For Blu-rays, the end is nigh — and that's good news

My fiancee and I recently moved, and the most cumbersome part wasn't the couch or the entertainment center — it was our physical media collection.

I have two 23-gallon foot lockers filled to the brim with CDs and DVDs. My Blu-rays took up one medium box from Lowe's and most of a second, alongside my “Star Wars” VHS boxed set and bulky “Simpsons,” “Lost” and “The O.C.” collections. My fiancee's DVDs remain packed away in eight U-Haul boxes.

If this was 1995, we would be the envy of our nerdy friends and could practically open a cottage video-rental industry in our apartment.

But it's 2015, and what we have is a worthless burden.

Last week, when signing up for renters insurance for the first time (no lectures, please), the agent asked me to approximate the value of all our stuff. I thought about all those discs, and how we'd be lucky to get more than a dollar for most of them at a trade-in place, and said, “CDs and DVDs aren't worth anything anymore, are they?”

“Sadly, no,” the agent said, and we agreed that they're not even worth figuring into the equation.

So what do we do? Do we invest in pricey, bulky bookcases to put years of “wasted” money on display? Do we take all the boxes to Goodwill? Or do we continue to let most of these discs collect dust in the bedroom closet as we watch the movies contained therein on Netflix, Hulu Plus or cable?

For now, the collector in me cannot be stopped. In the last month, I've added “Jurassic World,” “Aladdin,” “Tomorrowland,” “Cinderella” and the “Back to the Future” trilogy to my Blu-ray rack. All of these came with redemption codes for digital copies that are more easily accessible on the VUDU app on my iPhone and Blu-ray player than on the Blu-ray disc itself. When you tap the movie's poster, the VUDU streaming copy starts almost immediately; when you put a Blu-ray disc in your player, chances are you'll be waiting three minutes for the darn thing to load up.

Of course, those digital copies you redeem when you buy a Blu-ray don't come with bonus features, but digital retailers are starting to package the bonus features with the versions you buy straight from them. If you buy Pixar's “Inside Out” from VUDU — which was available digitally three weeks before the Nov. 3 physical media release date — you get all the bonus features that appear on the Blu-ray. The same can be said of Disney's recent rerelease of “Aladdin,” which has a whopping 56 extras including new and old documentaries and deleted songs. (The only bonus features that haven't made the translation to digital retailers yet, aside from rare cases on iTunes, are audio commentaries.)

Disney gives you even more incentive to leave physical media behind with its Disney Movies Anywhere app which links to your existing digital collections on iTunes, Amazon Video, VUDU, Google Play or Microsoft Movies & TV. If you watch Disney, Pixar or Marvel movies on their app, you might get more bonus features not available anywhere else.

The CD all but died years ago thanks to iTunes, and Spotify and Pandora are finishing the job. The movie industry's “discpocalypse” is upon us, but the good news is that video and audio quality don't appear to be suffering; all that suffers is my desire to have tangible proof of the money I spent, a physical representation of the love I have for that movie I saw 10 times at the theater.

And I won't have to throw my back out moving another 23-gallon foot locker.

• Sean Stangland is a Daily Herald multiplatform editor. At 16, he spent his first paycheck on a VHS boxed set of the Sean Connery 007 movies. You can follow him on Twitter at @SeanStanglandDH.