VIDEO VARIETIES 2025

I spend too much time watching video. Broadcast TV, downloaded
documentaries, and the constantly growing collection of movies I
buy on second-hand VHS/DVD. It often strikes me as a waste of my
time, but usually it's time when I'm so tired or unmotivated that
after forcing myself to a productive task, nothing much gets
achieved anyway. Alternatives of reading old books/magazines or
staring blankly at a wall for an hour lost in thought, aren't
really more beneficial for health, learning, or entertainment. At
least I can hope to combine some minor repetitive productive task
with viewing video, packaging up products I sell usually, which has
the strange effect of burning random sections of the video I'm
watching (especially documentaries) into my mind such that, quite
unlike my normal forgetfullness, I can spontaniously replay bits of
them in my head years later, like recalling a traumatic event.
Unforunately that recall is only about 1% of the content I've
watched, so not particularly useful as a deliberate memorising
technique.

Anyway, that aside, what I wanted to do was a quick round up of the
state of video media formats that I use, since it's changing. Or
more accurately, I'm affected by its changes, since for long-form
reading I've got plenty of old books and no interest in digital
alternatives, and for music I have my tracker module collection
sampled from the infinate FTP collections of modland.com, or ABC
classic FM, none of which has changed in relation to my usage.

VHS

These are my favourite video source, but the supply is definitely
drying up. Although I've said that before and then bought a huge
haul from a shed out the back of an antiques stores at $1 each last
year. But most op-shops have none or few VHS tapes left for sale.
Yet when they have a few, I still often buy them, because somehow
they more often contain interesting movies than DVDs. Whether that
means people with my movie taste hung onto VHS tapes longer, or
nobody else buys them because my movie taste is terrible, I'm not
sure.

DVD

I always hated DVD. Since the switch from VHS happended during my
childhood I initially couldn't understand why it had happened.
Later I worked out that, besides the issue of video
quality/resolution (which I never much cared about then or now),
DVD with it's solid one-piece construction was ideal for home video
distributors in terms of per-unit cost. For them, the inevitability
of scratches was a happy side effect, since most consumers were
short-sighted enough not to care about it and bought them anyway.
Preventing scratches also requires going from the clumbsy grabbing
and pushing in of a coveniently-grasped block of plastic into a VHS
player, to a precision act of finger dexterity that after a long
day often has me dropping the disc on the floor and going through a
cleaning process to wipe off any resulting grit that didn't already
scratch the disc.

It's hard to tell whether numbers of used DVDs in second-hand shops
are increasing, but the prices seem to be dropping and expensive
box sets seem to be appeaing more often now, also priced very
cheaply. So more people are probably switching away from them. The
decline is clearer in statistics for new DVD sales:
https://www.statsignificant.com/p/the-rise-fall-and-slight-rise-of

That article from a year ago mentions department stores in the
USA ending sale of DVDs/BluRay. This got me thinking. One thing
that you can pick up from looking at far too many DVDs is that the
discs sometimes seem to be older than their packaging. Without
going into too much detail, the mechanics of DVD production require
a large set-up cost for each new DVD title produced, but it's cheap
to make each disc after that. So the business is geared to large
production runs to offset the set-up cost (runs of under about a
thousand discs aren't even considered practical in the industry). I
suspect that distributors therefore usually make more discs than
they need and store the extra discs away in warehouses, without
cases, then package them up for sale later when stocks run low or
as multi-movie sets.

There's a chance then, that a some point when new DVD sales begin
to be doscontinued, that these stockpiled DVDs will be released to
the market at clearance prices, and maybe almost as cheap as used
discs in the $1-$2 range. Maybe it's just as likely that they'll go
into landfill, but I thought it was worth a look to see if this was
happening already in Australia. It appears not though, the cheapest
discs are still around $10, and most around $20-$30 (about what
average VHS tapes sold for in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so
home video seems to be defying inflation at least). Box sets and
special editions are still highly priced, $60-$100+, especially
BluRay discs (which I don't even have a player for). New releases
are still happening.

I did find old references to 80% off selected titles as part of
Black Friday sales last year though. Whether that was the usual
trick of boosting prices on a handful of products before the sale
then discounting them down again, I don't know. Generally it
doesn't seem to be the end of days for DVD in Australia quite yet.

STREAMING

I object to this in all sorts of ways:

* Subscriptions for anything irks me - I hate recurring costs and
 avoid them wherever possible
* You're paying twice - First for the internet connection, then for
 the streaming service. I'd be paying a lot more for my internet in
 order to handle the amount of data video streaming requires
* Can't buy second-hand. I hardly ever buy movies at their new
 price - but there's no such cheap (legal) option for streaming
* My mobile broadband internet isn't reliable enough anyway for
 streaming as opposed to downloading video in advance of watching
 them, especially since the damn 3G switch-off.
* Only borrowing the movies - the streaming company pushes up the
 price, goes bust, stuffs up your account, and you've suddenly got
 nothing
* Like hell I'm letting DRM stuff run on my computers
* I like picking movies by their cases, off shelves, reading the
 blurb. While looking for out-of-copyright movies to download I find
 it much more difficult and boring on computer
* The obsessive collector in me really likes having excessive
 quantities of similar-but-different physical objects in the form of
 physical tapes and discs

So video streaming has never even been a consideration for me,
beyond downloading from YouTube using youtube-dl/yt-dlp. Yet
statistics show that I'm again very unusual with this, and the
finance reporter on the TV news recently even lumped streaming
subscription costs into a graph of "essential" services
contributing to rising family living expenses (and this was on free
broadcast TV!).

This turns out the be a sideways aspect to cutting down the DVD
market, because now Amazon and Netflix are producing movies
themselves, I've seen that at least some of those movies never get
released on DVD. Curiously some series do get DVD releases, but
whereas it used to be a given that any Australian-released movie
would eventually be available on DVD, that's not the case anymore
for these streaming movies. A DVD release seems to be an exception
rather than the rule for content from these platforms, and that's
only going to shrink the market further. Of course that won't
affect me for a while, given DVDs from the 2010s and before are
still the main ones trickling down to me through the second-hand
shops.

BROADCAST TV

I'd normally just call this TV, but now everybody thinks that
includes streaming too. For me it doesn't even include the
commercial channels because they have too many ads - just the
government-funded ABC and SBS (the latter has ads, but few enough
that I can bare them, or at least fast-forwarding through (VHS!)
recordings of them).

Pickings are slim, and seem to be getting ever slimmer. SBS has
annoyed me by no longer publishing summaries of the new movies
rolling through their World Movies channel on a blog at their
website, however at least the movies I do still discover there
often make up a fairly regular source of decent content I can still
watch for free (including no internet cost). On that note, it's
interesting that they are screening some Amazon-produced movies, so
I do get a little slice of this new streaming content, once it's a
few years old.

Then there's the question of how long broadcast TV will last. ABC
and SBS run ads for their streaming services on all them time, and
the ABC has a new head who appears to be keen on cost cutting.
Nothing's been said yet about ending broadcast TV, but the ads
clearly show where they want their audience to go (and pay ISPs for
their TV reception instead of the stations paying for transmitters).

DOWNLOADS

YouTube is clearly working harder lately to defeat downloaders and
front-ends, but thankfully the downloaders are still winning,
except that options for downloaders are narrowing mainly just to
yt-dlp.  They still have RSS feeds if you craft the URLs for them.
Since getting six-month SIM cards my end-of-data-quota YouTube
download batches have become a less frequent event, so I'm building
more of a "to download" URL backlog than usual. Most of the YouYube
channels I follow are hardly getting updates more than once every
six months these days anyway though, so it hardly matters. Modern
short-attention-span clickbaity stuff that seems to dominate now
doesn't appeal to me at all.

Downloading from Edonkey2000 is a newer thing for me than
downloading from YouTube. I only started in the last few years,
after getting tired of trying to find (real) YouTube copies of old
documentaries referenced with ED2k links on the docuwiki.net
website. I use a VPS for its high-bandwidth internet access, and
convert the videos to lower resolutions before downloading them to
home in a tenth of the data. Bittorrent is the other option, but
seems worse to me in most respects - no built-in file search, and
single torrents containing multiple files that are bigger than I
have storage space for on the VPS.

Yet ED2k seems to be dying out, just as I've jumped onto it.
Increasingly files I find never have any peers for months. I
changed my tactics to select a whole heap of videos instead of
limiting to as many as will fit in the storage space (it's set to
pause downloads if disk space drops below a minimum threshold), but
now lots of partly downloaded files threaten to fill up all the
space (then mostly stall) before any complete. It's not that I'm
failing to upload a due proportion of data downloaded, the network
just seems to have become less active than when I started just a
few years ago. There are clearly still lots of people sharing porn
on it though, just not the obscure documentaries I'm after. Or
maybe until now I've just been _really_ lucky with the docos I
picked.

CONCLUSION

It's still alright for the moment, but my viewing options look set
to shrink in the future, as DVDs will eventually fade away like
VHS, TV goes off air, and downloads get more inconvenient. My aim
is to have collected enough video by then on tapes, discs, and
drives, to keep me happily re-watching old stuff forever while
leaving modern media alone. Of course I'll get even more out of
touch then, but that's happened anyway.

- The Free Thinker

You are viewing proxied material from aussies.space. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.