They don't want you to buy though. They want you to subscribe/rent. So I'm guessing that before too long, the "buy" button will go the way of the dodo.
Yeah I would guess that with the ease of streaming, few consumers want to bother with physical media any more. For me, I usually watch a movie once. I’d much rather pay a few dollars to stream it than pay ten times that to buy a disc that will just sit on a shelf.
Owning used to make more sense when there was less overall product. When you can't find something new to watch, you could fall back on a copy of something solid.
I can't remember the last time I rewatched anything...
It was a light-hearted tongue-in-cheek bit of commentary on today's eternal rent-seeking culture. However, the studios have always been this way, and to doubt that is just planting your head firmly in the sand. From the early days of VHS/Beta tapes, an ordinary citizen could not own them strictly from the high prices. Also, look at the legal writings on any physical media you've purchased. The terms clearly limit what you can do with it. Let's also not forget DRM.
The holy grail for them is a per-viewing fee whether that's ticket sales at a theater, or rental fees from a streamer. Allowing eternal multiple viewings is just leaving money on the table. If you think conversations about how to eliminate that have not occurred in a C-suite at any/all of the studios, you're just not thinking about it enough
Yes but if we all approached this sensibly, then someone on Twitter couldn't get offended on behalf of a hypothetical person, in an industry they don't work in our understand, about a topic that's become the flavour of the month for virtue signalling and thus get their own big break as the internet's main character for the week.
And then what would happen to the Twitter outrage industry? No one thinks of the real victims here /s.
>And then what would happen to the Twitter outrage industry?
I would love to see it all burn in the dumpster fire of its own making. It would be the ultimate in karmic self-correct. Too bad I don't really believe in that kind of stuff.
Phase I has already been initiated with Best Buy discontinuing sales of shiny round discs: https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/best-buy-ending-dvd-bl...