And we've bought a dvd player...

 A day or so ago I tooted a link to an article from the NYT about rediscovering a DVD player and its advantages over streaming.

Well, we’ve been on a similar journey, and have just bought a DVD player to replace our broken fifteen year old unit. (Actually, we bought one twice - we'd forgotten about needing a multi-region player to watch overseas dvds - so we've now got a second dvd player connected to our old tv in the studio)

Now, we are not luddites. We have a fibre optic NBN connection and watch most of our tv as on demand tv - not that we watch a lot of tv, basically the evening news and an hour or two of recreational tv most nights - foreign language crime dramas and BBC classic dramas mostly. 

But, we live in a rural area. A trip to the cinema or the theatre involves an eighty kilometre round trip, and to be honest, the local cinemas are not known for their art house films, and we only get a touring Shakespeare performance once a year.

The content we tend to watch, classic movies, adaptations of classic novels, foreign language art house films and the like tend to spread fairly thinly over the various streaming services available.

And it was a friend who was volunteering at a community op shop that put us on to the fact that there’s a robust trade through op shops as well as ebay and other online trading sites on second hand dvd’s, mostly sitting around $10 - cheap enough to turn into a coaster if it’s a dud disk - making the cost of a multi region dvd player and few second hand dvd’s competitive with the cost of a streaming subscription, where basically you pay for content you don’t watch.

And of course, we can share dvd’s once we’ve watched them with friends...