Im torn. On one hand yes everything is available digitally. On the other I like having hard copies and not thinking about backing up 3 hard drives and random hard drive failure and managing an even larger library on a computer…its nice just to have the media exist. And what happens when our ability to own media disappears (which looks to be a very real possibility).
They do take up space. I may keep the ones I really like and get rid of others.
I easily have over 300. Along with dvds, but im keeping those.
I get all the sides of this dilemma and I think it comes down to personal choice. I got rid of most of mine and kept a handful. Then we had kids and I herited an old TV/vid combo so they were able to watch my wife’s old Disney movies she’d kept. For a few years there they enjoyed a brief renaissance, but as they got older and less keen the tapes just take up space.
We can access every thing we want online, and, while the VHS does have that nostalgia, my children aren’t that into the novelty of it anymore and would prefer to stream stuff instead.
In terms of ownership, I struggle with which physical formats to retain. Musically I’ve kept my vinyl, but we’ve got 100s of CDs that I can’t bring myself to toss out. I’ve got a load of Blu-ray which is cool, but never gets played.
Even all the media files in my NAS are rarely used. It seems like IPTV is king or us at the moment, and physical media is somewhat redundant. But hey, we’ve got a basement, so there’s always the option to store them out of site, which is a workable compromise for now.
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