Why I (Probably) Won't Buy the Tomb Raider Movie on Blu

I’m starting to doubt the need for physical media.

Back when MP3s starting becoming the norm, I’d still buy CDs and rip them, keeping the CD just in case the computer crashed. But just the other day I bought an MP3 album from Amazon, who is kind enough to store a backup copy for me on their “cloud” server. Google has a similar service. I could lose my computer tomorrow, yet the album would still be available to me. Or, I could be on my parents’ computer and stream it from the cloud instead of filling up all of that hard drive space they’re saving for pictures of grandkids.

Lately it’s gotten me to thinking, why buy DVDs? With the amount of streaming content on the internet growing all the time, why buy movies at all? Well, okay. Say I love Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and watch it several times a year (just being hypothetical here). If it’s not streaming for free, I don’t want to pay $2.99 to rent it every few months. That I might (hypothetically) buy. But do I need to scrounge up a copy of the Blu-Ray in some Best Buy bargain bin?

Behold, my giant head and tiny shoulders

No, because just like with music, I could get the digital copy and store it on a cloud somewhere. If I had internet access, I could stream it to any device capable of that. Or if I knew I wouldn’t have internet, I could download it to an appropriate gadget. At this point, I’m starting to doubt that I’ll ever even buy a Blu-Ray player. Give me a tablet or netbook with an HDMI out, and I can (in theory) have my entire movie collection with me at all times.

As HDTV sets become the norm and storage/streaming devices become more common, making a run to the video store, or even not being able to find exactly what you want to watch, will become a thing of the past. No more perusing your roommate’s DVD shelf. All his favorite movies will be on his computer.

I used to see my DVD collection as a reflection of who I am. People could come into my apartment and look at it and go, “So that’s Trevor. How many Angelina Jolie movies can one person own before his friends call an intervention?” Now, they’ll never know (and neither will I).

If I didn’t like physical books so much, I could even see doing away with my heavy, heavy library. Moving would become much easier if just did all my reading on a tablet, keeping the brunt of library on some server in the sky. I’d also have a lot more shelf space for… Ramen noodles and dust and cans of Spam, I guess.

Am I missing something? Do I have too much faith in the cloud? If a solar flare kicks up an electromagnetic storm and wipes out their servers, my DVD player isn’t going to work anyway. Or am I getting ahead of myself?