Does anyone here have a digital movie collection?

[ThaVirus]

In general I’ve leaned on streaming services to watch movies, but lately I’ve found that a particular movie I want to watch is not on any of the services I pay for. That gets frustrating.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for Blu-Ray and disc deals but I find the physical media is cumbersome. Having to change discs depending on what you want to watch, storage space, etc. I’m not a fan.

I bought a few movies recently (physical copies) and they came with digital codes as well. I redeemed them and set up my MoviesAnywhere account and now I’m kind of thinking that a digital collection may be exactly what I’m looking for. The issue is, I’ve heard horror stories of digital licenses just being a “lease”. Basically, you can buy a right to the digital license for whatever movie through the host, but if they just so happen to choose to stop hosting it, you will lose the movie and there’s really nothing that can be done to prevent it.

I say all this to ask, has anyone actually encountered that sort of issue or is it totally overblown?

[lcarus]

I have about 8 TB full of movies and shows and stuff. I've collected a bunch of stuff over the years. It sucks that about 99% of the time I think "Oh I'd like to see this movie", Netflix or whatever site you're subscribed to doesn't have it. Now there's a streaming site for every single distributor and even then they don't have everything.

The only thing I almost always stay subscribed to is Shudder. Mainly for the Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs. But they have a lot of horror movies and shows for a good price.

[ThaVirus]

Originally Posted by lcarus

I have about 8 TB full of movies and shows and stuff. I've collected a bunch of stuff over the years.

Yep, we’ve got Amazon Prime, Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max and oftentimes I still can’t find a particular movie that pops in my head. That is very annoying.

But it sounds like you’ve got the digital copies saved on a hard drive. Where do you get the movies?

Do you have any experience buying digital movies from retailers like iTunes, Microsoft, Prime Video, etc.?

[notorious]

Originally Posted by lcarus

The only thing I almost always stay subscribed to is Shudder. Mainly for the Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs. But they have a lot of horror movies and shows for a good price.

Hmmm. I'm going to check this out. Loved Joe Bob back in the late 90s.

[DCTwister]

Yeah if you have movies on iTunes or whatever, you only have a subscription to watch those movies during the term of your subscription, nothing more. You don’t own the movies. If that service goes away, you lose access.

The only way around this really is to rip the movies from Blu-ray/DVD onto your hard drive. About 10 years ago I went about doing this. Seemed like a good idea at the time, although a big pain in the ass. Of course I never really used them much and defaulted to just watching / buying on iTunes / Netflix or whatever. Think of it this way - most movies are pretty fungible anyway. You will watch them a few times and never again in reality. If you “buy” on iTunes that probably covers you for a few times you will watch it in your lifetime. Ripping to hard drive is simply not worth the trouble and you would have had to buy the Blu-rays or DVDs anyway.

[Fish]

Man, I used to spend so much time gathering and organizing media collections. Movies, TV, music. I had apps like Couch Potato that would routinely scan for and download new media when it was released. I'd format the names, download artwork, and organize it all.

Then Amazon did their online music thing where they would allow you to upload any music you had whether it was pirated or not, and it would host all of it online, which I could access from anywhere on just about any device. Which worked so well it completely broke my OCD media routine.

Amazon has since abandoned the free music upload collection ability(), but I'm pretty much 99% online streaming at this point. I still have my collection on my computer, but it's getting very dated at this point. If society ever completely collapsed, I'd still have local access to a pretty sweet collection of 90's-2010's movies/TV/music. So, I got that going for me..

[BigRichard]

I have several TBs of movie and tv data. I haven't broken it out in a while but I also have two large disk binders stocked full of DVD I copied. I am guessing there is a 200 movies in there from probably 10-15 years ago.