Comparing Digital Physical Media

18 June 2024

I was recently inspired to write this post by Ted Kutina's video "The Importance of Real Things", where he talks about why someone might prefer physical media over digital streaming and downloads. He compares books to e-books and CDs/DVDs to Spotify/Netflix, and it's a topic that I think many have begun to seriously grapple with for themselves recently. I want to compare the various options that exist for media consumption, starting from the least user-healthy, to the most user- and socially-healthy.

intro: what is the status quo As it stands, the user of the modern web has come to accept some harmful terms of service, generally speaking, in order to live and consume per the status quo. In the early 2010s, people broadly realized that the cable companies were screwing them for their ridiculously priced channel packages. Suddenly, services like Netflix started becoming much more popular. Around the same time, after the iPod revolution crossed into its silver years, Spotify was seen as the up-and-coming sensible way to listen to all the music you could ever want, immediately available to you, for a monthly fee. Spotify and Netflix work the same way, on a basic level: The platform deals with content rights and royalties between distribution or production companies, and the user can consume anything they want for a small monthly fee. That sounds fine at first, but what happens when the rights holders decide that a particular movie or series should be removed from Netflix -- what if it was a show you really liked? Not much, basically. The customer has no control over what content they have access to, that they pay for and expect to get. Setting that aside, you accept that Netflix can't make a deal with everyone, and some media companies wanted their piece of the pie, so then in the mid-late 2010s we saw the rise of new streaming platforms, like Disney+, Peacock, Crave, Paramount Plus, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and probably many more. Now how do you navigate this landscape? You want to watch a show that's on one network's streaming service, so you pay the $5-10 for a month and watch it. But another show catches your eye and you start to watch that. Suddenly Disney+ seems like good value for your money. Or at least it's got that show you like. And HBO Max is good too, they have those movies and stuff that make you feel smart and cool. What's another $5? Keep that up, and you'll be paying more than you did with cable TV (Minus the ads (Not really)).

Point 1. Longevity of data

• physical things last longer than digital things, so long as ...

Point 2

• NAS storage, using a computer at home just for storage, an extremely useful, oft-forgotten, and culturally overlooked appliance key to proper data/media management. Think about it, do you put your books in the same bin as your files, pictures, movies and music at home? or does each thing have its own shelf. we need to move away from the "all my things are on my desktop/this one trusty USB stick/this one old WD Passport" to proper, tried-and-true storage solutions that cost a fair bit up front, but are the only sane choice in the long term.

Point 3

• Cost My "homelab" setup - a minimally viable product (disclaimer: NO BACKUP, NO LONG-TERM SECURITY)

  • NAS SERVER: HP Z420 Workstation - $120 CAD
  • STORAGE: 2x4TB WD Red Plus - $115 CAD each
  • OS: TrueNAS - $0
  • SERVER MACHINE: HP Compaq 8000 Elite USDT PC - unknown but it's very old, prob ~$80 CAD at the time.
  • TOTAL - About $430 CAD you don't need the highest end performance and you don't need the newest processors for a lot of the things we want to do. hosting a couple web servers that serve flacs and image files to just over one client is easy. If it's just for you (or more rarely, you and your friends/family), there will rarely be concurrent streaming and you will rarely face any traffic bottlenecks. Once you get over the initial cost of the hardware, and taking into account the infrequent but regular costs of upgrading/replacing hard drives, you stand to save a lot of money.

  Spotify Premium Individual - $10.99 CAD/mo Netflix Standard HD Plan - $16.49 CAD/mo

  My family never really had a streaming subscription, except for very early on in the Netflix heyday, back when it was subversive; my dad prefered to torrent the movies we watched, or later on when I was in high school, we would use Kodi plugins and then Stremio. I quickly grew to dislike those options, for reasons I'll get into later. But I've had and paid for Spotify for about 7 years now, so let's add all this up and compare how much everything costs.

  "Traditional" Streaming service setup (the cordcutter's special): (Spotify + Netflix)

  • price The DIY NAS+Media Servers (plex/jellyfin et al.):
  • initial buy-in: ~$500
  • recurring costs:
    • hard drive replacement: 2 new, larger hard drives, every 4 years, (to keep up with data usage and hard drive health etc): a generous $500 Now, while that initial $500 on a new nas and server setup may seem daunting, in just over 18 months, you would have paid the same amount of money for Netflix and Spotify. Except the music and movies are yours to keep and take care of, not theirs. in 10 years time, the streaming companies would have extorted almost $3300 from you, not considering that they raise prices every 3 years. meanwhile, your nas will be chugging along just the same as before, having only cost you, after 2 hard drive upgrades, $1500 cad. Keep in mind that on your NAS you can host and store whatever you want, i have manga, anime, audiobooks, and ebooks. how much money would i need to pay Crunchyroll, Shonen Jump, Audible, Amazon to access legal digital versions of these products that I can get for free? Some, I can even source from my library, and copy without circumventing DRM. What I mean is that by putting in some effort into gaining control over your own experiences, you open more doors for yourself, at minimal cost

Point 4 - lookmovie.to and illegal streaming sites

Point 5 - having infinite choice (illusion of choice/decision paralysis => dependence on algorithm making choices for us) vs small but loved collection of things that we curate for ourselves

Point 6 - this all sounds incredibly expensive and a headache waiting to happen! i just wanted to listen to my old CDs!!! or: why physical is better than digital

Point 7 - what about the libraries?

Point 8 - whats better: listening to music on your own on spotify, and crying when it's taken away by the rights holder, with no actual recourse? or buying a cd, listening to it until you're tired of it, and selling it to a music store/giving it to your friend/your kid - what's better, buying books new from indigo, where they only sell the pulpiest fiction, and the least helpful self-help books, or at the second-hand book shop, where their collection is vast and varied, the books are pre-owned, so no paper is wasted, there may be notes in the margins or signs of someone else's thinking and interpretations, there is interaction with and through the text. is that worth losing when we sign up for a kindle subscription? (kobo and nook devices are easier to just use as e-readers, but the social argument still stands) - better yet, why not get books, audiobooks, ebooks, newspapers, magazines, tv shows, movies, CDs, video games, musical instruments, power tools at the library?! they buy them so YOU can use them, so lets USE THEM! - although we should always pirate ebooks because the publishers charge libraries disgusting amounts of money to download adobe epubs (if at all, recently more books are becoming web-reader exclusive. no downloads, no portability, just electron garbage.)