So… you prefer owning your media, as was said many times here. Great.

Right, so what is the relevance of this in the context of owning your own media versus being milked for money by corporations and having what you paid for removed at their whim? You’d have to be familiar with common usage of media players up to today to give a knowledgeable comparison on what was and is normal or impractical in that area, let alone the meaning of digital, which you don’t appear to be. My point that owning is better than allowing corporate exploitation for convenience sake still stands.

I didn’t understand this for a long time myself. And I can’t rightly remember when I first learned about this sort of thing. But once I did, information just seemed to flow to me from multiple directions. Maybe look up classic tactics around sales and marketing, then deceptive, yet typical, psychological sales and marketing practices. There’s a book on credit cards I enjoyed years ago “How to Take Advantage of the People Who Are Trying to Take Advantage of You: 50 Ways to Capitalize on the System” by JSB Morse (Though long story short , avoid debt and credit cards). One video on YouTube turned me off of buying ink cartridges once I found out what they truly cost versus the exorbitant amount they sell them for. Capital rip offs.

Bills/expenses are important in the following order:

Rent / roof over your head

Electricity and gas

Food (fresh food, frozen food, canned food. This is also the order of the speed this food goes bad with fresh going off first and canned lasting the longest. This can also be the order of nutritiousness with fresh being the best. The reverse on cost with fresh usually being the most expensive).

Saving money is more important than moving out unless employment prospects are nil back home or it’s psychologically taxing to be around family. That saved money, whether using retirement options via employers who may match your contribution or through your own individual bank or brokerage, provides freedom to move out with more choices, or travel, or quit a sucky job, or deal with an emergency etc.

Owning my media is what’s significant and I do in multiple ways that have been listed. It’s not an issue which one I use. What’s important is it not being locked up by a corporation after I’ve “bought” it.

I don’t see the disagreement here.

Digital includes digital optical discs (DVDs). DVDs and downloads are preferable to the situation posted by OP which is what I posted in this thread. The choice is convenience or not being taken advantage of and owning your media.

And an aside, have you never had a portable CD player or minidisc player or mp3 player, nevermind a tape player? Are you familiar with Walkman? Sony still makes that.

Another DVD plus is never having it go pixelated or buffering while watching due to some streamer error or widespread cloud downtime or other issue. That one time purchase and watching it whenever I like for as long as I like, and not some corporation, is an impeccable experience.

Netflix’s lowered revenue growth is the highlight. That’s what they and their investors focus on, with subscriber satisfaction being an afterthought. The price hikes haven’t shown any effect on that downward trend either. But hey, keep hiking I say. Fires burn bigger when fuel is added and these people can’t differentiate water from gasoline. Having washed my hands of this company, I’m looking forward to further scrambling when revenue growth is nil and then negative and the stock drops and drops and the corporatists wail.

This is exactly what I thought of. The wonder and awe of teleporters were forever lost to me and replaced by a Lovecraftian, world of Cthulhu-esque cosmic horror type dread. Let’s have some technological advances for bending time and space a la A Wrinkle In Time or Dune. Manipulate stuff that’s not my body.

Abusive is a perfect description. Exploitative too. I’ve always viewed store credit as a sucky refund policy. Offline. Whenever I discovered these, usually because I needed to return something, these shops lost my business.

And the above is not even the same situation when you really look at it. This person didn’t want to return something. They made a purchase they wanted to keep. Then Amazon just said, “oh, we’re repossessing that media and keeping your money. Feel free to use this store credit on something else for which we can repeat this scenario all over again at will. Have a great day!”