Simple example: My wife wants to consume certain Austrian/German content in Canada which are not available on any streaming service here. The streaming services there (Germany/Austria) do not support Canada. She was gifted DVDs of them, but that means she can't watch them on her phone or tablet (or laptop without a usb dvd drive that's region coded to Europe). Options are to:
- rip the DVDs (pain in the butt unless you have a specific setup for doing it en-masse. Some shows end up with episodes out of order, etc)
- download the shows
And this is when she's lucky enough the show/movie had a DVD release.
Similar problems exist for local content that doesn't exist on streaming sites altogether (bunch of things I grew up watching that I'd like to revisit).
Note that ripping DVDs is still piracy if said DVDs contain DRM[1], at least in the US. I don't know about CA, but I'd imagine it's similar, considering the state of copyright ...
[1] Region locking is a form of DRM, and most DVDs at least used to be region-locked. I don't know if that's still common practice nowadays.
- rip the DVDs (pain in the butt unless you have a specific setup for doing it en-masse. Some shows end up with episodes out of order, etc)
- download the shows
And this is when she's lucky enough the show/movie had a DVD release.
Similar problems exist for local content that doesn't exist on streaming sites altogether (bunch of things I grew up watching that I'd like to revisit).