Apple TV

I just have a hard time trusting that purchasing digital versions of TV and movies will actually stay mine for as long as I want; that the company won’t someday say, “sorry, we’re making an upgrade,” or “our contract ended and we don’t have rights for that anymore.” Just look at what happened to people who “bought” titles with Funimation and were told this month the service will be shut down and merged into Crunchyroll, but they’ll lose their library of redeemed titles because Crunchyroll doesn’t support them. Of course, Apple will probably be a more stable business than Funimation, but do you want to pay close to the same price as a DVD/Blu-ray and never know if you’ll really be able to keep them?

If you’re concerned about scratching physical discs, you can always rip them and use something like Plex or Jellyfin to play them to a smart TV or streaming device. Once they’re digitized the physical discs can be stored out of the way, where you only need to access them if you want the special features (assuming you didn’t digitize those also) or need to fix a bad rip. There’s certainly an upfront cost in hard drives and you need to learn how to rip and transcode the discs, but if you still have the physical discs it’s much harder for a studio to prevent you from enjoying the content you’ve purchased.