Owned physical media and/or downloaded music vs streaming services.

No worries. And I completely understand that the concerns btw about streaming as a long-term music format - it's one of the reasons why I purchase what I like. But I'll purchase digital files as well as CD's / vinyl, I'm not concerned that they'll be wiped out by a hard drive crash. Sometimes that will be lossy files (if I'm on the fence on a purchase and I find the album on the cheap), and at times it's been lossless files.

Depends on the circumstances.

 

I haven't looked at BDR media in a while, so your post got me re-checking the numbers. So I went to Amazon, searched for a 25 pack spindle of BDR's and I got $19.99 for a pack of Verbatims. But that's 625GB for a 25 pack -- multiple that by 3 to get ~2TB and we're talking $60 now.

So using Amazon dollars again, I looked for a 2TB hard drive to compare and got $60 for a Seagate -- so the numbers are actually about the same when you get in that range (and I need a lot of storage, 1TB is way too small...in reality I'm nearing 3TB requirements soon per HDD).

But then there's the other issues : a 2TB hard drive I can replicate in one shot, I don't have to shuffle discs around like I would with a BDR spindle. And the speeds, I suspect, on a 6Gb/s HDD will probably beat an optical drive fairly easily. And those BDR discs are read-once, correct? BD-RE discs exist, but they are pricier I believe and I would definitely need re-writeable if I went back to optical.

HDD's still look to be the better storage option to work with, at least in my situation.

 

For shuffling around access only, yes I would go with a hard drive every time. For long term storage, like say my complete Beatles on 1 bluray, I am going with a save state that cannot be changed (that and it has the option of much cooler artwork and isn't fragile).

Hard drives are where I edit, blurays are where I save them. That includes movies too. If I transferred movies, music, and all that at full quality...not possible. I probably have about 10 tb now, but I wouldn't dream of trying to save all my optical media there. An average bluray is about 30gb. Let us say even a 500 collection...well you get my drift. And accessing all that information at the touch of the hand, yeah right. Even super fast computers hiccup on full bit rates with HD video and sound going out to a 65 inch screen. And 3D...hell no. It is because there is a lot more going on than just playing the movie for example.

As for your price. Amazon isn't big on having the best prices for storage on optical drives for obvious reasons. Ebay is where it is at for premium price Verbatim products. Amazon is way to expensive for so little product...again because hard drives are more in line with the push of their digital purchases.

 

I mentioned Amazon prices to just level the playing field between the two options.

HDD's can be caught for very cheap on eBay as well...about a year back I grabbed a 2TB pull (likely from a server) for something like 15(?) bucks. It's got a lot of mileage on it, but I have drives with a lot more than that and they are still going. And 15 bucks for a tertiary backup drive was worth the risk (so far so good btw).

I can see the benefit of a final copy at times, that gives one some extra peace of mind that you won't overwrite something accidentally (I've done that a few times....that goodness for backups when I've messed up). But I've had the reverse occur more often when I backup on CDR / DVDR and then I'm actually backing up redundant data as the last copy was finalized....wasted a lot of MB / GB that way. It's easier for me to just mount a drive as read-only if I consider it "final" and needs no more edits.

 

One comment on the Ebay thing. I am not talking about buying used. I don't think the playing field is level because Amazon has a vested interest. Don't you find it weird at how few options there are on certain things while on Ebay there are tons of alternatives?

Amazon has very few BD-R's and that is for good reason. They are pushing streaming or digital downloads and they have zero interest in the material being saved.

But whatever the cost of hard drives right now, they cost way more to manufacturer. Same with chip sets. Too many parts vs plastic aluminum...and ink. That was the only point I was making. Hard drives are great for editing no question.

 

I'm a physical media only guy. I only listen to music on my stereo system in my living room.

Nothing wrong with streaming but I'm 59 and it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks.

My kids think I'm crazy.

 

My point earlier is that I need my digital storage to be re-writable today. Already went down the read-only path with CDR / DVDR many years ago. My digital media collection is generally a fluid one, similar to my physical media collection.

As for Amazon, I suspect it's less about a streaming agenda and more about supply / demand. They sell lots of vinyl, as an example. Wouldn't vinyl sales directly impact their streaming services also?

 

My kids think I'm crazy too, but for different reasons.

 

I think you will be disappointed by the accelerating trend, which is towards on demand streaming. It's not just Netflix, which admittedly was the trailblazer. You also have Amazon Prime, HBO Go, Hulu, Google Play. CBS is reading the tealeaves and going with All Access, Disney is due for a major splash with its own service. Apple is starting to produce streaming content and other major movie studios will no doubt try something after Disney.

For all of these services, producing an additional physical copy is an additional operating expense and a disincentive for new subscriptions, so yes, they would love to phase out physical media. I think that will eventually happen, but probably not for some time yet. However, I doubt that there will be another new physical disc format beyond the current UHD standard.

 

Not seeing the connection. Recording digital to bluray vs a vinyl record that can't record at all? Microsoft was this way as well. They went full steam ahead on HDDVD, not because they wanted HDDVD, but because they wanted Sony/bluray to fail. Hence the disconnectable player on the Xbox.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Netflix is a trailblazer? They are filling the rental market that already existed. Rentals back in the VHS days eclipsed sales by as much as 90% at one point.

All streaming combined has not cracked 50% until just recently. That is pitiful. Now mind you, this is revenue. Not profits. Big difference.

Netflix has over 260 million subscribers but yet 178 million in revenue...yet only negative cash flow? You know why, licensing costs. For a huge company with all those millions of subscribers, they are still pretty much running on fumes. I predict that it will be a different story very soon. They are banking on their original content beating the heavies...and they are stupid for it.

HBO owns their content, and they sell huge in physical product, so moot point there. Hula and Google Play are small potatoes, Amazon Prime in the streaming business...ditto. Amazon prime is huge from physical delivery, that is a fact.

Disney is another story. Their sales of Star Wars and Marvel have generated record profits for physical content, it is really a landslide.

In closing, what Amazon carries has no bearing on the underground market much like Walmart not supporting blurays. Walmart doesn't carry a lot of things that have been very successful. This is not news for a chain store like effect (call it online chain).

All I can say is wait and see. Just give me credit when it implodes. The kiddies got to get out of the house and work eventually. "Netflix and chill" will one day have an expiration date. There is already signs of it on the horizon.

 

Are you serious? Of course Netflix is a trailblazer in the streaming space. Everyone knows it, including all the big players that are now (finally) scrambling to compete (see list of companies I mentioned before). They wouldn't be doing this if Netflix didn't show them the new way. Netflix is now a global giant because of their early foresight. If they continued to just rent DVDs, they'd be nowhere today (probably literally). Transporting physical media around is so 20th century!

I'm just speechless by your casual dismissal in the face of an established track record and global trends that are shaking up the whole industry.

I suppose Amazon must also be a flash-in-the-pan because it doesn't make much profit. It, like Netflix, reinvests most of its revenue back into the business to grow the business, and so on. While Netflix (like Amazon) continues to grow, they don't need huge profits to keep the shareholders happy. Tesla pretty much operates on the same principle, another trailblazer in the adoption of electric vehicles and renewable energy storage.

Simply looking at a company's profits in isolation is an inadequate indicator of a company's success.

Wow, if that's what you think then we must be living in different universes! I guess in your world telecommuting doesn't exist.

 

There is no reason to get all "wow" just because I disagree with you. Lets crank it down a notch ok?

Yes I am very serious. Though there are lots of Netflix fans that see them as doing no wrong, I am not the only one to see the issue of their lack of true investments. In order to truly dominate you have to have cash flow. Going deeper and deeper into credit is not a successful business model without assets. 20 Billion in debt should have any company in worry. Proven economics is key. Companies far bigger than they are have gone done because of ignoring the obvious.

Transporting physical media is very "20th century" and despite the trendy ideology the world economy is just a tad older than the last 20 years. Again, the rise of Netflix as some kind of new entity that just came out of nowhere is ignoring the fact that renters have always been there.

Netflix may have destroyed Blockbuster, but Blockbuster was well on their way out before there was ever a Netflix in the making. Same with Walmart to Woolworth...Nintendo to Atari...etc.

However in all cases mentioned, the perceived oh they are so much bigger is again coming from the fact that people are dismissing just how big the former companies were because of lack of competition and way more dominance for their era. Did Nintendo ever have computers? Did Nintendo ever have revolutionary arcade penetration?.....Did Walmart sell tractors, did Walmart take the cities? Has Netflix produced buyers that not only sold product in the store, but they also had a future aspect of selling product around them by selling gas...food etc. You have to look at the big picture and just why Netflix is "so much bigger". A lot is based on lazy companies whoring licenses at budget prices...but even at that budget, it is killing Netflix future....which again, save for a few examples, is severely lacking in home grown assets.

Ok, so you disagree with me. How about accepting a different idea than your own even if you don't agree with it?

Unlike Amazon, Netflix has not diversified. A company that needs to stay afloat based on what the big studios allow them to have, is not good. Any of the heavies that decide to pull support will crush them. Worse, more competition can have a double stroke of killing the goose.

If you look at what I wrote, I didn't just look at one factor. As much as you say I just dismiss Netflix, you seemed to dismiss anything that was said. You don't think that the ground floor of streaming services has anything to do with a lot of people not working?

Sorry, but I think that was childish. Way to straw man. Of course it also challenges the notion that I am communicating to you through a message board. I must not really support that either.

Of course, I have never claimed that I couldn't be wrong. My prediction is simply that.

 

The "wasted" space on write-once-and finalize media has got to be trivial compared to a whole RW piece of media going south. I was burned (npi) early and often with RW media so I eat the cost of a few wasted megabytes here and there, but I've been a write-once man for a very long time now (when it comes to optical).

Everybody's mind is wired differently, however, and mine is happy with taking one snapshot on Monday and another on Tuesday, so to speak, even if that means two copies of 97% of it. I just write the date in marker on the bottom of the disc (jokes!)

If my latest fails, I then revert to Monday at the worst. (Another joke: Shyeah, like I do daily backups.)

An increasing number of laptops and other portable systems aren't even shipping with optical drives built-in. There's definitely a weaning-away going on, from both Hollywood and Silicon Valley, nudging the market towards clouds, rentals, streams and PPV, but I don't necessarily think it's Amazon in the driver's seat. I see plenty of choices for writable media on Amazon.

 

Again, my digital collection is fluid but even more so my general data files / documents etc. I realized this fairly quickly when I was using read-once optical media and the number of discs that literally were 95% the same as the last one but I had to update for the deltas so had to use a whole new disc. Became very wasteful and I actually started to use CDRW's (and later DVDRW's) for anything with frequent edits.

Problem is that those edits grew into many areas, over time. So my setup I suppose is just wired this way now.

 

A couple relevant charts related to the subject at hand:



And for video:



To me, it is easy to see that streaming is where things are and are headed, but I can't really predict who the main winners and losers will be at this point. Yes, Netflix is big now, but if companies follow Disney's path, they could lose content over time. In other words, it is easier to see that streaming is winning out, but I think it is too early to tell which companies will win in the end.

 

Those charts are so simplistic.

First of all growth is not the same as lack of sales. The growth rate of the USA was down...yet Russia was eclipsing the USA for a number of years....and....

Notice they show brick and mortar as nothing while ignoring that rentals have always been bigger and went to streaming...and?

Meanwhile profits are completely ignored.

As for Netflix that House of Cards just might surprise a few people. 20 billion in the hole is not the future, but again, just give me proper credit for saying it here when it happens that is all I ask.

By the way DEG are a bunch of biased digital only fans. Their non-reporting of true sales reflection has been epic.

Out of that 6 billion figure for streaming, how much of that actually goes to the parent company vs physical?

Renters eclipse buyers constantly, does that really mean anything in the big picture?

 

I own over 15.000 CDs and LPs, and hundreds of DVDs and Blu Ray discs.

At age 61 I have gone to streaming, both for music and films/TV shows. I love streaming.
I wish streaming had been available in the 1970s. I would not have spent a fortune on this library of music that takes up a huge physical area and which my sole heir wants no part of.

I love streaming.

 

We agree that the charts are not 100 percent accurate as far as the entire market is concerned, but it is easy to see they are off more in the other direction. Amazon Prime is one of the largest streaming services (if not the largest) and it is not even included in their data. That is a huge hole in that number.

You are referring to Netflix and it can be expected that their overseas #s are way up and their USA numbers are flattening. In the USA, they face growing competition from everyone from Google, ATT, Hulu, SlingTV, HBO, Showtime, Disney, etc. The number of players in the streaming market will continue to grow because that is where people are and many are headed. The writing is already dry on the wall.

As you mentioned, Netflix isn't making huge profits, but it is irrelevant to this conversation. The fact is that streaming is growing and Netflix is obviously investing in their own content to try to stay unique in a growing market rather than just taking short term profits and parking them in an offshore bank account.

As I said, it is too early to tell who will come out on top in this market in the long run. However, it is easy to see that the market is growing.

 

I own over 15,000 CDs and LPs. I do not love my library. Its physical size is like an albatross I have to move around. I can’t sell it. CDs are almost worthless. My LPs have all been played a lot and are not in mint condition.

My sole heir wants nothing to do with my collection. I wish I had been able to stream since 1970 when I started buying my collection. I would not have bought my collection.

 

But then wouldn't you have still spent a fortune?

 

Unless he got the CDs at deep discounts, the amount spent just on the music side would not be close. If he spent an average of $10 a CD, he would have spent $150,000 on music. You would have to live a really, really long life to get anywhere close to that with streaming.

 

My Spotify premium is $120 a year. I have spent many, many, MANY times more than that every year from 1970 to the present on my collection.

 

Yeah, and I can go the other direction. There are also independent sellers and distributors that don't report in their numbers either. Anywhere from truck stops to small chain stores....yada yada.

Where we disagree is how much that number means. I say almost a 50/50 split is pitiful, because renters should be much higher. Back in the VHS days, no one, and I mean no one bought video tape until the prices came down around the time of Forrest Gump. The facts are that video tape would cost anywhere from 50 to 90 dollars for a premium title, and adjust for inflation, it isn't even close bud.

People have way more disposable income for entertainment and the rise of the DVD sales came from the death of the rentals. So obviously you are going to see a downward trend, which is why you have the declines that you see. DVD was a special circumstance that continues to make the "death of physical media" flag waving so hip and cool. Although I think it is cool to laugh about it because it ain't happening.

What is dry on the wall, that streaming is replacing physical media? When they crack 75% then will talk.

The entire entertainment market has grown (though it is soon going to change). How is the profits not relevant? If it takes 10 times the amount of sales to match what bluray brings in, doesn't that make the numbers just a little skewed?

Great, I sell 6 billion subscriptions and actually pay the companies that are making the blurays that I am competing against?? Yeah real smart move there.

Meanwhile companies like Universal or Disney make their own releases, sell them at 1/3 the rate, but keep most of the profits. And streaming is king? Only to renters. The people that care about quality, buy, and they buy the majority of the profits that are had.

As for the value of streaming, to each his own. I would rather have my collection than 95% of what is on Netflix. The majority of what I watch isn't from my private collections was never on there, and what is on there is in terrible quality. Same with Youtube, Amazon Prime (yes I am squarely looking at your terrible quality music to go with your low quality "high def"). Hell even the so called 4K has abysmal bit rates to pair with their meager availability of premium movies. It is all budget licenses and the worst part is that all of them continue to shrink as proprietary rights take hold.

Netflix and company are going the way of finding good content on youtube. The facts are that people are tired of giving their stuff away for free.

Actually to beat this further. So Netflix has about 104 million subscribers. That generates about 832 million based on a 8 dollar streaming cost. Obviously I am simplifying here, but this is just to make a point.

So lets say you take Beauty and the Beast that sells 2.5 blurays. According to DEG it generated 52.8 million in revenue. So that is a 21 times increase vs 8....hell lets make it the 12 times cost of Netflix premium plan.

You see where I am going? This is one bluray release without any DVD sales factored in and yet I haven't even spoke of profits.

 

I usually stream to own.

 

This is exactly the situation I am trying to avoid.

I have perhaps 1500 CD's / LP's combined at this point, with CD's probably being the majority of that number. And of those 1500 at least 70% are probably ripped to digital in some fashion. The eventual goal is to cull the physical presence down to something I can carry in the backseat of my car. Everything else I'll just stream, be it from a music service or my own digital collection.

Have some years to go I hope, before this becomes a bigger issue for me. For example if I need to move to a smaller home.