It has only just begun. We’re still in the “competing” phase. In the next year or two, we’ll see consolidation, more price increases, more ads, mandatory annual subscriptions to reduce churn. We’ll essentially have an even worse version of cable via Netflix, Amazon and Apple.
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I’m glad that by and large I still buy DVDs.
I’m beginning to think that if I allocated my streaming budget to DVDs I’d be better off. 
But, I’d be concerned about the longevity of the DVD format.
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It’ll no doubt last my lifetime! Imagine if all your purchases on streaming services are now riddled with adverts. It makes me reticent about making anymore purchases. I wonder if this will come to audible also. IMO adverts are the cancer of all media.
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OTOH from my POV it clarifies and cements the status of Lamb. It’s been years since I read the books but I seem to recall he swore a lot in them as well. Now I’ve got to go back and find and re-read them 
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I seem to recall he swore a lot in them as well
He probably did, but that doesn’t mean he should, or at the very least, not necessarily replicated in in-home entertainment, where more than just one individual has to endure the language, which is not the case with a book.
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If they went to only Annual Subscriptions that would really lose them a lot of subscribers. The sticker shock of £100 all at once versus £10 a month is massive and would lead to a lot of dropped people. Plus it would cause a massive spike in Subs in one quarter (think of Apple’s Services Revenue) and a drop in the other three quarters.
You’re looking at 20 - 30 years max if they are kept in peak environmental conditions.
That’s why I rip a copy of mine and watch that. Occasionally I’ll bust out a blu-ray for extras and the like.
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I’m curious. Did anyone here purchase a copy of Twister or Mars Attacks when they were first released to DVD? They are now 27 years old, do they still play?
I have some movies that were released on DVD in 1999 but I have no idea when they were manufactured, or exactly when I bought them. But they still play in my old SuperDrive.
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Maybe i’m misremembering and it was just rewritable optical media which had a relatively short shelf life
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Or buying digitally.
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I’ve seen recent examples of both Sony and Amazon removing purchased digital content from peoples libraries, I think it was mentioned here on the forum. Though not a widespread issue I know it’s happened other times over the years.
I used to be ‘all in’ on buying content digitally and getting rid of my physical dvd and media collection, but now I see that as a mistake and am much more reluctant and purchase physical media where possible. Different methods have different trade-offs but that’s what I’m most comfortable with these days.
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No, you are correct. Looks like the RW disks could fail in as little as 5 years.
I was primarily referring to the alternative of a freely available and infinite (for all intents and purposes) supply of high quality entertainment and education to be rediscovered in books. But yes, streaming platforms vs the local library’s video section is no contest: streaming wins every time. Though library shelves are arguably more browsable and may increasingly hold treasures that streaming has long since cut to save money.
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Or not buying movies at all.
Most movies today are remakes or sequels and they are usually available on streaming within a few months of release. I’ve found few worth watching once and none, IMO, worth buying.
When I want to see something I can usually subscribe to a no ads streaming service, for a month, for less than the cost of renting one movie. That’s good enough for me.
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I am curious about how little I hear about M-Disk either in this kind of discussion or in general discussions about backup strategies. These are alleged to last for centuries. It would seem that this technology would solve this issue.
I would be interested to hear from people who have actually bought into this technology.
In partial answer to my own question, the Wikipedia article about M-Disk makes you a little nervous. Bankruptcies and stuff like that. I went to the mdisk.com website, and I ran into some internal broken links which makes one nervous. Perhaps this technology simply could not get a critical mass of consumer users. SSD’s have gotten so cheap that, for the purposes of human lifetime storage, it is competitive just to have multiples of these and assume some will survive.
I don’t think long term data storage is going to be solved any time soon. In addition to the media to use, there is the question of the hardware needed to retrieve the data, the file types to use, and a secure offsite location to keep everything.
This brought back some memories. At my first “real job” we entered grocery orders on punched paper tape and then threaded it into a reader when we were ready to transmit.
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Unless the digital service starts adding adverts to your purchases.
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Today, absolutely. Tomorrow, my money’s on Big Tech. Churn is a huge problem for them, both on the books and the need to crank out vast amounts of content, which is also quite expensive. Whatever the tipping point is, they’ll find it and enough people will pony up, once it’s “all or nothing”, when there aren’t half a dozen other places to hop to.
Then it will get a bit more interesting. We’ll also see piracy rise again, which will be much more difficult to contain than before.