[James2001]

There really are so many advantages to physical media that it really is a shame it's dying. Getting content in the proper frame rate, no chance of it suddenly vanishing or being replaced by edited versions as standards or circumstances change or finding subscription prices rising or having to take out a subscription to another service to keep watching. Yes streaming is incredibly convenient, doesn't take up shelf space and likely saves a lot of money for the companies over physical distribution, but it has enough downsides to make it extremely unfortunate that it seems to be becoming a replacement rather than a complement.

Digital downloads also suffer from most of the same problems. While unlike with streaming the content of the file you have isn't going to change on the whims of the distrubutor, you still have the issue of 50/60i content rarely being handled properly, the limitation of how many devices you can play it on before the DRM says no and that said DRM licences that can be pulled in an instant, therefore turning it into a useless load of 0s and 1s taking up space on your hard drive (the BBC Store- which I recently saw a promo for when rewatching a BBC Blu-Ray telling us how wonderful it was- being a very high profile example) still make it a totally unsatisfactory alternative. And DRM-free downloads very unlikely because of how easy it would make piracy.

I do think some of the recent high profile content purges will have some people reassessing physical media vs streaming (especially when not too long back we were told that services like Disney+ and HBO Max actually owning most of their content rather than licencing it in made unlikely much content would vanish), but sadly I can't see it coming back to the extent it used to.