Personally, with family who earns living from entertainment industry, I try to subscribe to some services… but I also download it and just stream locally. People get paid, but in 20 years I still have taken care of my needs.
That means old libraries start to contain a jumble of formats and encodings. The maintenance of this can be a pain.
I noticed this first with Apple TV+ where some films were getting provided in HD or HD/3D. If you have to chose between their perfect audio and video or whatever you have in your library its probably going to be what they offer.
I suspect that Apple (as an example) is using media quality and its features, (spatial audio, their immersive video) in part to prop up people wanting to pay for streaming content. It has to not only be more convenient to stream, but consistently beat the socks off what's easily available via torrenting.
Torrent networks and media players might catch up to start including this stuff and making playback as easy as streaming services' native video players (again I am focusing on Apple TV, particularly Apple TV app on Vision Pro as an example) but as far as I can see its not there yet.
I don't think we're looking at only audio and video quality increases but accommodation of variants on 3D, including media that was previously purely 2D reworked for new ways of displaying content with greater perspective that makes viewing more immersive on a deep bench of legacy content.
I honestly don't understand, do you generally just add media to a larger and larger hard drive and then transfer it every couple years to a new one?
It can be made into a pipeline where it's exactly like subscribing to a conventional service.. you just 'pay' with maintenance/curation.
No A/B testing, price hikes, or platform strong-arming. Well worth it in my opinion. Avoids all kinds of whims from publishers/co.
Not much to understand, it's exactly how you're describing, except maybe with the addition of occasionally encrypting a bunch of it and storing it offsite/cloud-based somewhere so that the 3-2-1 backup strategy is in play.
Netflix's premium plan is $23/mo, a 6TB WD Black HDD is $125 on Amazon, meaning roughly every 5 months for the same price of a Netflix premium subscription, I can increase my storage capacity by 6TB, with some minor added cost of needing the space to use that extra drive, and the power usage costs. And at the end of the day, if I stop paying Netflix my access to all that content goes away; As long as I have sufficient backups, that won't happen with my offline media collection.
Plex’s PS5 app stutters on all my content unless I dumb it down to a relatively low bitrate and 1080p max. Subtitles are a gamble.
