I grew up with physical media--LP's, tape cassettes, CDs, videotape, DVD, then Bluray.
I, like a lot of other people, was amazed by the library a simple streaming subscription could bring. First with Netflix, then with Spotify.
I slowly lost track of my physical media and eventually became 100% dependent on streaming services.
I was happy. Netflix had a huge library, almost everything I'd want to watch was there. Spotify had almost every artist I wanted to listen to (except for Joanna Newsome, god bless her harp playing soul).
Then the cracks started to show: A movie I planned to watch was no longer available, a seven-season TV series moved to a different service while I was season five. A show produced by the company that owned the service moved that show to another service it also owned to encourage me to have multiple subscription.
Then the pattern emerged: low prices combined with a big library, and once you subscribed, things would slowly disappear, and prices would slowly rise. In short: enshittification.
I started noticing that DVDs at the thrift store were $2-3 bucks. What if instead of spending $15-$20/month for temporary access to a mercurial and mutating library, I bought DVDs that I could keep forever (?) and re-watch and share with friends.
That was about 3 years ago. I currently have 425 movies, 65 TV series of 819 episodes with a total run time of 54 days, 2 hours and 55 minutes.
Along the way, I've found DVDs that sell for as little as 2 for $1! That's 40 movies a month for the price of Netflix standard ad-free tier!
I've told myself to stop buying them, because, though I usually buy things I've seen already, I have a massive backlog of things I haven't seen at all.
It's kind of funny to me how upset people get when a popular show like The Office or Friends gets moved to a different streaming service. It's hilarious to me that people will spend $15 a month for years just to have access to a show they could buy outright for $39!
It's also nice to sit down with a friend and watch a movie with a curated selection of things instantly available without having to see what service its on.
And after a while, I realized that without streaming video, I didn't need a home internet connection--about $30-$40/month. Instead I could get buy with a 15-gigabyte mobile hotspot, which is about $15 extra to my cell phone plan.
While 480p—particularly at high bitrates—is acceptable for some use cases, I'd much rather use a debrid service with Stremio to access anything at their typically highest resolutions than look for affordable sub-par or expensive top-tier disc-based versions of my library.
If high resolution, high bitrate, downloadable digital releases could be purchased at affordable rates (most digital releases are designed with streaming in mind, and thus have low bitrates compared to Blu-Ray releases), that would be a different story.
I find I can adapt to anything provided I stick with it consistently. I remember plugging in Buffy and finding dark scenes blocky and almost unwatchable, but I did get used to it. Re-playing the original Thief is rough going at first, but eventually you settle into it.
I also find that DVD upscaling is doing a lot of work and they seem standard with players these days.
I'm planning a streaming server in the future, but for now I'm managing video with physical media.
For music, I have a hybrid system of CDs for the car, my hard drive for my computer/living room--shared with an LP player--and a digital music player for when I'm out.