Why I believe in physical media

So to begin, I have been in the business of selling DVD's since 2001, and Blu-ray since 2008. Over the last 16 years, I have shipped literally hundreds of thousands of movies to all corners of the United States. 

One question I have heard regularly, going back as early as 2005, is how I plan to fight the coming tidal wave of digital movies and television. After all, we all know that services like Netflix, Amazon, Vudu, and Hulu have risen to prominence in the last decade as the physical media death nail, right? Not so fast! Over the past 10 years, our market has been still strong for DVD's, and rapidly being taken over by Blu-ray the last few years, even though this media revolution has been building for so long. 

So the question is, why do I cling to the physical media when the digital is so readily available?

1. When the world grid goes down, so will all the digital content.

This is not a sci fi script as you might see on Jericho or Revolution, but instead a realistic look into the future of the world. We have watched as across the world, one virus after another takes down networks, cyber attacks occur daily from hostile nations and hacker groups, and to make it even worse, we cannot remember our own passwords on a daily basis without having them all saved on our devices!

2. I have personally lost my digital content!

That's right! I have read an email from a digital video provider telling me thank you for my business, and they were sorry to hear I wanted to cancel my account. By the time I reacted, I learned my account and all my movies were gone, unrecoverable unless I wanted to spend hours on the phone with a robot. Fortunately, there were only a dozen or so films and a couple series, but it taught me a hard valuable lesson about digital content.

I have friends who had this happen to their Amazon accounts who lost hundreds of books and movies, along with thousands of MP3's that were wiped out when a hacker stole their account and closed everything for them. In America we take these global hacks and attacks as just news from other countries, never giving a second's thought to what may happen if the Amazon servers are breached and wiped clean? In the realm of possibilities, we never thought that those flip walkie talkies on Star Trek would ever actually happen, but they did with the flip phone. 

A quote I read some time back gave me confidence in the durability of physical media: 

"If we don't have physical books, how will we know our history when the world goes offline?"

To turn it around into entertainment media: 

If we don't have physical media, how will we know our culture when our networks collapse?

And this, is why I believe in physical media.