Sell off my Blu Ray's and go strictly VUDU?

[perezil]

Re: Sell off my Blu Ray's and go strictly VUDU?

There are two issues that quickly come to mind.
1. Is it legal to sell my physical media once I perform the Disc to Digital conversion. I suspect that the original media must be kept even if you paid for the D2D.
2. This like any other cloud based service is based on trust and expectations. There is no guarantee that the future will ever be in your favor. You can not control what others choose and how the service will mature, but you can always choose what to do with the physical media you have in your possession.



Luis P.
Billings, MT

[MaxH]

Re: Sell off my Blu Ray's and go strictly VUDU?

1. Is it legal to sell my physical media once I perform the Disc to Digital conversion. I suspect that the original media must be kept even if you paid for the D2D.

Let's not conflate what a private entity allows in their internal policies with duly enacted laws. Of course it's legal to sell your discs, but it's also a violation of Vudu's Terms of Service:

Disc to Digital:

You may have the opportunity to covert your physical Blu-ray? and DVD discs into electronic copies that may be stored and viewed through the VUDU Service via the Disc to Digital program. The Disc to Digital program is only available for physical Blu-ray? and DVD titles that have been legitimately purchased and are presently owned by you. VUDU reserves the right to refuse conversion of a title, or to limit or cancel your access to a previously converted title, if VUDU reasonably believes the title does not meet, or no longer meets, the purchase and ownership criteria set forth in this paragraph.

Now that's going to be very hard for them to enforce, but if you start bragging here about how you trade discs with people all the time and never keep any in your house for too long, they might just challenge your ownership of those titles on their service. But it's not illegal to sell them, it's simply a violation of their policy for providing us with their services.

[CBrown]

Re: Sell off my Blu Ray's and go strictly VUDU?

While of course, only you can determine your priorities, I'm keeping all mine for the reasons noted below (which echo many comments already made).

• Quality - 'close' isn't good enough given I bought the discs on Blu-ray, have a large HDTV and good 7.1 system as I wanted the highest quality. Streaming services will not be fully equal in the near future as they have to deal with bandwidth realities. When H.265 encoding matures and is implemented, they may be able to really match Blu-ray quality but we'll have hopefully moved on to a UHD format... I have all my movies on my home server so for home use, I don't have get them and pop-in (and deal with loading times, unskippable vs, etc), but I still have it at full quality.
• "ownership" - Amazingly folks don't seem to have learned from the issues during the DRM'd music time. UV may help overcome much of the challenge but it hasn't been around long enough to fully trust. IMO if you "buy" movies from Amazon, iTunes, Xbox, Google, or non-UV Vudu titles you are throwing your money away vs. other options. You are only getting the rights to view them in the way and on the devices that the provider determines they want to give you. I have converted all my titles that I can to UV so it gives me additional viewing options. Obviously some like Disney titles are unlikely to ever be on UV or a UV like service.
• Keeping vs. Selling - You are unlikely to net more than a few dollars on each title that you are able to sell so the effort may not be worth it. What is the value vs. the burden for the titles you have? Outside of all the extra's, quality etc, visitors like to look over my ~500 title physical movie collection, something that doesn't happen with the collection on a screen (as it doesn't happen when viewing Vudu, Netflix etc as you are looking for something specific to watch, not 'perusing') . Generates fun discussions and acts somewhat as a decoration in the movie room. For me it is a benefit, not burden at the moment.

[mjvmovieman]

Re: Sell off my Blu Ray's and go strictly VUDU?

I've been burned too many times by big companies' music services going out of business and losing my content - MTV, Microsoft and Walmart. While I have done D2D and sold off the discs, I only do that for titles I could live with losing.

Then there's the ability to lend a copy, watch special features and watch movies on the occasional bad internet day.

That's where I'm at too. I sold most of my blu-ray/DVD collection that I had converted on D2D or added to Vudu. I kept about 20 of my absolute favorites, as well as several Disney/MGM/ineligible titles with the mindset that if I lose my other other 400 titles with Vudu/UV dying, then oh well, I will live and I still own the 'must-haves.' With a mostly clear wall shelf, it was sort of liberating

[Gnatevil]

Re: Sell off my Blu Ray's and go strictly VUDU?

My 2 Cents...I love Vudu and streaming movies. I also love collecting the Blu-rays. I recently ran into an issue. My cable provider has implemented a 250G/month cap. I was sick and stuck at home so I decided to sit and watch all 6 seasons of Big Bang Theory. I have a projector and a 106" screen so I stream everything in HDx. Well, let me tell you, 6 seasons of 24 episodes at 20 min each in HDx will eat up your cap quickly. Lucky for me, it was at the end of the billing cycle so my cap reset near the end of watching everything. I went over by about 150 Gig and got a nasty gram email warning me that if I continued to go over my limit, I would end up having to pay more ($10 for 50). Needless to say, the wife was not happy. Now, if I wasn't so lazy, I could have take the blu-rays and played them that way. Now, if I decide I'm going to have any lengthy marathon movie watching going on, I will play the blu-ray instead of streaming the movies. I won't ever give up my physical discs because I want to be sure I can always watch what I want, when I want to without having to spend too much extra money.

Now I know people are going to say that I spent money on the physical discs. True, but the majority of movies now come with a Digital copy of some sort...mostly UV. I haven't purchased any movie directly from Vudu (yet) so I have both the Physical and the streaming version. I've converted my DVD and Blu-ray collection (about 600 movies) using either the D2D app or taking them to Wal-Mart. I have over 900+ movies and Tv shows in my Streaming library and over 1500 in my Physical library. Still waiting for the few studios to get on board with conversions...Disney...MGM (who's in limbo) and converting Tv shows to streaming.

And the biggest reason I started converting everything to UV was so my kids would enjoy my library of movies. They all live scattered across the country so they can't just "borrow" a movie (not that I would let them). Now they can watch whatever I have available in the cloud...which is the majority of my collection.

Bottom line, keeping the discs is a good thing. Streaming is a good thing. I'll do both.