Collecting stuff is a fantastic hobby. In my younger days, I would scour flea markets, yard sales, thrift stores, Craigslist, and eBay for the stuff I liked. I enjoy collecting entire artist discographies on CD whenever possible. Ditto comic books (mostly omnibus collections) and retro games (NES and SNES, if you're curious). Since I like to dabble with Docker applications, I used Koillection, an open-source utility that helps me keep track of my physical media easily.

When the format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray raged in the mid-2000s, plenty of early adopters and digital archivists bet on the format that ultimately lost. Their reasoning wasn't nostalgia or brand loyalty, but it came down to three practical advantages.

As we move further and further away from the heydays of the audio CD, things are getting a little muddled. Perhaps it wouldn't matter so much if physical media like vinyl, CDs, and cassettes were making a niche comeback among certain groups of people.

One of the strongest arguments for buying physical media in a digital world is the unwritten rule that "the disc is always the true version." It's long been the case that buying DVDs or Blu-rays allows access to original edits or missing episodes that aren't available on any streaming service. However, for one of my favorite shows, streaming has now become the version that's more faithful to the original.

Blu-ray may very well be the last physical media we get when it comes to video content, but if history had gone just a little differently, it would be HD-DVDs being frantically collected by media nerds today, and not Sony's gift to image quality purists.