Whenever the discussion about physical media and its inevitable demise comes up, the argument that "discs rot and degrade" will inevitably raise its head.
It should be obvious that any physical object will degrade over time. The question isn't whether your movie, music, and video game discs will eventually degrade past usability. What matters is whether they'll remain usable long enough so that it makes no practical difference to you. More importantly, the implication that media in a data center will be around long-term is just flat-out unsupported.
When you buy a disc with content on it and then store it somewhere (cool and dry!), that disc doesn't require any active, costly maintenance. The data is at rest in cold storage. When you buy a game, song, or movie that's stored in the "cloud," it's actually being maintained across several active storage devices connected to running servers. Every second that passes, it costs money, maintenance, and labor to keep that content accessible.
From laser discs to 4K Ultra HD — how well do you know the optical formats
that changed home entertainment forever?
In what year was the DVD format officially introduced to consumers?
Which two competing formats were merged to create the unified DVD standard, avoiding
a format war in the mid-1990s?
What is the standard storage capacity of a single-layer, single-sided DVD?
Which company's format won the high-definition disc format war that concluded in
2008?
What color laser does a Blu-ray player use to read discs, and what is its
approximate wavelength?
Which movie studio was the first to release a title on DVD in the United States?
What maximum video resolution does a standard Blu-ray disc support?
The PlayStation 3 is often credited with helping Blu-ray win the format war.
Approximately how many PS3 units were sold worldwide by the end of 2007?
A company that can no longer pay to maintain this content will shut it down. Even if a disc "only" lasted a few decades, a cloud service hosting content you paid for could shut down tomorrow, not in 20 years. Worst of all, you have exactly zero control over when it happens, and there might be no warning at all.
With a disc, you control how it's treated and stored. You have the option of making backups at your own discretion. You can periodically verify that it still works. You are the custodian of the data.
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