where owning media is considered a luxury.

Much more likely that it will simply be impossible to legally own any media.

Back when people bought analog media, I don't know if it was fully spelled out what you did and didn't actually own. Obviously you didn't own the copyright to whatever it is you were buying. But, you did own the physical item. What rights were transferred to you when you bought the record in the record store? Probably an unlimited right to play the record at home, but not the right to play it in a dance club. I wonder if the "copyright license" was ever actually spelled out though.

In the digital era there is no longer any physical item to own, and since you never did own the "information" encoded into the physical medium, ownership of digital files is already on shaky ground. In the past you could buy MP3s, and these days it's still occasionally possible to buy DRM-free e-books. But I wouldn't be surprised if in the future just having media stored locally will be presumed to be illegal.

There aren't stairs?

"The powers that be" aren't doing some kind of nefarious thing here. Physical media is only worth producing if they're doing it at incredibly high volumes. The smaller the run, the more expensive it is for each individual unit. Fewer and fewer people are buying, and there are fewer and fewer physical devices out there capable of playing the media.

For them, it's a simple calculation of the cost of producing physical media, getting it from the factory to stores, paying the stores to shelve it, etc. vs. simply having a website with media files on it.

While there are some people who still prefer physical media, for the most part consumers also prefer just going to a website and clicking a button vs. driving to a store, parking, searching the shelves in the hope they have what they're looking for, and so-on. In addition, as fewer companies put out physical media, it's harder to find the physical media you want in the stores, so more people prefer to go online, which leads to less demand for physical media, fewer choices on the shelves, and more demand for streaming.

I'm sure the bonus of consumers rarely having a way to view a movie or listen to a song an unlimited number of times without paying is something the media companies also enjoy. But, the main reason physical media is disappearing isn't some kind of conspiracy by the mysterious "powers that be", it's a simple profit calculation by accountants at Sony and Disney.

Disney has always been shit, especially their business practices.

Awesome. It was always in that perpetual beta mode where it's free, as long as you keep updating the API key

Not in all countries.