My Movies and TV

I'm a child of the 70s and 80s.  Movies and TV were a big part of growing up.  We had no internet or cell phones, so that was our entertainment.  About the only entertainment, aside from books.  You know.  Paper-based books.  

I'm in that crossover generation, though, Generation X.  We aren't Boomers, so the concept of digital things don't bother us.  Our technology advancement into word processors, then computers, then handheld devices, all happened in our prime.  So we had to adapt, and we did so enthusiastically.  However, we also retain the cynicism and skepticism of Boomers, plus we remember the days of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, David Brinkley, Ted Koppel, Peter Jennings, etc. Actual fact-based journalism, not headline-driven and click-driven lies like the Fox News, NewsMax, etc. of today. So, that location in between advancement and historical integrity have resulted us being pigeonholed as a forgotten and sandwiched generation.  And, frankly, I love it.  I feel bad for future generations, like all older people do, that they just don't know what they don't know and have passionate opinions about things they simply don't fully understand.  Boomers thought that about us too, and of course, every previous generation is correct.  Age and wisdom do that.  However, newer generations are always more open minded to try new things, so I'm at least aware enough to realize that there are things I don't care for with newer generations that I may simply not understand.  They aren't necessarily bad.

But I digress.  I'll have a much bigger entry about that later.  This is about entertainment.  

So, for decades, seeing movies was done in a theater only, until the big three networks started having things like the "Saturday Night Movie" or "Sunday Night Movie," which were always a few years old.  In the early 80s, the VHS vs BetaMax home video tape wars began. This coincided with advent of cable television, which brought entire channels of movies 24/7 to the home.  So many of us with access to said cable remember spending hours watching Home Box Office, now HBO or HBO Max.  

I remember living in Broken Arrow Oklahoma in 1981, where I first had cable television, and got a taste of movies-at-home.  The first day we had HBO, I remember seeing Young Frankenstein, which I was too young to grasp. Then Black Beauty.  I've talked to others who had similar experiences at similar ages and we all seemed to have grown up on the same movies.  Better Off Dead, Revenge of the Nerds, Gotcha, Zapped, Porky's, Hamburger the Movie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Up the Academy, Midnight Madness, Cannonball Run, Smokey and the Bandit, Private School, The Flamingo Kid, The Hollywood Knights, etc.  Just a lot of low budget comedies with memorable and repeatable lines of humor that defined us.  Full of lines I probably still recite today.  I laughed at a few I thought of while typing this that I still say today that no one born in 1990 or beyond would know where in the hell I got it.  

The problem with cable movie networks like HBO, Cinemax, The Movie Channel, etc., were that you had to watch what they had airing, at the time you were watching.  No control or selection.  That's where VHS/BetaMax came into play.  We could buy videotapes of movies we WANTED to watch, at any time we wanted to watch them, as often as we wanted to watch them. VHS as a format won because porn adopted it.  This same concept would happen with Blu Ray and streaming.  For some reason, porn, which was always safer in the privacy of your home rather than public theaters, sold a lot more home video tapes, discs, etc. than any mainstream movie, so those formats tended to win the public favor. 

Through the 80s, VHS tapes and VCRs became more and more popular, as they also allowed you to record shows off the television to watch later, which was a very convenient innovation for the increasingly double-income households where parents worked and kids were left to their own devices. The industry dabbled in Laserdisc technology, but the discs were too large and expensive to break the market.  Heck VHS tapes, as low quality as they might have been, and as limited of a life tape had, still cost $50-$100 a tape.  

Moving into the 90s, video stores would take it up a notch to RENT video tapes to customers, which made them unnecessary to purchase outright, and still watch whenever they wanted.  This became a big deal in the late 80s and early 90s.  The Friday night pizza and a movie concept, all at home.  Theaters were still doing well, but VHS rentals were a thing.  I worked at both Blockbuster and Alfalfa Video stores, and loved the whole scene.  Movies playing all the time on our televisions, talking with people about movies, etc.  For an older teen/early adult, it was the scene, man.

In the mid-90s, DVDs broke, making the quality of movies much better than VHS tapes, and lasting much longer.  They took up less shelf space at the rental stores and big box stores too. Bringing entertainment home got easier and easier.  This eventually led to the Blu Ray/HD-DVD format wars similar to VHS/BetaMax.  As mentioned, porn made Blu Ray the winner.  Sony Playstation did too, since Sony was the creator of Blu Ray. 

The minute High Definition capabilities were in the home by the early 2000s, and prices for digital media had dropped to very affordable levels, collecting and buying whatever personal entertainment desires one wanted, had become ubiquitous.  Personally, I bought my first HD TV with my bonus from Chase in 2005.  It was an enormous Sony HDTV.  Cost about $3000, if I remember correctly.  I ended up selling it to my in-laws, who had it for years.

The turnaround time for new movies to be released onto Blu Ray and DVD got faster and faster, delivery of rentals got easier with the advent of Netflix (by mail), and still theaters had a robust business.  Granted, movie home collections took up a lot of space.  Sometime around 2009, as the merger or digital media, internet, the rise of smartphones and wi-fi were making things ripe for complete home collections in the digital world, and elimination of physical media.  Netflix had begun the concept of streaming directly to TVs in 2007, so a couple of years of small growth had intrigued me enough to ditch the Sony HD TV and upgrade to a Sharp Aquos, which had an onboard Netflix app.  We didn't need anything extra.  Granted the speed wasn't great and the buffering was an irritant, but calling on movies and television seasons on demand was absolutely fascinating.  

This new technology only vastly improved.  It served the interest of children, who were babysat with channels and videos of all their favorite cartoons and shows, like Blue's Clues, Winnie the Pooh, Power Rangers, etc. It served the interest of adults, who didn't have to get babysitters to have a dinner and movie night, and didn't have to fight the crowds and inventory limitations of video stores. The concept of home movie/tv watching just kept getting easier and easier.

My collection of DVDs and Blu Rays was huge.  I wanted to be able to have a single storage, and on-demand way to access all my collection.  There was no Vudu, or similar service, yet, so my impatient self grabbed onto the Sony BDP-CX960 400-disc DVD/Blu Ray changer.  It was huge, heavy and not entirely user friendly, but it was a home storage player for my whole collection.  In fact, it wasn't enough.  I had TV seasons of shows on DVD that spanned 9-10 discs, so I sucked up 400 pretty fast.  I seriously considered buying a second one and daisy-chaining them to my TV, but these players were about $700, so getting one was stupid enough.  This was 2010, though, and I wasn't about to sit around and wait for owning my library in the cloud.  My desire to digitize my entire life became my main goal.  I wanted to own nothing physical.  The cloud was becoming ubiquitous and the applications of such technology seemed endless.  I was premature, though.  Vudu began growing as a concept, especially after it was purchased by Wal-Mart in 2010, to eventually an industry partnership call Ultraviolet in 2012.  As a result, I didn't keep my Blu Ray changer long.

For the next couple of years, I would use Vudu's at-home service to convert my home media to digital media, then sell those home media items online or at Half Price Books and Movie Trading Company.  Fast forward to today, where I have nearly 1000 movies and TV seasons all in the cloud.  I have probably 5 or 6 actual home media discs, and that's just because the rights of those items have not been made available to digital distribution.  

The funny thing is, the difference is in "ownership."  Instead of owning a physical media that is always mine, retains some amount of value, and can be gifted, sold, etc to other people, my Vudu and Apple "owned" movies and TV shows give me the lifetime "license" to play those movies and shows at my whim.  The technology is still relatively new and laws have not really kept up.  I've given several family members access to my whole catalog, including my kids, so the entertainment content can be enjoyed for many years beyond my life.  I am curious if there will ever be a time when laws will dictate that "licenses" run out when someone dies and cannot be transferred, but that would seem stupid.  They all sit in the cloud or a digital "locker" and are accessed by an account that I don't predict will ever go away, at least not anytime soon. 

I've been curious too as the ability to have this digital locker should the company go out business.  For instance, Wal-Mart sold Vudu to Fandango-At-Home in 2024.  Nothing has changed for me except the branding of the app, but if Fandango-at-Home goes away, what then?  Ultraviolet, which I mentioned earlier, was created in the early 2010s by the overall movie industry (for the most part), which morphed into Movies Anywhere.  My Vudu/Fandango-at-Home account, as well as my Apple account, synchs with it to provide a digital locker safeguard that, should Fandango-at-Home or Apple, or any other service, go out of business, Movies Anywhere (the industry) knows I "own" them, and would be accessible via their app.  So, I feel pretty protected.  But we will see.

In the meantime, internet connectivity and devices have advanced so that pulling up anything I own that I want to watch, happens in a multitude of ways, at lightning speed.  Everything I ever wanted, from my earliest of childhood days, are a button away.  Shows like Land of the Lost, Moonlighting, Twin Peaks, Dallas, etc., which all change rights with different networks and streaming services all the time, stay right in my locker and are part of my watching pleasure any time I want.  I hope my kids, grandkids, etc can continue to watch all the stuff I've enjoyed since I was a wee lad, for decades to come.  As the fractured nature of streaming services are making it near impossible to pick a la carte, as they originally promised, and the growth into more cable-like structures occurs, it's becoming cheaper simply to buy what I like, or even buy what I haven't seen but want to, rather than pay for endless services.