Physical all the way for me. If I've got something digitally I assume I've only got it temporarily.
I just can't be arsed to do the work required to back stuff up to the extent some of you seem to.
To the bolded: how?
I'd rather pay $35 once for a physical copy of a movie and have it forever than pay $15 every month for a streaming service that may or may not allow me access to that movie when I happen to want to watch it.
And the physical copy NEVER has ads in it!
There are very few movies that I watch over and over, and the few that I do watch again on occasion are easily accessible online. If I needed to, I
could own a copy - nothing's stopping me - but I don't need to. $35 is months worth of streaming
many movies and shows. On top of that, my space is worth money to me, and a huge amount was freed up when we got rid of shelves of books, CDs, and DVDs.
Streaming music gives me an all but unlimited library. I previously had well over a thousand CDs in my collection, which means I spent upwards of 20k on music. Streaming is, what, a couple hundred bucks a year, for my entire family? So that 20k would have bought us basically all the music in the world for a hundred years. Available anywhere, and I can download whatever I want (I currently have about 6k songs on my phone). It can't wear out or get lost, and my money isn't tied up in piles of plastic that will sit in the environment for a thousand years, slowly breaking into micro-particles and poisoning wildlife (I can't get too self-righteous about this, though, because my miniatures collection...). I can access it anywhere, any time. But, again, if I want there's nothing stopping me from buying physical media. I just have no use for it - my quality of life is way better without it.
Or books. I typically pay half price or less for ebooks, just have to remember to bring one light reader when I travel, it lights up when I need it to, I'm not killing trees, I can purchase a new book from my patio when I want...there's just no comparison in terms of value. Occasionally I do want a physical book (typically for illustrations), and then I buy one. It's not an either/or proposition. No one's making me go digital. It's just way better for me. YVMV.
But there's no question that digital media is vastly cheaper than physical media. I've lived both. All you have to do is go on Amazon right now and compare the cost of ebooks to paper books (hell, there are tens of thousands of free books you can download to your reader any time you like).
And if you do assume you have something temporarily...for most things, that's a feature, not a flaw! My kid doesn't need to deal with a houseful of my crap when I kick it. I've found that paying way less money to have something when you need it, rather than way more money to have it when you don't need it, is liberating! I have more money, more space, more content (vastly), and less stuff!
I think humans mostly cling to tangible things for psychological reasons, even when it doesn't make much sense.