realize that these are really just rental contracts with an open-ended date. After all, the service you buy the movie from has to actively serve the movie to you every time you watch it. It’s not like buying a disc that costs the content distributor nothing while it sits on your shelf.
So it makes sense that some sort of legal or practical issue could arise where your access to your movie is revoked. However, while I can understand why it’s not possible to get the same sort of ownership level over your copy of a movie compared to physical releases, that doesn’t mean I have to like it or waste my money on it.
Related
Why I Bought Star Trek on Blu-ray Despite Streaming Services
I don’t have to suffer from saucer-separation anymore.
I Don’t Want to Lose Older Versions of Movies
I own two different versions of Robocop on Blu-ray. One is the theatrical release and the other is the director’s cut which should have been the theatrical version, if not for an impasse with the film ratings board. I can’t imagine someone telling me that I can have access to one version of this film, but not the other. What if I want to have the original release of Lord of the Rings where Gandalf wears a wristwatch, or you can see modern New Zealanders driving in the distance as the Fellowship of the Ring cross the mountains?
Most importantly, what if I don’t want a censored version of a film made for modern audiences looking at the media through the lens of their modern sensibilities? That’s exactly what can happen with a digital movie purchase. It can happen to books and music too, of course! It’s not always third party meddlers either, sometimes the original creators (I’m looking at you, George Lucas) can’t stop adding or altering stuff in their films.
Related
The Quality Just Isn’t There
While streaming video quality is pretty good, there’s a large and notable gap in quality between the Blu-ray version of a movie and its streaming counterpart. In fact, the regular 1080p Blu-ray version of a movie usually looks better overall than a 4K UHD stream.
There are many reasons for this, but largely it comes down to the bitrate and the quality of every individual pixel. Even the best 4K stream tops out at around 25Mbps, and despite big advances in compression methods, the lack of detail in every frame compared to Blu-ray is undeniable. Add to that, streaming quality constantly fluctuates with network conditions, and most of the services that let you buy movies digitally don’t let you download them on anything other than mobile devices.
So now that some content makers, like Disney, are phasing out physical media for their new movies and shows, it means that you will never have any way to watch the best quality home versions of these media—unless they start offering 100GB downloads for digital customers.
If I’m going to pay for permanent access to a movie, I’d like to have a high-quality copy of the film. Streaming just isn’t good enough.
I’ve long lamented that, unlike rental DVDs and Blu-rays, rental digital movies don’t come with any extras. For a film buff like myself, I love watching behind-the-scenes content, VFX breakdowns, interviews, and anything else to do with the production of the film.
While many digital movies come with a decent selection (e.g. my Apple TV copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey) the extras you get with newer films or even some classics are pretty lackluster compared to what usually comes packed in with the physical copy. Add to that, you can usually catch most of these extras on YouTube or other streaming services, and it doesn’t feel like any type of incentive anymore.
Physical Movies Are Cheaper Most of the Time
One of the things I’ve become accustomed to with digital purchases of books, music, and especially video games, is that there are often sales and deep cuts to the cost of purchase. I feel a lot better, for example, about buying a digital game on Steam if it’s 90% discounted compared to paying full price.
However, unless I’m always missing them somehow, I find that digital movie purchases are rarely ever on special. Even when there is some sort of deal, I can usually get the DVD version for a few cents, the Blu-ray for under ten bucks, and the 4K Blu-ray for, well OK, for some reason, the pricing on these can be downright unreasonable unless you pick them up used.
Yes, I might have to go trawling the local shops for a deal, or wait a day or two for an order to be shipped to me, but that’s OK. After all, when I’m looking to add a movie to my collection permanently, the whole advantage of instant gratification falls away. What’s waiting a day or two for a movie that will be at my beck and call for years?
So, until platforms allow me to buy a DRM-free copy, at much higher quality, that I can download and store on my own terms, I have lost all interest in buying a digital movie ever again.