Don't Buy, Rent.

My Personal Netflix Machine

I have ripped all of the movies I own to a NAS box quietly hidden behind a closet door. I will not be going back to physical media, ever. I used to lose the discs, the kids would use them like skateboards, aad the load time for DVD then navigating the menu is such a pain. Add to that the 5 minutes of advertising that we purchased and its a non starter to ever go back. There's really no good reason to use the physical media.

The question now shifts to owning vs. renting business models. I like the idea of owning. I "own" Top Gun or I "own" Willy Wonka. The thought makes the horder in me warm inside. But as I transferred all my media to a NAS box and quietly stored away my blu-ray or DVD to be seen only if i ever move i started to think how closely what i'm doing resembles Netflix. The only exception is the NAS box is in the cloud and I don't really "own" any of the movies. Here's the NAS I use reviewed here here or a video review

So I don't "own" the movies, but guess what? I have access to thousands of movies. Neat. A trade off. So should I "own" or just rent? Well, to my son who doesn't know what's going on behind the scene's its really all the same. He's watching a movie. The experience we're striving for is to 1. Find what i want to watch and 2. Play it effortlessly.

Now let's break that down backwards.

2. Play it effortlessly. Check. Netflix does this for me now, with a decent internet pipe i can find and play movies just as easy as if i owned them (actually a bit easier if you're still using the DVD).

1. Find what i want to watch. Here's where we're not quite there yet. I can easily find what i want . . . . as long as its available to stream. . . . this is why the hybrid model exists in my house, and why i believe will continue to exist until DVD availability = Streaming availability.

A Parallel

I'll make this short, this is a long post already.
I used to buy songs off of itunes for $1.29 a pop. . . .
I now give $9.99 to spotify for all i can consume + some other neat features. . . .
Music has gotten there.

Now here's video. . .

I buy bluray/DVD @ 9.99 -$29.99 a pop . . . .
And I pay netflix $7.99 month. . .
But i believe the future is more like music. Give me newer release and i'm willing to pay >> $7.99 a month for an all you can consume, all you can search, encompassing library of content.

Better yet, combine my movies and music for one  fee. . . . I've become comfortable with renting my media. . . it's the future.