What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?
Libraries! They often have digital access to various services—e.g. Kanopy—but also often have lots of physical media sources! It involves a little more planning and a little less algorithm, and there are shows and movies that won't ever be available—e.g. things from Netflix, Apple—but there's enough out there already.
If you want guaranteed future access, then this is probably the only online option that actually fulfills this guarantee... other than that, physical media.
I regularly snag DVDs for $1 USD or less at garage/yard/boot sales. I see tons of cheap used physical media in record shops when I travel, too. eBay and Facebook Marketplace are also great sources for used DVD.
I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state.
*we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.
I watch films on streaming rather than old dvds with unskippable nonsense like "don't pirate this dvd" (well obviously I didn't, that's why I have the dvd), or the pain of the menu systems to just press play.
Physical media isn't guaranteed to retain future access. There are protocols for players to update various bits of data from the newest disk you have ever inserted into them. The Nintendo Wii certainly does this, I'm not sure if BluRay does but I don't see why they wouldn't.
You can still buy physical media online, though an increasing portion of movies and shows are produced by the streaming companies, and you don’t really have an alternative there.
Subscribe, screengrab what you like, unsubscribe. Repeat. Really easy to do in a virtual machine, so it doesn't conflict with anything else happening on the computer.
You can stream your own stuff, from home, to all of your devices and your friends' devices, for free. And since the movies are on your own hardware, you have them forever. Movies, tv, music, books, comic books, video game roms, basically any sort of media you can even name. And it's been possible for you to do so for the last 15 years, maybe more.
No. The whole issue is that the seller needs to maintain an online service to allow you access to the movies. This online service costs money so over time is likely not worth the cost. This plus the online service provider undergoing changes (bankruptcy, acquisition, mergers, etc) or they themselves losing rights to the movies. Seems to me that rental or purchases are still unbeatable. The alternative is streaming but the downside is higher costs over time and worse quality movies.
