Digital Media Ownership

Australia Broadcast Center

24-06-2025

THOMAS MIDENA, REPORTER: Movies, music, books and games... do we even own them anymore? As the world around us turns more and more digital, and almost everything can now be downloaded or streamed, it's becoming harder to know if the media we buy, or "buy access to", will still be ours in the years to come. Even if it's physically in our hands!
Take the Nintendo Switch 2. It's the fastest-selling game console ever, but its physical games come with an interesting quirk. Some of these come how you'd expect. They've got a game cartridge inside. Plug it in, play. Some of these other ones say "game key card", meaning there's just an empty cartridge inside. You've got to take it home and download all the files yourself before you can play. These empty carts will be useless if Nintendo's servers ever go down, or the company decides to stop serving up the game files. And some people see this as yet another step towards paying for access to content that we don't get to keep.
PERSON: Most things we have are downloaded now, like Netflix has pretty much everything now. But we still have DVDs that we use like on special occasions when Netflix doesn't have it and stuff.
PERSON: I think when I was young there were DVDs here and there. But most of my life that has been streaming.
PERSON: Sometimes I watch movies on DVD that I like can't find on streaming and usually get those from the library, but other than that music, most of other stuff it's streaming.
PERSON: I only watched DVDs as a kid but now I just do streaming media like Netflix and Disney Plus.
(0:10:35) I've gotten rid of all my physical stuff. Because I collect comics and I read lots of books and used to have lots of DVDs and yeah I've replaced all of it. It's like, it's just too cumbersome.
DR KATE SANSOME, UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE: So like historically, you would have say a collection of DVDs and books and CDs in your cabinet at home. And now it's all just like online media libraries and the majority of the time people are just subscribing to streaming services to get access to digital media.
Dr Kate Sansome is a researcher who's very interested in this stuff.
Does anyone ever say, "Kate, you're looking Sansome today"?
KATE SANSOME: No, I've never heard that before.
That's the first time?
And she reckons there's a few key reasons our digital entertainment has changed so much in recent years.
KATE SANSOME: And the first one is probably the most obvious and that's just like technological innovation. So we now have like cloud computing. So these services like Netflix and Spotify, they can provide like cloud-based computing where you can access really large libraries. And so now you can access these media libraries from like your phone or your car or on your TVs.
KATE SANSOME: The second one is in response to the global financial crisis in 2007 where you saw like a real shift in consumption towards like this access-based consumption. So historically you might have gone on to iTunes and maybe have bought like an album for $15. If you've got like a competitor, like Spotify, that's a much more attractive offering, if you can pay $15 and get a huge library of music
KATE SANSOME: And I guess the third one is around piracy.
Because you wouldn't steal a car.
KATE SANSOME: Yes. Again, around that time, a lot of people were pirating movies and TV shows. And so if these kind of companies were able to offer a cheaper subscription-based model where it's really convenient, you can have easy access then that's like one way to kind of deter people from stealing media online.
So while new digital platforms can be cheaper for consumers and make more money for entertainment companies, they also take away some of the control and ownership that we used to have. Because with ever-changing licenses and agreements, shows and movies on streaming sites and digital stores can sometimes simply disappear.
PERSON: In the back of my mind, I'm a bit concerned by it. Like I hate to think how much music I've bought and movies through like Apple Music. If that ever disappeared, I'd be a lot of money out.
PERSON: I feel like we're sort of losing ownership of what we can actually watch, because we don't really own the shows and movies that we buy. And now it's just like if it disappears from streaming, you can't watch it again, or you can hope that you can watch it again.
PERSON: We're just losing the preservation of all this art by going digital, digital, digital and things that aren't making money are getting cut off. So I think, yeah, we're losing art. We're losing people's talent and losing people's work.
KATE SANSOME: It should be much more transparent to the consumer. There is some changes in the law like in overseas, in California. They've just introduced a bill where streaming services or like video game providers, they have to actually disclose that it's a license and they're not actually buying. And then there are some platforms like Steam have just started to change the language there so that it says you're renting a license and you're not actually buying a product.
Some concerned customers are turning to alternative online stores, which remove restrictions and theoretically let you keep your purchase forever. And others are turning back to good old-fashioned reliable physical media.
PERSON: This is why we need DVDs, because like once something goes off Netflix or something like that, we're not going to be able to watch it ever again. So it's good to have it physical and now you don't have any DVD shops anymore and it's just sad that we're losing that.
There are some DVD shops, I'm inside one right now, right?
STEPHEN VINCENT ZIVKOVIC, GALACTIC VIDEO: Right. Galactic Video has been here for 30 years, and we've got no plans to go anywhere anytime soon. People like to pick up a DVD or Blu-ray, it's a tactile experience. There are also a lot of films and TV shows that are not available on streaming services but they have been released onto physical media in the past. So our customers come in and rent or buy those.
Now I'm in a different shop. For much of the 20th century, records were the way to listen to recorded music. And a lot of people just like holding them, and looking at them! This is a real thing no one can take away from me.
SHOP ATTENDANT: Are you going to pay for that?
Probably not.
Vinyl records started to fall out of fashion in the 80s as smaller, cheaper CDs arrived. Then in the noughties, iPods, with their capacity for 1,000 songs. But in the age of streaming, vinyl records have actually made a huge comeback. Here in Australia, vinyl sales have been growing consistently for the past decade.
KATE SANSOME: We do have like a vinyl player at home, like a record player at home, so I don't often listen to it, but I will just have it kind of like shown on the shelf.
Today over 90% of video games sold and music listened to is digital. But while it may seem that the ease and value of digital platforms has won out, not necessarily. Printed books are still more popular than ebooks.
PERSON: I think it's all going to be digital one day. Not that we necessarily want it to be, but that's just the way the world's heading. We literally saw a video of this girl and her older sister gave her a DVD and she had no idea what it was. So it's not looking promising.
PERSON: I feel like it'll come back again. Because these days people are very into DVDs again.
PERSON: It's like with streaming, everything is locked behind a paywall, so DVDs are always just the best option.
PERSON: I think like records and stuff like that, I think that's coming back because it's more of a novelty. But I think that due to its lack of accessibility, it's probably gonna continue to be wiped out, I think.
PERSON: I'm mainly just stick mine on the wall, but I'm thinking about getting some worthwhile ones and just getting a vinyl player cause it's just whilst you have like Spotify and Apple music like that's OK, but it's always good to just have the sincerity of an actual physical music player.
PERSON: Having the digital version of everything available, it makes the actual music and videos all lose value. Because if you can just have whatever you want, then what is even the point in it anymore, I think.