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DVDs and Cancel Culture
My wife tried to see if any of the mothers at church with younger children wanted some of our old Veggie Tales and Superbook DVDs. Most said that they don’t have a DVD player.
Streaming services have reduced the need for DVDs. Still, hundreds of millions of DVDs are sold every year. My assumption would be it is older people, like me, getting their movies on discs. Turns out, that isn’t the case. According to the MPAA, “those aged 25 to 39 are more likely than most to watch DVDs.” Some of the reasons for buying DVD’s is better quality and availability. In the old days of streaming, Netflix had most of the movies. Since then, other services have popped up and access to all of the movies you want, when you want them, would require subscriptions to lots of different streaming services which can get expensive.
For movies you will want to watch multiple times, I think there is another reason to buy DVDs. We live in a time where they show warnings before movies to let you know the film includes “historical smoking.” The same people activity promoting legalization of marijuana are worried that you might see a fictional character smoke a cigarette. Classic novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird often show up on lists of banned books. With this culture of censorship, can you be sure that your favorite films will even be available on your streaming service a year from now?
Want to watch Blazing Saddles? I read that HBOMAX requires you to be lectured about racism for three minutes before they let you start the film. How long until they just ban such films altogether. And now we have to worry if something might be “Anti-trans.” Psycho might be considered a classic, but only if you are a trans-phobe. The only man in the movie who likes to dress up as a woman is a mass murderer. And he is the one referred to as a psycho, rather than just a guy who was born that way.
There are lots of reasons to love the convenience and selections available through various streaming services. But for me, if there is something I plan to watch over and over, I am not going to let Big Tech tell me what I can and can’t watch. I guess that could sound a little paranoid, but from what I have seen over the past year or two, the Left has no issue with censorship and actually prefer it to debate. Am I wrong?
Published in General
That is a fantastic Twitter account.
When it comes to media storage, it is important to keep a tool for accessing that media as well. So if you’ve got irreplaceable family moments archived on VHS, then make sure you stick a VHS player in the vault as well.
Or more probably, if your photos are all digitized on several USB flash drives, better have something that you can plug that flash drive into. In 30 years, who knows whether USB ports will be common. They may go the way of SCSI ports.
Especially since so many companies want to push people into putting stuff “in the cloud.” (Which is really just someone else’s computer, but people don’t seem to realize that.)