10 Reasons Why Physical Media Owns!

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NOTE: the following article appeared recently on the Format War Central website (followed by reader comments).

10 Reasons Why Physical Media Owns!
by Mehar Gill, December 12, 2008

Let's face it, before the last format war was even over a new one had begun, both formats had to fight an uphill battle, leaving the winner to fight alone for "true" reign of the market. With a slew of pro digital download announcements, we here at Format War Central decided to give Physical Media the spot light by telling the world: "Hey, Physical Media Still Kick's Ass!".

1. People Like Physical – Whether its a 12" vinyl record or simply a DVD case, people have always wanted something they could hold, to tell them "Hey, you own that!". Stigma related to this ensures people will always have place in their hearts for years to come.

2. Bit Rates – Consumers are a odd bunch when it comes to quality, some are fine with VCD type video playing back on their 55" HDTV, others won't settle for that, they want the best! Physical media is capable of reaching bit rates which currently wouldn't be possible on digitally distributed content for a variety of reasons.

3. You Can't Sell Digital – If you're sitting on 50 copies of Doom on HD DVD hoping they'll be worth something one day, don't bother. Depending on the title, you could get a hefty sum of money for it down the line. Unfortunately, the same would not apply to digital content, something tells us your 20GB Xbox 360 HDD filled with the third season of Heroes won't hold much value 20 years down the line; in fact a few months down the line and we're sure the HDD would be worth more than the show! We wonder how much your colorized Casablanca VHS is worth?

4. Unified – With Digital Downloads, almost everyone and their sister [company] are releasing a distribution device/platform, it's a lot to take in! To add to the frustration none of them will work "across the board". Compared to lets say a Blu-ray player where you can play almost every format known to man, including Blu-ray, DVD, CD, HD DVD [combo player], VHS (Yes that´s right, VHS!) and more! Adding to the irony, many also have the ability to stream content from places like Netflix and soon Blockbuster!

5. Restrictions, Restrictions! – When Digital Downloads were ushered in it meant doom for users who imported their movies. Before, region coding was the only issue to worry about, with downloads restrictions are but not limited to:

• ISP Locks: In today's day and age it's not hard for providers to cut you off solely based on the country your connection is coming from.
• D.R.M.X!: You may have heard of Digital Rights Management, but have you heard of Digital Rights Management Xtreme! before? With Digital Distributed content, DRM has been taken to new heights, giving you viewing windows, HDD locks, and a whole slew of other nasty surprises.
• The Studio Equation: Believe it or not, studios only want you to give them money when they tell you too! Despite the digital market being capable of providing millions in revenue, studios choose to ignore the market or limit them. There's a reason why your countries XBLVM only has 10 HD movies while the American store has close to 1000.

6. So Easy Howard Stern Can Do It! – Pop in your disc/tape and play, simple isn't it? Compared to downloads -- where you have to find the movie you want to watch, queue, optionally wait for it to download, find where the file is stored, and playback -- if necessary, take time out of your experience to watch the buffer bar load.

7. Instant Access – It goes without saying, if you want a top quality video distributed digitally, streaming just won't cut it.

8. "I always feel like somebody's watching me" – If you tend to use your VUDU box or Bit Torrent Client (Legally… we hope) at least once a day to watch your HD/HDX movies, odds are someone will take notice. We won't blame you if you decide to watch Tropic Thunder while your neighbor gets fined and/or arrested for "piracy".

9. It's Not a Wired World! – Shockingly surprising yes we know, their are locations in this world that have have little to no Internet access at all (even in North America!)! Despite not even having 56K access, there is a really good chance those locations have access to at least one form physical media to enjoy.

10. No Back Up Plan – In a Democratic system, a company is capable of losing millions overnight, the unfortunate case for many is they are forced to a shutdown. Suppose your favorite content provider is forced to shut down their servers for any reason, any content you bought would be gone! Any DRM server checks needed for content to work would fail, leaving you with an empty shell of a movie/album/game. Although some services, such as Microsoft Digital Locker (recently confirmed to be shutting down next August, 2009) allow you to back up your data periodically, unfortunately this model is yet to applied to any other service.

Disclaimer – If your product and/or service was mentioned, it's not because were targeting you or anything, it was just an unbiased example.

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