Disc or stream? Stream or Disc?

To quote myself (Rick, this is for you): "We are on the cusp of a transition matrix." Meaning, the digital convergence of the Internet, the networked television and widely available and inexpensive streaming content is nearly rivaling what we can purchase and own on optical disc.

So are we still buying movies on disks? I'm tapering off. It seems like most every movie I have (over 400) on my shelf are available on Netflix--many streaming--and Hulu, etc. And I've this pile of disks that are in the "to watch" list, which doesn't seem to get any smaller. How many of these that I have already watched will I watch again (aside from a relatively small handful of true favorites)?

It seems that more and more often I catch myself or the family watching a movie on cable or the computer and say, "We have that on disk" and am met with a shrug (even to myself).

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You can't really dismiss the streaming stuff due to quality any more. Sure, you may still have to suffer the occasional buffer/stutter but that's going to be the first of all issues resolved by the providers and hardware and network (am I leaning away from "net neutrality" here? No, but that's a different topic altogether). Even YouTube is now touting 1080p resolutions and they're providing commerical streams as well as the Niagra of amateur offerings. And it's all legal, too. Movie content owners have seen what happened to the Music industry. They're not fighting it, they're going with the flow--or trying to own the flow. If piracy is in your bent then there's an even bigger hose to drink from.

What that means for our loved Optical Discs is that when it comes to the commitment of purchase, I'm just down to the Really Big movies. Kaboom movies where you want the uncompressed sound and really optimum viewing experience (i.e., without the aforementioned apologies of buffer/stutter/compression), or in cool packaging--like the Star Trek Target disk where the disks are stored in the Saucer Section of the Enterprise!--or rare small ones that won't be available on-demand for a while (i.e., "The Wages of Fear", or early seasons of "Fringe"). A very few disc releases have good extra content disks which may or may not be available from Netflix (usually no).

And. of course, there's always the need to complete a series started long ago, before we got to this "cusp" between "own" and "use". Which brings me to the point of this ramble.

Harry Potter &THBP: buy? Netflix first and then decide? I've got the others in a mish-mash of DVD, HD-DVD (yeah, I'm that guy) and Blu-Ray. So there's the "complete the 'collection'" argument. And potentially it could be like Star Wars, where once a decade you want to pull out all the disks and re-watch them all in order. Or do I wait until juuust before The Deathly Hallows comes out in theaters for a reprise before waiting in line opening night?

As a complete aside, yes, I would like to rip all these 400 movies to my network store, but even letting them run overnight that's a year or more of very organized effort. The Ektachrome slide trays I have stacked in the family room attest to my will on such endeavors. To say nothing of the Terabytes of disk that would in fact pay for years of Netflix subscription. Ah, the trevails of the 21st century.