Most people consume media in a disposable method, despite the fact they want to own it.
Interesting conversation on Twitter this weekend with my new friend HarryAllen, as I’m discussing how I consume my media, in this particular case I’m watching the final season of Battlestar Galactica, season 4. Some in Twitter say they’d prefer to buy the DVD set, where I prefer to have it on demand, and not own or have to manage any plastic.
A few reasons why I think owning physical media (DVDs, CDs) is antiquated:
- 1) I’m impatient, I want it, when I want it.
- 2) Owning media takes up space
- 3) It reminds me of the 80s and 90s when my friends would buy shelves and shelves of VHS tapes –DVDs will be antiquated, as new formats are already coming around beyond Blu-Ray.
- 4) Owning media is a liability: It depreciates over time, can be a challenge and a headache to sell
- 5) It’s bad for the environment: If there’s anything the world needs less of it’s forged plastic disks and equally bad for the environment containers.
Friends and family of mine like to own media libraries, but I question exactly how many times they watch it after buying it. Perhaps it’s a Western mentality, the desire to ‘own’ and have collections of content.
So what’s the future? I prefer to buy via iTunes, or Amazon music (DRM free), or stream the shows live from the web, even Netflix offers on demand via the web –you don’t have to open the mailbox. Once I buy it, I can always download it again in the future, and at some point, most media becomes free in order to give it a second life.
This isn’t just about TV or movies, but applies to my CD collection too –I will never willingfuly buy a CD again if I can get it on demand. Could this apply to books with the new Amazon Kindle? Maybe, yet I think it’s one of the few types of media that will still retain it’s original form –sometimes it’s nice to unplug.
Take my kid sister, who’s visiting at my house for our Mother’s day dinner, she streams content online, downloads it from the internet, and has an iPod. I think looking at Generation Y is a clue to what is to come, media will represent the culture it’s providing for: portable, mobile, interconnected, interactive and on-demand.
To me, owning physical is the old way, the new way is relying on the network.
Would love to hear what you think.
“To me, owning physical is the old way, the new way is relying on the network”
Working in historical maps – 1600 up to 1900 – One can appreciate how effective the preservation of the “old way” is. Hopefully the network will be there, available to us all when we need it, right? Then again, Battlestar Galactica is something very important for humanity 😉
I agree with you that the world is getting there — but I think that we are not there yet. As you correctly point out, we are at a stage where most things (music, movies, info etc.) have morphed to the on-demand model. However, until folks completely ‘trust’ the reliability, availability, and convenience of the digital media/net we are always going to have a market for the physical media — either to store ‘favorites’, or for critical stuff at work/home, or the medical field where legalaties mandate storage for a certain time.
absolutely – though I expect that the “transition” will take quite a bit longer than you think – not just because of mindset/”old habits die hard” but because the missing pieces and “minor” drawbacks of the interim/transitional solutions aren’t minor, at least relative to mass adoption. They will get solved, I agree, but until they do the masses won’t change, and until the “masses” change, the media industry will resist it IMO.
There is in fact a disturbing development to see norwegian kids consume more and more “stuff” each year, and actually wanting the technological divices instead.
Norway is rich. Even poor families can afford “stuff” for their kids. And families drown in cheap toys, dvd’s, chlothes etc.
When we can afford quality devices that gives us a cheap access to movies, books and alle the latest music, -Why don’t we buy it?
Our parent generation were brought up learning to take good care of everything, and re-use of possible. But our stores are filled with cheap trendy stuff, and the majority buy what they want, whenever they want.
We are thaught not to spend to much money, and that exencive stuff are “show-off”. Many are still anti-american in our society. Blaming americans for the decades of consumer trends.
But guess what? WE ARE THE RICH ONES! We are unwise spenders.
There is probably no other country on earth where there is such a majority of inhabitants able to pick and choose like they want to. No country with equal rights for emloyees, possibilities for kids, and freedom of choice to do and be whatever we want. We CAN afford to be both trendy and environmently friendly. There should be less spending on cheap garbage. Buy less stuff, but quality stuff. These are the lessons to be thought.
But we still cant buy it all. Because, we are certainly rich, but the products aren’t here for us. We have iTunes, but can’t buy a movie there. Or download the latest episode of whatever we watch on TV. So we are still stuck to buying the physical “stuff” or copy illigeal like every kid at our daughters schools are doing.
There is some will, still not a lot. But if there is a choice, and some start, there will certainly be a movement here as well.
I don’t own a TV. But I look forward to the day I can buy and watch my favorites from iTunes and watch it on my imac. Still I can’t.
Get the possibilities out there. The kids will change the trends, -like they always have. Just make it possible.
A little late to the party, but … maybe you want to read Nick Carr’s take: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/04/clutter.php
The essential point is that the medium shapes the both message and how we think about and around it. And that’s why, were the book to be digitized, it would no longer be the book, but something else. Probably shorter, probably more superficial. Something with a lot short attetion span. Something like a blog?
Now what was I saying?
Personally, I prefer physical media to intangible downloads. But then I read newspapers and I was a record collector…I appreciate the packaging & design along with the content. A computer file just seems functional and not artistic. I want something I can hold in my hands.
As far as environmental concerns, maybe the solution is not to eliminate physical media but to recycle it and reduce consumption. I mean, do people really need hundreds or thousands of DVDs?
This issue blurs across age group categories as does general consumer behavior. For some age groups, content defines who they are (younger more so than older). When I was young (35 years ago), I would carry around my baseball cards because that was a statement for my young life trying to broadcast something to anyone that cared. (No one really did.) Today, kids love to show you who is on their iPod. The music (and movies, TV shows) define an element of them. For some older generations, a wall of CDs or DVDs in their family room define them. This behavior has ramifications on physical vs on-demand.
Agree with all of your points here – only caveat I see is for a family with kids. Especially little ones who have a tendency to watch “Monsters, Inc” or “The Bee Movie” 40-50 times over their lifetime. In that case, owning the DVD makes sense.
Digital media is the ultimate commodity in our consumerist culture. Used and consumed and disposed of at a whim and without a trace.
It is interesting to consider this trend for the (nanotechnology-enabled) future, when EVERY product is reduced to digital media files that can be streamed to your 3D printer for assembly on demand.
Might you not be writing a similar post Jeremiah, in 25 years, where you bemoan people’s antiquidated ideals of owning any physical products, including their clothes – when you yourself prefer to print whatever suit you want in the mornings and dispose of it in the evenings to be recycled into something new the following day?
First, I think it’s very hard to discuss this subject regardless of our own generation/experiment/feelings. I’m 35, records have been an essential part of my life (a la ‘High Fidelity’) and I can’t imagine living in a purely dematerialized musical environment. Books are not only information printed on paper: they are objects. They are beautiful, appealing, ugly, heavy, soft, whatever… You carry them around, fold them, lend them, note them. It’s not just a matter of owing and knowing the content.
But if we go beyond our physical/sentimental relationships with objects, what must digital content achieve to fully rival physical supports:
* securing the content: you can lose a book in your apartment, but you’re most likely to crash your HD
* improving the experience: owning a CD is not just being able to listen to it, it’s also being part of a group: “I’m the kind of person who thinks David Bowie is cool”, or “I’m a young rebel with punk ideals”. Downloads can hardly give you those feelings.
* be fully open and perennial: we can read books from 300 years ago, which is unvaluable for historians. In 300 years time, will we be able to read epub?
This is the three main challenges I see. Interestingly enough, they are not on the same level:
* security is a distribution issue (licensing, replacement of lost files, etc.)
* experience is an edition issue (how to package immaterial things? that’s an interesting challenge. spend time on this, labels, not on chasing pirates)
* openness and perenniality is a technology issue (but whatever comes out, it will never be as robust and ubiquitous as ink and paper).
This is my relections for today. I hop it adds a bit to the interesting first post and the following commentaries.
Neither form of media storage is perfect, whether owning them on a circular piece of material, or getting it off the web when you need it. The media could break for some careless reason, and your network connection could falter.
It won’t be ideal, until we can compress and store digital content within our bodies, and when we have internal software to manage all of those files. At that point, we can simply ‘carry around’ any media which we think will be in demand by our whim in the near future. For any new media, we can pull those down off the net, and store them until we need them no longer.
Another aspect of this, is that the nature of entertainment is going to change drastically, when we have fully immersive virtual reality. Given a choice between watching James Bond defeat the enemy, or virtually BEing Bond, which would one choose?
DVDs will be obsolete in the near to medium term. But entertainment media in general will no longer be necessary, sometime beyond that.
My answer to your question is — it depends.
I’m speaking as a digital immigrant so media “ownership” used to be the only option. Personally, I prefer a middle road, i.e. to borrow books from the library over purchase, because, unless they are reference works, I read/ assimilate what I can and then pass them on to others. Similarly I rent DVD from Blockbuster because rare is the movie I watch more than once.
Downloading to portable devices is brilliant in that it reflects and compliments our untethered current existence. Music and short blogs work well in this format. If you have to contemplate the content then a more permanent media would be preferable.
Re: Permanency — We haven’t been using servers to store data on long enough to know what the actual life span of unbacked up data really is — I mean the Dead Sea Scrolls stood the test of time in the desert, but are fairly unique. Other documents exist for over 500 years in the right environment. Can we extrapolate that disc held data will do the same? I question anyone with a definite answer, because how could they possibly know?
I can certainly agree with the environmental aspects of owning media, goes for any other product. Its very interesting to ponder what our future will look like with both physical and digital media. I think it will be a combination of both. Having the choice is one of our most (over)enjoyed qualities of living in the West. Why do people still go to the video store and rent DVD’s? Its a cultural experience. People like to get out and wander around even if to leave empty handed. You can’t duplicate that social experience online. How do we make that better? I would like to see my own database stored in a cloud whereby I could have access to any movie that I’ve purchased/rented that would allow me to rate/comment on it because how many movies have you rented, forgotten to bring back, pay a late fee just to realize that the movie, well, sucked. Maybe its a combination of walking (not driving) to the movie store, bringing your own personalized BluRay (or hologram, flash drive etc) disk, pick your movie and have the clerk copy the movie to your disk. The cover changes images to reflect the movie and you walk out with you physical/digital media device. It you wished to keep a copy of it, pay your owner fee, you burn the disk, print off the label and there you have it. It plays on your encoded player for a certain period of time with the ability to renew it through your player (Blockbuster, Rogers are you listening?). That would reduce a large collection of media, packaging, shipping etc. Good for the environment, yes. Good for collectors, yes. Good for digital collectors, yes.
I don’t think its a matter of you will only have one or the other, but choice. Something we take for granted and are very fortunate enough to have every day!
Good topic Jeremiah!
I agree with not having tons of traditional media clouding your space however, sometimes I like to have things to grasp and call my own. Call me old fashioned but I have taken a liking to both. Sure I have my feed demon and twitter. But I still ordered extra copies of the newspaper edition that declared Obama president. Sometimes buying an item you want then and there or from a certain place or event holds a certain nostalgia for me. I enjoy books from friends that were picked out for me. I still buy cds from concerts and music festivals. I do use i tunes to buy music but if I really respect the artist I go out and buy the cd as well. Also, many of the next gen have ipods etc but as far as books and kindle in learning institutions go, will we buy every student a laptop or kindle? Will we bitch about having to pay higher taxes to give students these tools? I still like printed pictures and the way my fiancee’s family has written and e media archive and pictures from when his grandfathers battles from casablanca to anzio. There are some things that need to be preserved. I have several portable hard drives, a blackberry, 3 computers and rely heavily on technology. However, I hope that “archaic media” doesn’t go extinct any time soon.
The claim that digital streaming will replace digital storage is nonsense. In an ideal world of unlimited bandwidth, it still makes no sense for me to stream my favorite album every single time I want to listen to it. As the price of local storage (ie, flash drives) drops to nothing, it will be even more appealing for me to store things locally.
Even the theoretical future world of vast electronic resources will care about resource management. We’ll want that bandwidth for temporary and dynamic content, just like we do now.
A part of the reason for those shelves of DVDs, CDs, books etc is affiliation. They demonstrate who you are in the same way as the car you drive. A load of data on a hard disk somewhere or on a server in the rocky mountains doesn’t tell visitors that you are a diehard fan of Heroes. And there’s only so much wall space for posters.
Also, the technology is still seriously flaky. Upgrading the anti-virus on my PC at home has just stopped it from booting. Admittedly that’s partly a Microsoftness but as other devices are becoming ubiquitous their complexity is increasing and, with it, vulnerability and likelihood of attack.
Both these issues will be resolved over time but, until they are, I can still see mileage in physical media.
Coming in late here but I agree with Frank Meeuwsen and I think he’s made a good point as to why we may gravitate towards a CD, or book for example as “It just feels better. More human.”
When you read a book or magazine, the experience extends not only to the words on the page, but the hands (holding and turning/flicking pages), smell (that old book smell, or high gloss pages and embossing in magazines).
You can play a rollercoaster game on XBox but nothing will compare to the sight, sound and feeling as your body experiences the real thing.
I came to the same conclusion about CDs a long time ago and now buy CDs only when I cannot download the files from the Net. I still own the copies, however, locally. I have no desire to depend upon the flakiness of the Net for my entertainment, and that’s probably why I still purchase DVDs (or Blu-ray) as well. If I want to order Season Four of The Pretender, I don’t have the storage for it on my Windows box, or on any other medium that I own, such as my DVR. Depending upon the Net in my rural location for 24/7 download is just plain foolish. So DVD/Blu-ray it is.
Neither have I given up the hardcover book habit. I have over a thousand books (and counting) and they’re my proudest possessions. Quite frankly, reading on an electronic device frightens me. Can you say “eyestrain extreme?” I hear that the Kindle is not so bad, but in its case, the price, both for the book and the device, is prohibitive.
So the technology is not yet there for a complete conversion to electronica, and even when it is, there are some areas where technology will never push out what already exists (and here I’m thinking of books).
Just curious:
You mention the western attitude of possession in a pejorative way more than once. Yet your #1 reason for antiquating physical media is:
“I™m impatient, I want it, when I want it.”
I find that attitude as harmful to society as the need for material gains.
Just a thought.
“As a 23 year old, I can tell you about how I consume and how my friends do (20-25 year olds). ”
Yes, and as a 44 year old I can guarantee you that as you age, you consume your entertainment in a very different way.
That’s been the problem with the whole “physical media is dead” myth. The assumption is that 20 year olds will be relating to their entertainment the same way decade after decade. True for some but the majority.
Also, considering all the people on the planet who have cognitive difficulty due to age or disability, nothing can top press-and-play.
Physical media ain™t going anywhere.
I prefer physical media. I know that when I buy a DVD, I can now rely on being able to watch it whenever I want, as often as I want, without further investment. Streaming is great for some content, especially when I want to see something right now and I don't have the DVD, but quality is usually inferior, often painfully so, and network problems frequently cause me to lose the option of streaming. Also, I fear that without physical copies, we are heading toward a scenario in which I have to pay a fee every time I want to view a film. This probably won't be true for all content, but I fear that it will be for more obscure, less popular titles, which is what I often prefer.
I prefer physical media. I know that when I buy a DVD, I can now rely on being able to watch it whenever I want, as often as I want, without further investment. Streaming is great for some content, especially when I want to see something right now and I don't have the DVD, but quality is usually inferior, often painfully so, and network problems frequently cause me to lose the option of streaming. Also, I fear that without physical copies, we are heading toward a scenario in which I have to pay a fee every time I want to view a film. This probably won't be true for all content, but I fear that it will be for more obscure, less popular titles, which is what I often prefer.
True, I agree that books are going to be the one stalwart in the trend of digitizing media, but that’s partially because the format in which we consume books as mass media has always been different than that in which we consume music and movies. For music and movies, the method of “owning” them may differ widely between people who choose to collect DVD’s, those who download onto their hardrive, or those who just choose streaming, but the way we CONSUME them is fundamentally the same as it ever was: in front of a screen. When we’re talking about physical books vs ebooks, the way the two are consumed is radically different (paper v screen) and I think it will be this inability of many to accept books as an electronic media that will let physical books continue to be a viable product for many years.