Key Takeaways
- Your favorite show may not always be available on streaming services due to licensing agreements.
- Physical copies provide better quality and often include extras and special features.
- Displaying physical copies of your favorite shows can be a conversation starter and a way to ensure entertainment during outages.
If you really love a show that’s streaming on one of your subscription services, don’t let it fade away. Grab the opportunity to buy it on DVD or Blu-ray, or you may never get to enjoy it again.
Your Show Won’t Be Streaming Forever
There are thousands of shows streaming across dozens of services, but these shows are almost always in rotation. As their licensing periods close, the current service may choose not to renew the deal and no one else may be interested. Just like that, your show is nowhere to be found. Who can forget when King of the Hill left Netflix and fans were left in limbo until it was eventually picked up by Hulu?
Either way, unless it’s a show that’s owned by the streaming service, it’s always going to be an open question whether anyone wants to pay to provide access to it, and the more obscure the show you like, or the less popular it becomes, the bigger the chances it’s going bye-bye.
You Might Not Be Watching the Best Version
Despite advances in streaming compression and faster internet, online video still doesn’t hold a candle to the quality of disc-based media. If you want to watch the best looking and sounding version of your favorite show, then you want to watch the version mastered for DVD or Blu-ray. You’ll get the best possible quality, with perfect consistency. It’s easy to think that the quality you get from streaming is good enough, but I think that’s often because people have forgotten how good Blu-rays or even DVDs look.
One big gap in the content offered by streaming services is a lack of extras and special features. You do get extras with some digital movies and shows you buy outright from outlets like Apple TV, but even then it’s not always the full gamut you get on a DVD or Blu-ray disc. If you really love a show, then you owe it to yourself to see a little more of what happened behind the scenes.
You Can Display Your Love for Your Favorite Shows
One of the saddest consequences of the advent of all-you-can-eat streaming services, is the loss of personal media collections. In the old days, when you visited someone’s house, their VHS collection very quickly told you what sort of person you were dealing with. Conversations and even friendships are easy to start when you can get so much info on someone just by glancing at their shelves.
Now wouldn’t you like to have a little of that back in your life? If you buy your very favorite show on disc, and put it up where people can see it, you’re not just getting a copy of your show. You’re getting a talking piece and some nice decor all rolled into one.
You Never Know When a Rainy Day Will Come
Online streaming services depend on a lot of systems working, just so you can press a button on your remote and have your program start a few seconds later. If an outage has never happened to you, then it’s only a matter of time until the power, internet, or the service itself goes down. Buying your favorite shows on disc ensures that when those rainy days come you still have a way to entertain yourself.
I don’t know about you, but I have a lifelong love for certain TV shows, and I’ve made it my mission to have hard copies of at least the most important ones. In some cases it’s a race against time, as I don’t know for how long those discs will remain available, but every month that passes I try to build that collection just a little more.
