This was originally an essay on why relying on digital media is foolish. I then went into the superiority of physical media, with the caveat that this is shorthand for "media you really own" and not necessarily just physical (and with some "physical" media being stuff you didn't really own.)
Unfortunately I kind of proved my own point by accidentally deleting the essay when working on a sequel. My last backup of the site doesn't have the original version of the essay, and I foolish cleared my cache when checking if the page was really gone or not. Thus the original words have been lost forever.
Eventually I will probably rewrite as much as I can of this essay from memory. For the moment I am just adding the navigation at the bottom so that the linked list structure isn't borked.
As stated above the original article was lost. What follows is a reconstruction from my hazy memory, even to the extent of not changing claims that I may have reevaluated later. However, there is no guarantee that this is exactly what was originally written.
Recently I purchased a CD player/tape deck. Due to a variety of factors I ended up with quite a few cassette tapes, so I wanted to have a way to listen to them at work. The player was actually new, found at Target, but of course I was using it to listen to old things. I fully expected to be mocked by my coworkers since honestly listening to tapes at this point is a bit silly. And I was mocked. But it took me a while to realize that they didn't realize that I was listenting to casette tapes. They thought I had simply purchased a CD player. They were instead mocking the very idea of listening to a physical CD at all.
The idea was that somehow physical media had become "obsolete." Since there were streaming sites, there was no need to bother. One notable thing about all of this is that they always meant streaming sites; no one was listening to a bunch of MP3s and saying that those were the future. The main argument for how they were obsolete were mainly that it was 2022, and in 2022 you streamed music. Anything else was being stuck in the past, man. One guy said something about not wanting to deal with the hassle of swapping discs, which is fair, but that's it.
Later on I heard the same thing when talking about movies. I was talking about regretting getting rid of some obscure VHS tapes now that I actually had a working VCR again. I got a response that mirrored the nostalgia, and then went on to talk about when we "had to" sell our DVDs and Blurays, since those were obsolete. At that point I got very confused, especially since the people involved still had a blu ray player and complained about not being able to watch certain media since they were not available on streaming.
That brings us to this article: the obvious fact that physical is king (with certain caveats I will get to in a bit.) Despite it being supposedly "obsolete" there are several advantages of physical media. One is longevity. It doesn't matter how many times the rights change hands, I can still go back and watch anything I have on disc. Now obviously with physical media the media itself could decay, but in my experience this takes a long time. VHS sucks and I've still been able to watch a copy of Gone With the Wind printed in at least the early 80's (granted, it wasn't played much.) Later printed DVDs and blurays are likely to last for fifty years at least, which long outlasts any chance of a streaming site remaining operational and maintaining the licenses necessary for you to keep watching them. On a related note, you can't have your media altered. I have a copy of the first printing of My Little Pony: The Friendship Express (the release where Derpy is called Derpy and has her original voice.) Hasbro scrubbed that episode from the internet as much as they could, but they can't do a damned thing about Derpy's voice in my copy.
There are also the benefits of not needing to pay continual streaming subsciptions to watch your media, and not needing a connection to the internet.
One frequently overlooked benefit is that since you actually own a physical product, you can transfer that ownership. I have lent many series to my friends which is more convenient to them than doing something like sharing an account, and legal on top of that. Many of my videos were inherited from my grandparents. I can sell stuff to thrift stores, and I can also buy from there. With streaming sites at the end of the subscription period you've got nothing. Hopefully you watched some movies and have fond memories of them, but that's it. It's like watching a movie at a theater (which no one has ever conflated with "owning" in any meaningful way.)
I said earlier that there are some caveats. What really matters is that you own your media, in that you can use it whenever you want, and that you can transfer it as you like. With games this becomes tricky. In the old days phsyical copies of games really did meet these criteria, especially on consoles. Since then games have required more and more online "support" or outright DRM. For example I have a "physical copy" of The Orange Box, in that it is on a disc. But all that disc contains is the files for very old versions of Half Life 2 (including the episodes), Portal and Team Fortress 2. I can install those, but they require that I use Steam to actually play them. This requires online access. And if I do connect ot Steam I need to use a code to verify my copy (which I've already used) and I would be forced to immediately update the games. The situation ends up being equivalent to simply purchasing the game online; I've just saved some time in downloading files. And other games are often worse. There's a "physical copy" of Fallout 76 that you can buy in stores, but the "disc" is just a piece of cardboard with a code on it that has a code to activate an online copy. There's no distinction in the actual files, so you really own nothing.
This originally was in an update edit, but I've decided to place it here: For another example, consider Overwatch. When Blizzard released Overwatch 2, it decided that this should be the only Overwatch. There were still physical copies of Overwatch 1, but if you installed them Blizzard.net would just immediately install Overwatch 2 instead. Thus in a sense you had a "physical copy" of the old game, and maybe if you cracked it and rewrote the code to work on a local LAN you could play that game instead of Overwatch 2. But for practical purposes, you could not use your "physical copy" of Overwatch 1 to play Overwatch 1. People defended this by noting that you could get extra skins if you had Overwatch 1, but first of all people buying Overwatch 1 were likely trying to buy Overwatch 1, not skins for Overwatch 2, and there's no guarantee that Blizzard would continue to honor this arrangement in the future. Indeed at the time of this rewrite, I don't know if they ARE honoring that arrangement.
For games what you really want is DRM free, or at least so minimnal of DRM that you can't have a company remove access. For example, if you have an old copy that uses a CD check, that's DRM but as long as you have the CD you are good. But this isn't quite tied into being "physical." In fact, you can get the same advantages with a purely digital copy. For example, while I have physical copies of Heroes 1, 2, 3 and 5, I never got a physical copy of Heroes 4. I picked one up on GOG, and I effectively own it. I got it two computers ago, and since that point I've never redownloaded it from GOG. Instead, I just transfer the files over from one computer to the next. Everything works fine. Since GOG isn't even aware that it's on two of my computers, there's nothing they can do to remove it. I could lose access if all my computers broke before I made a backup, but the same is true of loving a movie if you break a disc. The advantages are effectively the same. So when I say "physical is king" I really mean "things you own are king" which for games in particular often means something non-physical.