From DVDs to e-subscriptions: how we've given up on owning our own purchases, and where this is leading.

You have no power here

In 2021, the Google Arts & Culture Lab recreated the lost works of Klimt. Three of his paintings survived only as black-and-white photos, the originals having been destroyed by the Nazis. But now, experts using AI and the surviving fragments were able to bring the original paintings back to life.

Philosophy (recolored with Artificial Intelligence)

In addition to recovering paintings from old photographs, we now know how to recover them from X-rays as well. It is no secret that artists of the past occasionally painted new pictures over the old ones on their canvases. Moreover, unscrupulous owners sometimes cut canvases to fit them into new frames, losing precious parts of the image. As such, technology has helped restore Rembrandt's "Night Watch" or reveal secret paintings by Van Gogh or Picasso.

But technology now makes it possible not only to derive "images from images" but also from descriptions. For example, artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo and University of Madrid student Paula García, who wrote her dissertation on the use of AI in contemporary sculpture, were able to reconstruct a Velázquez lost in a fire. They used a textual description by historian Antonio Palomino, as well as a small sketch found in a private collection. With the help of MidJourney, Sanchez and Paula were able to get a decent result after spending 100 hours restoring the painting.

Sánchez Castillo's AI-aided reconstruction of Velázquez's 'Expulsion of the Moriscos'

We as humanity have lost quite a few irreplaceable artifacts from history and art. Examples include the Library of Alexandria and other such losses of our ancient written heritage. No less grandiose fires, thefts, and other tragedies have destroyed many paintings from personal collections over the last century. So what's wrong if someone still can't even finish a piece on their own, and now we have to wait for ChatGPT to finish what was the end of the Ice and Flame feud?

Major losses are causes for grief, but have you noticed the everyday losses right under your nose? Have you bought something you thought would last forever, and lo and behold, even without a fire or break-in, you’ve lost it? Check through your digital library, chances are a lot of stuff in there has gone missing.

From digital media to digital subscriptions

Back in 1999, an American company launched a pioneering subscription project. Before that, most Americans were accustomed to going to a video rental shop to pick up a VHS for maybe a week. This company, however, offered to send DVDs right to your home by mail, letting you return them when you want without any overdue fees. Of course, the original concept changed over time, evolving into a monthly set-fee subscription for a limited number of disks that the customer returned by mail at their own expense.

Time passed, technology developed, and the Internet allowed streaming to become more and more of a thing. YouTube appeared, and now, the company that sent its billionth DVD by mail in 2007 has also opened an online service with a framework already familiar to its users: pay once a month, get a collection of the best movies from a wide library of about a thousand movies, which at that time was more than the popular brick-and-mortar rental places had. Although the online library was smaller than the company's full catalog of mailable DVDs, the project was very warmly received — a complete success. The company, which started with the rather risky idea of mailing out DVDs without a rental deadline, soon became Netflix, a global household name, which has carved out its place in the monthly spending habits of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

The magic of light and sound

Thanks to the convenience of Netflix and similar services, we’ve barely noticed how we've totally given up on building collections of our own. True, by paying for subscriptions we get much more than we could by buying each item. All these services offering tons of music, movies, games, and books give us instant access to content and… at some point we realize that it was all just a rental. A rental with no late fees.

Playstation 5 without a removable drive

Most laptops and computers lost their removable drives quite some time ago. Apple's last MacBook with a built-in disk drive came out back in 2012, twelve years ago. And understandably so: the internet had evolved, the cloud or reusable compact media have become more prominent for sharing information, and storage has become dominated by digital platforms. Movies? It’s all on Netflix. Games? Steam has taken over, providing more than just games since 2005. Paintings? All you need is Instagram and museum websites. Knowledge? For all the controversy over the impartiality of Wikipedia, it's still the number one encyclopedia in the world. Why clutter up your shelves at home when you have a full catalog of human knowledge on your phone?

It's hard to say who was the first to notice the catch: gamers, movie buffs, music lovers, or other fans of art, but most likely it was the former. In the early days of the digital distribution of games, the boxed versions were no different from the electronic versions. If a game "went gold," it meant that the developers finished their work and sent the final version of the game for disk production and certification. Then, the eager gamer bought the game in the store and ran home, and even without internet, everything just worked. Sometimes it involved loading data from a second disk or entering a complex code from the box while starting the game, but the Internet was not required. Still, every program has bugs, and games are just highly complex programs. The game industry offered patches, which were sent on extra disks so that players could get a better experience (and sometimes just one that works). The Internet solved this problem: if there was a bug, they’d roll out the patch, and the player would download it, and nothing had to be mailed.

The absurdity of all this has snowballed to the point where the term "first day patch" is not even frowned upon in the gaming industry anymore. On the contrary, games are berated when they don't have a major update on day one to fix all the bugs. In 2016, No Man's Sky was released, which went gold so raw that Gordon Ramsay would have screamed his vocal chords right out had the developers been cooks. And in 2022, the Call of Duty series reached its apogee with the release of Modern Warfare 2, on a disk that had only 70 megabytes of data, and the remaining 150 gigabytes had to be downloaded from the Internet. Naturally, offline play was out of the question.

But even before that 70-megabyte disk, the platforms had set the trend by releasing a generation of game consoles without removable media in 2020. Xbox Series S and Playstation 5 "slim" cost less than their bulkier counterparts with a removable drive and let owners buy games directly from the platform's online stores or use their subscription services for a small monthly fee to access all the games. Considering that, two generations earlier, people used consoles not only to play games but also to watch movies (because why buy a DVD player when a console can play movies), the trend toward abandoning disks was inescapable.

This content is no longer available

That is, in your region, and it is more and more of an everyday reality. Aside from the predictable copyright issues in different regions and how dramatically users in Russia and the CIS, for example, have lost access to their content libraries after the sanctions, this kind of thing is increasingly found all over the world. In some locations, Netflix can't agree with the state on broadcasting and cuts off access to a certain American show. In another, the royalties due to creators make the service unprofitable. In yet another, due to a breakdown in rights negotiations, a movie available in Europe can’t be viewed in America. And to think, there used to be no problem buying a Blu-ray off the shelf. Then, the almighty algorithm showed that some movies were too unpopular to waste data center space on them. We're getting ever closer to living in an episode of Black Mirror, where the algorithm tells us what we should watch and then deletes everything else forever.

In gaming, the situation is no better. A developer can shut down the game servers, and although a single-player game used to still be available on disk, thanks to the fact that patches now make up the bulk of the game, it’s literally game over. And it doesn't even matter if the game was purchased directly or as part of a subscription. It's done, it's gone.

The game The Crew is not even ten years old yet, but you can't legally play it if you bought the electronic version. And there are no day-one patches or add-ons for the existing disks

In the gaming world, there are services like GOG that preserve old games and the possibility to legally purchase and play them, but how long will that last? It’s still a digital purchase, and what are the chances you’ll be able to play Heroes of Might and Magic 3 ten or twenty years from now? The answer used to be simple: as long as I have the disk and keep it in good condition, I can always reinstall it. Well, these days, the disk gives you 70 MB of the game and good luck getting on the other 99% of it.

If you think only gamers are out of luck, think again. Every year Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and other services remove dozens of titles from their libraries for good. And they also remove content that was unique to their online platforms without any DVDs or cinema runs. As a result, a mini-series called The Secret Society of Mr. Benedict released in 2021 probably gained a few fans, but since last year, all they can do is tell their friends how much they liked it because, at some point, Disney removed it along with a bunch of other content from their streaming services, including stuff found nowhere else. This has reached such a level of absurdity that the 2023 movie Crater was released on Disney+ on May 12 of last year and less than two months later, on June 30, it was erased from their online library. Did the movie have a DVD or theatrical release? No. Where can you watch it? Nowhere. That's when the public noticed its disappearance and of course, Disney conceded by re-releasing the movie on other venues three months later. But that's just a lucky drop in the ocean thanks to the hype it got. Fans of Mr. Benedict are still waiting.

Canceled creators, censorship, the whims of creators, algorithms, and the strategies of upper managers — today, all this and more can spirit away titles that you thought you had paid for at any moment. This stands even for titles not covered by subscription but bought separately. Control over the arts now lies in the hands of publishers, not consumers.

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum

"Wait a minute," you say, "It's all about legal access, we all understand... You know..." And I understand and wink back at you, not suspiciously at all.

We all know what we’re talking about

Of course, pirate sites and torrents, no matter how many times the authorities take them down, always bounce back. In 2023, a study found that about 87% of games simply can't be played without resorting to piracy or similar techniques, and that number will only grow. Games will be hacked, books will be scanned, music and movies will be downloaded from streams and reuploaded as long as there is demand and it will all be published on the internet. Ironically, this dynamic resembles how it used to be with physical media. You find a long-lost movie CD and then share it with your friends and so on. It gets copied and distributed, viewed under a blanket in a darkened room with the internet turned off. Our parents and grandparents would probably be proud of us. Some people copied rare books, some passed around a torrent of the Ninja Turtles — to each generation its own.

Fun fact — for a short period of time, Spotify owned μTorrent. This came about because Spotify wanted to hire Ludwig Striegeus and to keep him focused on his μTorrent brainchild, Daniel Ek bought out Ludwig's project in exchange for a 5% stake in Spotify. It’s a good tip on how to hire a great programmer who has a pet project.

But there's an important point here, or even two. First, pirating still isn’t legal and we don't recommend it. Neither pirate downloading nor distribution is legal in most countries. In some places, of course, it is overlooked, but in others, for downloading a movie torrent one night, you can go to jail for a few years or pay a debilitating fine. Second, everyone who has used torrents, even without intent to piracy, knows that there is nothing sadder than the inscription "Seeds: 0" except maybe, "Last Seeded 5 years ago." Yes, the world of torrents is very tough on quality. If a project is not even needed by the pirates, it is history. There are quite a few games that have never been hacked. There are quite a few shows, series, and movies that are simply not available for download or purchase anymore.

Digital subscription services have effectively pushed aside much of the Pirate Bay crowd. It is easier for a person to buy legally than to search for torrents without viruses, miners, or other annoyances using a proxy or Tor. It is more convenient to pay a small amount legally and listen to thousands of tracks a day on Spotify than to download the same mp3s for free and without SMS.

What's next

In September 2023, Netflix mailed its last DVD. It might seem that DVDs have been relics for a long time already, but they’ve been discontinued by the world’s biggest streaming service, which essentially started the whole thing, only just recently. But they have been discontinued nonetheless. DVD sections have been removed from major retail chains, and many titles are being released directly to online services, bypassing the cinemas. If earlier a fire could destroy decades worth of a movie studio’s output, now, even if you have impeccable fire precautions, you can still lose a beloved media library that you’d otherwise share with your children and grandchildren down the line.

So what to do about it all? There is no clear answer. Physical copies will probably continue to disappear. Collector's items will probably continue to be reissued to take up space on people's shelves. If you want to show your great-grandchildren the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you'll probably be able to do that without any problem. But as for something rare, you're going to have to get creative.

Limited edition of the six Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies with artbooks. Yeah, there are 30 disks in the set

At one time, I had to buy a VHS cassette at a Japanese auction (as I was in another country) just to watch the first ever clip of my favorite music band. But at least the cassette existed! It’s called Vaughn and it's still on my shelf. But this video just wasn't available online at the time of purchase. Finding something rare and trying to get a physical copy as an artifact can be a very memorable adventure, but if the release is entirely digital, with a single server cleanup, it’s utterly lost.

I guess, looking at how things have unfolded from the beginning, to be sure we preserve our memories we all just have to start taking notes. Who knows, maybe in the future, neural networks will be able to recover lost digital art from our recordings, reviews, and let’s-plays and that's the only way we'll be able to show our grandchildren what it was like when we were kids. Cherish your memories and nostalgia, and share in the comments what lost digital art you miss. Maybe something has disappeared from your collection as well? Maybe you're the kind of person who bought Concord? 😀

For example, I think the 2012 Deadpool game doesn't deserve to be forgotten among Activision's cancellations. They would have made so much money buying the rights back and releasing a remaster now, ugh.