People, in general, don’t care. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, more that they just don’t notice until she show they searched for isn’t available and then they shrug it off and move on to another one they can watch. Most people I know don’t want to keep large catalogs around if things they like because they only watch a single movie a few times in their lives. They watch it and then they’re good for years or more. There’s so much content out there that there’s no way they’re going to rewatch things and there’s no way they’re going to miss it because they’re having enough trouble keeping up with all the new stuff. On top of that, the convenience of just turning on the tube and hitting play vs trying to find the disc, and store and organize it is huge. And ripping it and then keeping a large amount of storage locally, online and healthy for the purpose is out of their technical wheel house. (And budget at times)

Honestly, I’m a big proponent for buying physical media… but I’ve greatly reduced what I rip/buy/keep, just knowing there’s only so much time left on my personal hourglass and I’ve got better things to do than worrying about all that up keep. When I kick the bucket, no one is going to care about it all. Maybe they’ll keep a few interesting ones but they’ll likely just sit on someone else’s shelf. In the mean time, how many times am I really going to watch some of these things?

my collection is small compared to some, but ive got about 22 4tb drives in use in various arrays.. but its mostly video.