People who were torrenting were not buying DVDs.

Besides, tormenting and setting up a Plex server is a lot more of a hassle than just paying $15/month and being able to stream from anywhere.

I think there are some people out there ripping DVD/Blu-ray to their own personal media servers who would now torrent.

Also you can stream Plex from anywhere these days. Even just casting from your smartphone to whatever device is very viable.

Yes, I realize that. There are Plex apps for everything. But then you have to worry about your Plex server being up, people’s upstream bandwidth is usually piss poor since most people have cable. On top of that if your device doesn’t support the same format that you encoded it in, the Plex server has to transcode.

That both limits the quality and puts more load on the server limiting the number of simultaneous streams.

Not to mention when torrenting you have to troll/trawl [1] the internet for a good high quality rips.

Or just using streaming service.

Since Disney is one of the four major studios that support MoviesAnywhere, you can buy a digital movie from any of the participating stores like from Apple, Google, Vudu, Amazon and they will automatically be available in your library from the other stores.

[1] British vs American spelling

The thing is … these days you’re often spending more like $45 a month, and it’s on the way up.

In the 90s I would spend the equivalent of £19 for an hour of star trek (£13 for the 90 minute tape is £29 in today's money).

I stopped once I could DCC them not due to the price, but because of availability. I could get the DCC the day after the episode was broadcast in the US, rather than 6 months later.

Still got a long way to go to get back to those costs, and the delay is no longer a thing (they seemed to have sorted out the ridiculous wait with the latest SNW season)

> People who were torrenting were not buying DVDs.

I am a counterexample, and there's never only one.

My usual workflow is:

1. Watch a movie on a streaming service. If I enjoy it:

2. Pirate a local copy. When the physical copy becomes available:

3. Rip the physical copy, delete the pirated version.

Without a physical release, there's no step 3, and step 1 becomes increasingly pointless.

And the majority of people aren’t doing that. You hardly ever hear the music industry complaining about piracy once iTunes and especially Spotify came online. “convenience beats free”.

I had a Plex server set up at home with over 1000 movies collected over the years from 2007 - 2020. It got to the point where I would just rather buy/rent a movie than deal with torrenting or the Plex server.

Eventually, I just copied all 2TB+ to AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive and got rid of it.

> People who were torrenting were not buying DVDs.

People who weren't tortenting were also not buying DVDs. Convenience, plus artificially low pricing (Disney claims to be losing money on D+), will always Trump long term interests in the majority of the population.