Pour one out for physical media
Netflix is no longer mailing DVDs
It’s the end of an era. NPR reports:
Netflix will end its DVD-by-mail service
The transmogrification of digital media in my lifetime has been jarring.
Consider what has happened in the past 100 years.
Radio became widespread in the 1920s. Suddenly, people had access to news, music, and propaganda every evening.
Vinyl disc recordings became available to the public. That hit critical mass in 1948, just in time to turbocharge the careers of a gazillion artists. Without the vinyl LP you would never have known of Frank Sinatra, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, and so many more.
Everything audio turned digital in the 1980s. That was a huge benefit for bands like Pink Floyd, who were able to sell a CD of Dark Side of the Moon to the same people who had already paid for an LP.
Meanwhile, Blockbuster Video was getting off the ground in the mid-1980s. And all of a sudden you didn’t have to watch whatever the networks were showing on the TV.
Physical media was a very big deal for a very long time. Today, hipsters collect vinyl and everything else is digital.
Does that make the world better? Worse? Talk to me.
You've asked an interesting question there, Ed. On the one hand, we live in an analog world so it seems like analog media "ought to be" the best choice. However, analog is susceptible to degradation. Regardless of the physical media, The original copy degrades with successive copies. Finally, the quality of the recording media impacts the quality of the final product.
Digital is NOT analog. Nevertheless, the quality of a digital recording may be arbitraryily high and it never degrades.
Access to digital media is no longer dependent upon owning a copy of the recording but, in absence of media, the listener needs a subscription to to a service granting a license to the recording in question.
We travel occasionally with an autistic son who needs a few staple media items for some stability. We now can no longer guarantee there will be a DVD player in the holiday houses and have even requested permission to bring along a small Blu-Ray player. (I probably need to cast from an iPad to their smart tellies, I suppose). Although I’ve had online writing platforms since the early noughties, I have not yet succumbed to not so smart TVs and streaming - we have a 15 year old TV with a HDMI port, so we manage with MUBI and some arty on demand services and read a lot! but I’m not looking forward to talking to yet another machine that wants a login and might pinch my personals.
I am starting to feel like my grandmother, who drove a buggy to school with her twin sister more than 100 years ago - “it’s a different world”.