I object to the following three statements pretty strongly. I'll try to respond to each statement individually and then summarize at the end.



See, I think you're stuck remembering piracy of old, back from the days when everything was compressed to squeeze through tiny internet pipes and physical media gave you a better experience. These days, it doesn't. If I wanted to, I could download a DVD rip in minutes, and a Blu-ray rip in an hour or two on a standard US broadband connection. The quality of content between legal and non-legal channels is identical. Oh, except that the rips will be stripped of the ads and FBI notices that make it annoying and time consuming just to get to the main menu.



Again, you're thinking that digital copies are second class citizens; that they're not suited for the enthusiastic collector. But that's just not true. Digital copies can be displayed using personal media center software, which is easy to get and child's play to use. You get all of your movies in one place, displayed gorgeously on your big screen complete with cover art and background posters. Your movies have plot summaries, are sortable and searchable by all kinds of metadata (actors, genre, age, etc), can be paused and resumed at the same point months later. . .the list goes on.

In short, you get something like this instead of this.



As I mentioned above, it's far easier and more attractive to display and show off your movies with an HTPC than it could ever be on a shelf. Even if you don't agree, though, we're arguing over art at this point. The consumption of a movie is in all ways superior with a digital file that you control on your hard drive vs one locked away on a piece of breakable, losable plastic. But if it's just the physical display you're after, just buy 100 DVD cases on ebay for five bucks and then print out covers on glossy paper. You're talking less than 50 cents per movie.

Anyway. The promised summary, now.

What I'm really trying to get across is that movies are digital files, period. It is faster and cheaper to distribute and obtain these files via purely electronic means, rather than locking them onto physical media. We no longer live in an age of slow internet; you can get the same content over the wire that you can in your store. Except that you get it orders of magnitude faster. The three statements of yours that I quoted seem to strongly state that buying a physical copy is the way to go, and that is really what I disagree with.

The experience of obtaining and owning a file electronically is superior to doing the same thing via physical means.