Today, I took both my 400-disc DVD changer and my network Blu-Ray player out of my living room.

I’m tired of discs… of the inconvenience, of the late fees for the ones I rent, of the tiny scratches that seem to always crop up to keep my favorites from playing after a time. I’m tired of Blu-Ray discs that take roughly a millennium to load, if they load at all. And I’m tired ofDRM schemes that seem to exist to keep me from playing the discs I OWN on projectors or mobile devices. And I’m tired of loaning out my discs of my faves never to see them again.

I have both an Apple TV and a Roku in my living room. I’ve ripped over 300 of my movies to a single external USB hard drive, I can now watch any of them in any room, or on my iPad, pausing them on one system and picking them up again at that point in another room or on another device. I can even watch them from someplace else when I’m out of town.

And, on a societal level, I’m tired of doing something that Larry Ellison deemed stupid a long time ago. I’m tired of wrapping bits in plastic, paying the price both in purchase price and in cost to the environment for making them, shipping them, storing them, and marketing them.

Sure, we will have to work out things with the publishers and their concerns over copyrights, over the long run. But the first step is pulling the pug on devices that, realistically, became obsolete several years ago.

JRR