The end of physical media is neigh


Very sad news for me personally.  Honestly this struck me as hard or harder than hearing about the death of a beloved artist.   With the advent of machine learning and AI controlling our music listening we are becoming a world without any control at all over our music or movie culture.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/lg-stops-making-blu-ray-players-marking-the-end-of-an-era-limited-units-remain-while-inventory-lasts

erik_squires

Not surprising Blu-ray is going away.  With CDs there will maybe be enough die hard audiophiles to keep the market afloat because they think it sounds better.  My take is that streaming can sound as good or better than CDs (plus you get hi res in streaming), but it takes a lot more effort to optimize versus just buying a high quality transport and DAC and being done.  I get it.  But with movies, does anyone really care that much if streaming movies isn’t quite as good as Blu-ray?  I’d say 95% of the population couldn’t give a crap and the convenience of streaming overwhelms any quality differences.  It’s just not as important when it comes to movies, hence the demise of Blu-ray.  
 

I will say a major takeaway from this that I did not know was that I always assumed if you bought/downloaded music you owned it but apparently you do not and stuff you bought can still be yanked from you.  That’s just flat-out wrong and scary.  You don’t own the music but rather just the right to play the music.  That was new for me and quite concerning.  It’s a brave/scary new world.  I’m not up on downloading but is it possible to ultimately download the music to a server?  I’d think then you’d have it forever but not sure how that works.  Like, if you buy something from Qobuz, can you ultimately download it to your own personal server?  I’m admittedly ignorant in these things.  Still scary. 

love having lots of LPs, and CDs and DVDs and books and streaming...lots of good DVD players out there...just bought a Panasonic Blu-Ray and it's terrific...and wifi was down here last night...

 

Maybe i should start selling off my BlueRay collection now before you cann't buy a player for them anymore. 

@glennewdick , The Sony Playstation 5 is a good blu-ray player. All the gamer dudes would need to go full digital before the gaming consoles stop having a blu-ray drive in them.

Part of the reason I haven't added music streaming is the result of my experience with movie streaming.  No matter how many subscriptions you have you'll never have access to everything you want.  And that's assuming you're willing to take the time to search.

BTW, I still have my laserdiscs and three (3) laserdisc players.  Which means I have to keep at least one television with legacy video inputs.  Life is so hard!

I am sure that the GenZ person who cleans out my space. Is going to get a lot more excited pulling the INNUOS instead of 24 IKEA crates of vinyl albums. technology can be a cruel mistress, but we signed the dotted line. And until someone can convince me that what I listen to is a bad thing  I’m enjoying the boat ride