The last time I bought a DVD, it was about a year ago, and it was only because BestBuy was having a Black Friday sale and had Clue for a whopping $5 (and seriously, how do you pass up Clue the movie? Tim Curry? Priceless!) Before that, I bought a couple of seasons of the West Wing. Nothing since.
I chalked most of that up to having A) a TiVo that records ridiculous amounts of free television for me, including enough West Wing and Law and Order reruns to make my head spin, B) being broke as a mo-fo, and C) having not a ton of free time.
But it’s quickly coming to the point where I’m over DVDs. They’re dead to me.
Over Thanksgiving, I saw a total of four movies, and only one of them was on DVD. (Kung Fu Panda is funny as hell, by the way.) And that was from Netflix, not something out of my own collection. The rest came from a variety of online sources and were all MUCH more convienent than a DVD: no going to the video store, no waiting for something to come in the mail and then sending it back, and no having to figure out where to plug the damn DVD player in because we ran out of TV inputs two video game systems ago…
TiVo with Amazon on Demand is my favorite so far. The collection isn’t stellar yet, but it’s the largest of the bunch and it’s pretty darn good. I rented “Get Smart” and “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the What the fuck was George Lucas Thinking” for a buck each (on sale), and sent them to my TiVo instead of watching them in my browser. When I tried this a few years ago, it took an hour for the download to start, two hours for it to finish, and you couldn’t start playing until it was done. Last night? Two minutes to start downloading and you could watch right away. Fucking brilliant.
Netflix Streaming isn’t half bad, either, although the collection is very limited right now. There’s a lot of old favorites that I haven’t seen, and now that it’s FINALLY Mac native I can watch it without waiting for my already overstressed MacBook Pro to boot Windows along side of OS X. It also just came out for TiVo, although I’ve found that to be a little buggy too (it won’t let me watch stuff in widescreen, just full.) It also has a nice collection of TV on demand, including the entire current season of Heroes. Even more than episodes than…
Hulu, the beast of free online video. They’re kicking YouTube’s ass up down and sideways right with their giant collection of free TV shows and movies. Things disappear (sometimes quickly) but it’s a great way to catch up on shows you may have missed last night or a week or two ago. And the movie collection doesn’t suck, either (Can you believe I’ve never seen “A League of Their Own”? Have now…got a little teary-eyed in the end…)
But then, there’s the one place DVDs still seem to kick ass: quality. For Christmas, my parents got a Samsung 46″ LCD TV with 1080p and 120Hz refresh, which makes things look…well just scarily real. I popped in “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” on DVD to test the machine and turned on all the fancy settings. It felt like I was hiding in the bushes spying on Frodo. The details were incredible. Of course, I also tried it with an episode of “The Office” through Netflix streaming, and it looked just as good…
So mabye DVDs aren’t quite dead yet, but they’ve got a foot in the grave as online media gets better and better.
