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