So a few years ago when I moved flats, I did something that I’ve come to regret as rather stupid: I had a clearout of my physical media. DVDs, Blu-rays, video games… they all went up on Olio, or to the charity shop as I figured that their day was past, and besides I could get them all on streaming or store download now anyway!
It’s strange, but over the past few years I’ve come to regret that. I also recently had a discussion with a friend who lost their Apple music collection due to a glitch and was now buying CDs again to get it all back, and the wheels started turning.
A dislike of internet outages, a keen eye for video compression artefacts (those little blocks can’t be unseen when seen!) and a general love of film and a desire to physically have it again mounted up and well…
After a trip to HMV and a few local charity shops later, I’ve got my collection started up again! But why am I choosing to give space to a collection of movies in my flat again, when streaming has none of the clutter and seeming inconvenience? Well…
You Will Own Nothing, And You Will Be Unhappy
The phrase “You Will Own Nothing, And You Will Be Happy” is one of the most overused memes on the internet. Originating in a WEF presentation from a futurologist speculating about how the world may look in 2030, it rapidly became the subject of conspiracy theories and memes, but also unintentionally managed to capture a wider unease about how our relationship with ownership is changing.
Perhaps the point is laboured, but since the start of the streaming age the depth of content, and quality has begun to go downhill ever more rapidly, as well as overall availability. To maintain an online library of films you like, you have to either:
a) pay a seemingly ever-increasing fee to maintain access to various streaming services to follow your favourite film or series as it moves over the services and hope that it doesn’t get taken off for tax write off purposes.
or
b) “buy” a film on Amazon, Youtube or Apple TV which is a bit of a misnomer: you are not buying a film but a licence to watch it as long as the rights holders and the streaming service provider remain on good terms. Should they fall out, or it becomes better financially for the service to remove it to save on things like music licensing fees, it’s gone.
And boy, have we seen that! Entire series such as the Willow follow up have been removed, perhaps never to be seen again, and some films such as Warner Bros.’s Batgirl or Coyote vs. Acme never even made it to exhibition.
As a lover of the art of film, this sucks. Sometimes artists chose to hide their failures – most infamous is Jerry Lewis’ The Day The Clown Cried, a Holocaust film that embarrassed him, but overall most film usually gets its day in the sun, even if it proves to be an infamous clunker such as Highlander II: The Quickening.
So for me, having a collection of films is kind of a middle finger to all of that nonsense. I have the film physically with me on a shelf, I can pick it out of the box and play it from the disk… it requires me to pay attention to the film having done something physical to start it, rather than just scrolling through a menu and selecting it. There’s something reassuringly slow about it all, and I don’t need to log in to anything, and well… I own something, and am happy with it.
The Best Cinema In The World (is in my living room)!
So after a few years of listening to movies and games through crappy speakers on HDTVs, I decided to give my audio an upgrade and spent some money to buy a 5.1.2 soundbar surround sound system, and upgraded from a 32′ TV to a 50′ one.
This set up supports all of the latest immersive surround sound standards, as well as Dolby Vision HDR, and in terms of standards could be more technologically advanced than most cinemas in the local area. A few of them have IMAX screens, but other than that they’re quite old fashioned, still with a 5.1 speaker system and non-HDR.
I’ve had possibly some of the best viewing experiences of my life on the setup I have now: the visuals and surround sound surpass quite a few cinemas (plus being able to pause the damn thing when nature calls) and generally I want the best experience from that. And here comes a bit of tech…
Amazon Prime, Netflix and Disney+ all use the venerable AV1 codec for the video streaming aspect of their service, and the E-AC3/Dolby Digital Plus codec for sound. For the purpose of compressing sound and video in an efficient manner to allow them to be transmitted across the internet, they’re great… however they’re blown out of the water by 4K blurays.
The peak bitrate of the streaming services for a 4K stream is around 35Mbps, however for a 4K bluray the bitrate is around 128Mbps. I expect that as internet connections get faster the streaming services will improve, but for now we’re faced with a pretty large gap in quality.
I’ve got some great sound and vision out of my setup with Netflix and friends, but for my favourite films such as the Dune series, it’s proven pretty great. The video is encoded at a much higher bitrate than anything on streaming, and the sound is often delivered by the lossless DTS Master Audio/Dolby TrueHD codecs as opposed to the lossy Dolby Digital Plus.
In some cases, I’ve not noticed much of a difference, but at least with Dune I noticed that the sound was a lot richer and more detailed, and I had to look hard to see any compression artefacts on screen. It is pretty much the best version available of that film, and the physical copy of Dune wins out over streaming.
So in this world view, picking up copies of films I like from charity shops for around £2 that blow the streaming version out of the water is a pretty big win!
It Won’t Change
Generative AI video has progressed rapidly in a small amount of time, going from strange, nightmarish videos of a malformed Will Smith eating spaghetti while melting to videos that are pretty convincing, like these from Open AI’s Sora 2 app:
While these videos are still somewhat strange and rough, they’re also something that about 10 years ago would have taken considerable time and effort to make, having to use CGI and a bit of time spent editing to get what now can be put together by typing in something like “Super Mario being arrested for speeding on a police bodycam”.
Making a decent, interesting video will still take time and effort even with AI (and a lot of the videos are just poor quality slop) but what can’t be argued is that being able to make an impressive video is rapidly becoming a lot easier, and this is going to have a knock-on effect on filmmaking.
While movie studios are currently pursuing legal avenues to keep their film content out of AI models, I don’t imagine it will take too long before they decide to monetize this and start making their libraries available as “content packs” or something like that for the generative video AI blender.
Paying $70 or something like that for the right to use Avengers content in your generative videos and doing something like recreating the most iconic scenes of Avengers: Endgame with you and your friends in place of RDJ and friends isn’t far away, and indeed Sora 2 allows you to insert you and friends into videos with its Cameo feature.
So we’re about to enter a world of people inserting themselves into films, and their dog bodyslamming Stone Cold Steve Austin to win the WWE championship, and so on, and while all of these could be very amusing and cool, I feel something could well be lost. Video will become intensely personalized and suited to your whims, but there’s a lot to be said for a well-told story that doesn’t involve you, and doesn’t bend itself to your will.
The blu-rays I own have already been pressed, and will exist free of whatever AI tooling comes out in future, allowing me to see the originally intended story without, say, the temptation of deciding to cast myself as Doc Brown in Back to the Future (which, I have to admit, is tempting) for my own amusement after paying Universal $20 for the right to do so.
The AI video future is probably inevitable, and when Sora 2 is available in the UK I will no doubt enjoy playing with it for my own amusement. But although I like the possibility of being able to see myself as Iron Man, I think I’ll always love having the option to go back to the original version, and just sit back and enjoy the story as it was intended.
The Answer's 42 