The Problem With Owning Movies Today

I don’t want to buy physical discs. They need a dedicated player and a place for storage. They have to be manufactured and sent around the world. I can’t play them on my iPads. But I can lend or resell them. I never owned a DVD or Blu-Ray player, only DVD-ROMs or DVD-Writer in notebooks. And I don’t plan on changing this. But…

To get decent movies – original audio language, sometimes with subtitles – there’s only one option: iTunes US. iTunes Germany doesn’t have the original soundtrack for all movies, Google Play only has German audio. That’s no news and I’m on iTunes US for a couple of years already.

But every time I want to buy movies or especially movie collections – like currently Indiana Jones or Star Trek (14 movies altogether for $105) – I wonder if I have, for some reason or the other, to abandon iTunes (because I switch to Android) or iTunes US (because Apple makes it impossible for non-US citizens to use it). That would mean I have to spend hundreds of dollars to buy these movies and TV shows again. But the same restrictions mentioned above will apply: no proper audio language and a chance of switching again.

This sucks.

Modern technology and the Internet are supposed to make things easier, not harder. I’m willing to spend money to support the people who created those movies, but I might have to buy the same movies again and again.

Pirating movies is not a solution. Apart from the negative effects on the creators of these movies, I have to store those movies somewhere. And I want to have access to all of them anytime and anywhere. From my iPads or other devices. And there’s a good chance I will replace my ordinary macOS devices with iOS or Android ones in private settings, so computer-local storage won’t help. And at least on iOS devices there’s no easy way to download those movies after setting up a new device.

Keeping pirated movies or any purchased movie which is not re-downloadable on some sort of network device means I have to run it all the time and I also have to create backups. This is time-consuming, costs additional money every month (you really want to have at least one online backup). It also means I have to micro-manage my tech stuff. If I’m not at home I can’t access my movies. And I also don’t want to run some NAS like the Synology ones to remedy some of the above problems somewhat.

Yes, I could use paid cloud storage, but this means to pay for pirated movies every month again and again for years and decades. Quite contradictory.

So I’m back to square one. Wondering if I should buy those movies.

Update

I bought the Indiana Jones collection. ¯\(ツ)/¯