I'm old school. I love having a physical book in my hand when I read. I like to dogear my magazines. I enjoy reading the liner notes of the CD I'm listening to. And it doesn't bother me to go upstairs, grab a DVD (or BluRay), come back downstairs, turn on my BluRay player, put the disk in, grab my remote, and watch my movie. Yes, there is a point to all that.

A buddy of mine asked me why I still buy “physical” entertainment. He stopped buying CDs, books, movies, etc. about a year ago. All he does is buy digital and either downloads it to his devices or keeps it on the Cloud and streams it whenever he wants. He was surprised that I, of all people, still buy physical media. Afterall, we do live in the Digital Age.

Yeah, I know we live in the digital age, duh! I'm totally into technology just as much as the next geek. I have a Facebook page, a Twitter account and an Instagram feed. In my house we have 4 laptops, 2 PCs, 6 video game systems, 3 iPods, 2 iPhone 5s, and an iPad. And there are only two of us living in the house. I'm totally into technology and I can't stand the idea of “owning” just a digital copy of anything and housing it on the Cloud. Why? Well, the Consumerist website can explain why.

Imagine if you bought a DVD of a movie and then one day when you go to play it, you get a message saying “Sorry, but the studio has decided you can’t watch this movie for the foreseeable future.”

This was the intro to the article that can be found here. Seriously, imagine you go downstairs to watch a movie. You choose your favorite move of all-time. You click the “Streaming” button. And you get the following message:

George Lucas has determined that the version of The Empire Strikes Back you are attempting to watch is no longer valid. Please stand by as we prepare to download The Empire Strikes Back – Special Edition 3D, version 2.0 (Now with more Jar-Jar!)

You think I'm kidding? Tell you what, why don't you read the rest of the Consumerist article and get back to me.

That Amazon Video You Bought? You May Not Actually Be Able To Watch It

Done reading yet? It's ok, I'll wait.

Ok. So now that you've read it, go back and re-read my little “George Lucas” joke. Yeah, not so funny now, is it?

Here's another scenario, however unlikely. You buy all your stuff digitally from Amazon and store it in the Cloud. What happens in a few years when the world goes crazy and Amazon goes out of business? What? Nobody thought AOL would go out of business. Hey, whatever happened to Buick? Mercury? I tell you, no business if 100% safe. Here's a different scenario, say you have to move to a place where they don't have broadband internet access? Yes, there are still places that don't have broadband (check out this map http://www.broadbandmap.gov/technology). No broadband access means no streaming. And if you lose your 1TB drive with all your music on it? It's heartbreaking when you think about it.

Just some to think about. Now, excuse me while I go change the album on the record player.

UPDATE: You think I'm crazy don't you? Well, it's happened again. Look what Amazon did to this lady's Kindle.

UPDATE #2: This one scares me even more. Apparently if your credit card expires (Gee, what are the chances of that happening?) so does access to your purchases.