Saying 2005 like it was a bad thing to own the stuff you had. I would much rather have it "the old way" instead of having my series be delisted from the streaming service mid season.

Just make a paid local tier, cheaper, but you need to load it and transcode it locally. Give the user a choice.

Unlike music, which was DRM free and could legally be ripped from a CD using iTunes. There was no easy legal solution for Apple to ship software that could rip DVDs. When the iPod with video came out, iTunes also started selling movies. The next year Apple introduced movie rentals .

Are you really suggesting that it would be a good mainstream product to offer video downloads - in 2024 - where people used a computer to download movies to a computer and then upload them to all of their devices? How then do they watch on their TV with the built in apps?

They setup their own Plex server? When I want to binge 30 seasons of South Park - some on my TV, some on my phone, some on my iPad, do I copy it to all three places?

What keeps track of what I watch and don’t watch?

In the apple ecosystem analogy, you would just need a time capsule-like device (or any server for that matter). A single copy would suffice. Locally, you stream as is, since wifi is more than enough for 4k content. On the go, after connecting to your server, if upload isn't enough, the server could transcode the movie scaling it down. Perfectly doable without having to have a copy in each device.

> Are you really suggesting that it would be a good mainstream product to offer video downloads - in 2024 - where people used a computer to download movies to a computer and then upload them to all of their devices?

If it was the sole offer, I think it would be too restrictive, but as a lower or cheaper/advanced tier, why not?

I had a Plex server setup that could do that. It was an old spare computer. iTunes can (could?) do that over a lan. That’s how the very first hard drive AppleTV worked.

It was a pain to maintain and had symmetrical gigabit internet. Most people have cable internet with very low upstream bandwidth.

But now you’re asking them to buy another device and what’s the benefit for them?

In today’s world, I would buy an Nvidia Shield that can do hardware transcoding.

But you can already download video to mobile devices ahead of time.