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Twigling t1_it249xd wrote

I fully agree with what you say. And regarding this part:

> I read online that Warner Bros planned to start phasing out DVDs and blurays this year in the process of going completely digital.

One thing worth noting is that when you stream a movie (or TV show) it's very heavily compressed.

With Blu-rays (for example) there is still some compression but the video and audio quality is still a lot higher and because of this the data takes up a lot more space - the average movie is usually somewhere between 30 to 40GBytes on a standard Blu-ray, while 4K will of course be even larger.

If studios start going down the 'streaming only' route (so no physical media at all) you can bet they'll still use very heavy compression; this wouldn't be so bad if they let people legally download purchased content using the same kind of compression that your average movie on Blu-ray is subjected to, but you can bet your bottom dollar that this likely won't happen, or if it does it will be on a very limited scale.

Using the above example digital only is bad if you want the best audio and visual quality, even more so if you have a large 4K TV.

And then of course you have movies that are stuck in 'streaming only jail' - two examples of this are the war movie 'Greyhound' starring Tom Hanks and the excellent Christmas animated movie 'Klaus'. The former is stuck with Apple TV+ and the latter with Netflix. I'd love to buy these on Blu-ray but I can't. There's piracy of course (which I don't indulge in) but even then the pirated versions will only be rips from the lower quality streams.

The customer is losing out, as so often happens.

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