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Rumors of the Death of DVD Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Every few months, I click upon an article online written by some overeager media geek announcing the death of the DVD by digital streaming.

These puff pieces are usually written with much conviction and enthusiasm for the digital-streaming model.

 Rarely do these ramblings address the serious movie lover who values quality audio and video presentation and they are, tellingly, uniformly oblivious to the many intolerable pitfalls of digital streaming’s imperfect delivery apparatus, the Internet.

When media writers make sweeping idiotic statements—such as “The DVD is dead. And you helped kill it!”—I cannot help but wonder if writers like Gary Susman of AOL/Moviefone (the author of this particularly inane nugget) are secretly stumping for Microsoft and are the ones wielding the dagger aimed squarely at the heart of DVD.

The software giant quietly staked out a spot on the sidelines of the Blu-ray-versus-HD-DVD format war with an eye on the NEXT phase of home video evolution: a future dominated by high-definition digital streaming instead of actual physical media.

Perhaps none-too-coincidentally, Microsoft financed a massive purchase of AOL technical patents just days after the Moviefone article ran.

It certainly wouldn’t hurt Microsoft’s prospects of dominating online streaming—nor would it hinder AOL’s standing in their eyes—for AOL’s news division to run a story urging reactionary folks to abandon their DVD players and succumb to the inevitability of a world where digital media and information is disseminated and consumed solely via the Internet.

Of course, this is all assuming you’ve got a reliable and affordable high-speed Internet connection to begin with (you’d be surprised to learn how much of the U.S. remains underserved in this respect). Plus, I truly doubt the days of unlimited data plans are infinite. What happens if/when broadband caps are eased and data usage rates skyrocket?

To the film studios, streaming makes a lot of financial sense: it’s virtually an all-profit enterprise, without the overhead costs associated with DVD duplication, printing, packaging, shipping and storage. But film studios make far more money on DVD sales than they do on digital streaming, so I find it inconceivable that they’d ever willingly give up a money-maker with such relatively meager overhead. I find digital streaming to be a convenient tool to have handy and it coexists nicely with disc-based media, but to think Internet-based digital streaming could actually ever REPLACE physical media is absurd, even if we had the proper infrastructure in this country to support such an endeavor. Which we don’t.

Plus, computers crash, hard drives fail and Internet viruses and PC worms are unleashed with alarming regularly.

By the way, the world leaders in high-speed Internet service are, in order, South Korea, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Latvia. Japan ranks #6. The U.S. comes in at an embarrassing 26th globally, just behind Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Congo. Just a little perspective check. No further evidence ought to be required in the case against digital streaming.

But there are many more strikes against streaming.
                                                                                                          
Even the most reliable high-speed Internet service is susceptible to power outages, and streaming is rife with instances of sluggish buffering, unpredictable technical snafus, and gross compression artifacts. The splotchy pixilation and solarization glitches are barely equal in overall quality to standard DVD, and cannot approach the unsurpassed clarity of a pure 1080p Blu-ray image. It wasn’t immediately apparent to me, but the majority of movies available for streaming are not even offered in Dolby Digital or DTS sound, and this cannot even begin to compete with the richness of an uncompressed Blu-ray audio track.

Further, deaf viewers and the hard of hearing are virtually shut out online, as studios are under no obligation to caption streamed content.

The fact that I collect movies on disc has a lot to do with my tendency to revisit favorite films, and the offering of special features—filmmaker commentaries, deleted scenes, previews, production diaries, retrospective and making-of documentaries—is often the weighing factor when deciding on the purchase of a double-dip upgrade reissue.

Today I can show a buddy the knife scene in Chinatown on my smart phone at the touch of a finger, but nobody can promise me it’ll still be available for streaming tomorrow. And if it isn’t, I won’t be too keen on paying a fee to view it on demand for a limited time every time the inkling strikes me to visit a sequence from the film.

Barring fire or theft, I’m glad that I can glance over to my bookshelf and retrieve my pristine disc-based copy of Chinatown anytime I choose, and will have to endure only the force-fed previews and copyright disclaimer screens before having full command of the film and an array of exclusive special features at my fingertips, even when the WiFi is on the fritz.

Again.

Though privacy concerns are palpable, I couldn’t care less if some notation in my viewing history suggests that I’m obsessed with Superman because I’ve streamed it more times than any other title on demand. What does give me pause, however, is the concern that my hypothetical streaming of a controversial film (i.e.:  Fight Club; Fair Game; American History X; Birth of a Nation) or an explosive documentary (The World According to Monsanto; Fahrenheit 9/11; The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Reni Riefenstahl, e.g.) will flag me as some sort of racist anarchist or conspiracy theorist rather than a mere film buff intent to absorb as much cinema as possible. 

And that’s assuming such incendiary fare is ever programmed into the rotation. How sad to think that a controversial film could easily be withdrawn from circulation, or subject to alteration or deletion without notice, and for any reason. I trust I’m not the only one who gets a creepy 1984 vibe when I think of every digitized bit of art, literature, film, music and history being stored away on a giant cloud-based central server in—what?—the Ministry of Information?

Streaming has proven to be a fun and economical way to channel surf dozens of TV shows I’d never bothered to seek out during their initial broadcasts. It’s also a surprisingly efficient way to sample the scores of movies I recognize but have never gotten around to viewing, and that might otherwise be the immediately regrettable target of an impulse-buy from the DVD bargain bin.

Yet it’s been frustrating to learn that the comparatively meager selection of instant streaming titles cannot compete with the massive catalogue of movies and TV shows available for purchase on DVD.

Until I can order up ANY movie EVER MADE at the touch of a keystroke, the streaming model will remain unfeasible.

Under ideal conditions, smooth streaming is great for, say, settling a bar bet or referencing a specific quote at a moment’s notice, but most movie lovers I know prefer to kick back in front of a big-screen TV in the middle of a sphere of surround speakers when screening a movie, and the preferred method of delivery tends to be the high-definition format currently offering the most superior and faithful audiovisual presentation possible.

Once it was laserdisc.

Today it’s Blu-ray.

It may be something else tomorrow, but it will assuredly NOT be high-definition digital streaming anytime in the near future, no matter what some digital streaming shill claims.

To echo a sentiment among disc lovers that paraphrases a quote made infamous by Charlton Heston and the NRA: “I’ll give you my DVD when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!

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