The scariest thing to happen on Friday, Oct. 13, wasn’t the murder of a person but rather the murder of an era. The Digital Bits was the first to report that Best Buy would stop selling DVDs, this report was later confirmed by a Best Buy spokesperson to Variety. This comes 2 weeks after Netflix officially shut down its DVD program. The only physical media left will be video games, but for how long?
For most people this will not affect them as we ran a poll that found that 87.5% of students rarely watch TV shows or movies using physical media. But this issue of physical media will only start to affect you by the time it’s too late. Take video games for example, when the Xbox servers went down in June of 2022, a system called Digital Rights Management prevented users from playing games that they had bought digitally. The excuse for having DRM is to prevent piracy as it makes sure you actually own the game you say you own. When you scroll right to agree on the terms and conditions of a digital distribution platform you have agreed to lease what you “buy”, and if the distributor wanted to, they could remove or modify any content they want.
When asked about his thoughts on the issue Gamers Club member Mason Bernstein said “It’s not good, but anyone who is buying physical games is putting themselves in a worse situation.” Member Josh Fritz said that “It would be much easier to take away a digital media.” “I don’t like paying a subscription for something I don’t truly have.” Bernstein said, which perfectly illustrates the idea that this issue will affect you one day, even if it doesn’t now.
Let’s say your favorite movie is taken off streaming If you don’t have the DVD, you’re not going to be able to watch it, maybe forever. A happy medium between having to pull out ancient technology to watch a tv show and bow down to our corporate streaming overlords is Plex. Plex allows you to convert your DVDs to digital to host your own streaming service with the content you own. The caveat to this is that you have to have a hefty amount of technical knowledge and hundreds of dollars in hard drive storage. 
It’s not just the worry that we will lose content, but that we will lose the quality of the content, physical media is stored in a “lossless” format while most digital storage like what you watch on Netflix or listen to on Spotify is “lossy”. Lossless refers to no compression; this is its raw form. It takes up lots of space whether physical or digital, so think something like a CD or a film reel. Lossy however is a compressed version that takes up much less space but is also degraded in quality. Again, It’s one of those things that you don’t realize how important it is until you either see it for the first time or lose it. A great comparison for a lot of people this year would be seeing the hit film “Oppenhimer” in theaters on film and then seeing it at home. This is the reason there are people who still collect CDs, Vinyls, and spend thousands on headphones that can give them that dynamic full range. Our survey found that 37.6% of people listen to music using physical media often.
This is the final nail in the DVDs coffin. With it, we will lose the ability to preserve multiple mediums of art along with their original quality. It’s another loss for people who want to actually own what they buy forever and be free from censorship. Without them, future generations may never truly know that Han shot first.
