The mass-market idea of owning a movie to watch at home is a relatively new one compared to the art of films themselves. VCRs and videotapes didn't hit the mainstream until 1980; prior to that, they were an expensive oddity. By the 1980s, rentals gave way to actually owning your own copies of movies.

For collectors, laserdiscs initially were the high-quality collectible of choice for superior sound and picture quality. They lasted until DVDs came out in the 1990s, and that soon gave way to the high-def format wars between Blu-ray and HD-DVD in the 2000s. For a scant three decades, we collected our physical media films and gathered our collections. Each time we upgraded, we tossed out the inferior version—well, some of us did. I can't tell you how many copies of Star Wars or Jaws or S

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