You don't own what you stream
Every streaming catalogue is a rental agreement with a marketing department attached. The word “Buy” on those pages is doing an enormous amount of work, and none of it is the work you think.
The licence problem
When you click Buy on a film in a digital storefront, you are not buying the film. You are buying a revocable licence to request that file from a server, for as long as three separate parties — the storefront, the rights holder, and the DRM vendor — all continue to agree that you may. Any one of them can end it. None of them owe you a refund, and the terms of service you accepted say so explicitly.
This is not hypothetical, and it is not rare:
- Titles vanish from “purchased” libraries when a regional licensing deal lapses.
- Whole storefronts have shut down and taken their DRM servers with them, bricking every file sold through them.
- Shows are pulled from platforms as tax write-offs — deleted, not sold on, deliberately made unavailable at any price.
- Remastered versions silently replace the cut you watched, and the original becomes unobtainable.
The industry term for the last one is version control. Yours is probably less polite.
Availability is not preservation
The counter-argument is convenience: why hoard files when everything is a search box away? Because “everything” is a rolling window, not an archive. A catalogue optimises for what is cheap to license this quarter. Anything outside the last decade of mainstream releases — foreign films, documentaries, out-of-print albums, unremastered concert footage, ordinary television that nobody is fighting over — drifts out of the window and does not come back.
The stuff that gets lost is never the stuff anyone is currently making money from. That is the whole mechanism.
Streaming solved distribution. It did not solve access, and it actively degraded preservation, because it replaced millions of scattered private copies with a handful of central ones under unified legal control.
The other half: they watch you watch
A licence server has to know who is asking. That means a permanent record of what you played, when, how far you got, where you were, and on what device — joined against an identity and a payment method. That data is retained, sold as “audience insight,” and disclosed under subpoena. Your local library card gets more legal protection than your streaming history does.
A file on your own disk played by your own server generates exactly one log line, on hardware you own, that you can delete.
What owning actually looks like
Owning media is unglamorous. It is a disk, a naming convention, and a backup. Concretely:
- Get a file. Buy DRM-free where it exists — Bandcamp, Blu-ray and DVD, GOG for games, plenty of independent publishers. Rip the discs you own. Where no honest option exists, understand your jurisdiction and make your own call; that is a decision with legal weight and it is yours, not mine, to make.
- Keep the good copy. Storage is cheap and re-acquiring is expensive. Do not re-encode your only copy to save 40 GB.
- Keep it readable. Open containers, standard codecs, metadata in files and filenames rather than locked in one application's database.
- Serve it yourself. Jellyfin is open source, runs on anything, and does not phone anyone.
- Back it up. A library on one disk is not a library, it is a countdown. Three copies, two media, one off-site.
The structural parts of that — layout, metadata, hardlinks, what to back up and what to accept losing — are their own subject. That's the next post.