Yep! It's how I learned about that Poop Cruise documentary. Or Tiger King. Or all the trash Isekai.

Things I would never walk into a store and just outright buy them. And if I did, it would be like $10-50 bucks, the price of the subscription.

I'm happy to favour things they are just not giving me a convenient way to give them money.

Except I didn't actually say that. I said that going to a physical location and getting a physical disk and then driving all the way back home is considerably less convenient than streaming content.

not everyone lives in countries with local libraries that have videos

Is MakeMKV still around?

I don't really think men look back anymore nowadays

Very much, yes.

I guess it's not technically a new movie, but I just bought the 4k blu ray rerelease of Dark City that came out this year. So there are still some new releases in the format.

While not a gurantee, they are not VC-founded which helps a lot.

There is something very satisfying about opening up a movie DVD box or game DVD box. You see all these artworks and especially for games, guides !

use libraries! they are great.

I could not get jellyfish to work

And they're partly creator owned, but I didn't see anyone claiming that creators owned more than 50% of the share or the voting rights, so it's not impossible that it gets bought and enshittified

I think progress by definition is good. Change is not always good. Not all change is progress.

It's almost nostalgic for me.

I get that this isn't an option for everyone. Part of why I wrote it in such big text without any qualifiers is that it is an option for a significant amount of people, yet frequently gets completely overlooked.

But I gotta ask

Why would you make a 25-munute drive but stop at the bottom of the hill? Why not just drive the rest of the way up?

I'm kind of the same way with music.

Why should I put in effort, they don't, the content creators don't.

The content creators have not built a method via which I can legitimately give them money. If they wish to do that then we can talk but they apparently are not interested.

I have no idea what an earth it is that you think I should do instead, clearly you are an intellectual though so I would value your input.

For high cost production that takes tens or hundreds of people to make, it's usually not up to the actual artists and creators how their stuff gets distributed. That's up to the publishers. They kinda... destroyed their older distribution methods, each one chasing the impossible goal of a streaming monopoly.

For some people, local Libraries are an option. If that isn't feasible, there are other options. Legal or otherwise. Whatever works, works. Most artists care more that you engage with their work, than how you got a hold of it. They already got paid, and residuals are less and less offered (or weaseled out of) by the publishers.