DVDs are still not bad if someone really wants to buy a movie. Cheaper than BluRay and with much weaker DRM. Video is very low quality in today’s standards, but bitrate and autio quality is better than any streaming.
DVD bitrate is only 9.8 Mbit and uses this very inefficiently due to the use of MPEG-2 encoding. When DVD was invented we did not have the processing power in affordable hardware for better codecs. Streaming services can do at least twice that bitrate and with much, much better codecs. Audio quality is similar, streaming services actually have higher bitrate audio than most DVDs (AC-3 at 448 kbit on DVD vs ~770 kbit EAC-3 on streaming). DTS could have higher bitrates (it was either 768 kbit or 1.5Mbit) but only supported 5.1 channels.
I get not defending the use of DVD over Blu-Ray at this point, but the downsides of streaming and digital “ownership” have been a sizeable portion of tech news for a while.
And honestly? US/Canada using the standardized protocol and Europe using the walled garden developed by an eviler-than-normal corporation sounds kinda backwards from the cultural differences between US and Europe we usually hear.
iMessage is the same though… It only falls back to sms when required (like everything else) and people hate it when it does.
