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I hear ya there. I used to spend $150/month on cable until I realized I only watched it during football season. Now that the season is coming to a close...there's really nothing else on.
It all greatly depends on the title and how saturated the market was by studios as popular movies have DVDs, the Blu-Rays, then even 4K discs and at times are also included in box sets too and movies that are primarily thrillers with not outstanding action and/or dialogue in them end up abandoned by people that have seen them too many times and remember the movie such that the mystery/surprise that was the main contributor to it being thrilling...... is gone. I've been to stores that sell used media and seen the same titles in the stores from plainly mediocre overrated movies with popular actors to a lot of thrillers good for a 1-3 times view then boring thereafter. Some movies are rare to find period as they simply did not produce enough copies to supply the public and went out of print early. At one time there were movies that they produced DVDs in the early to mid 90s and didn't ever reprint them till late 2000s such that trying to find the movie to buy was almost impossible and movies that came out early often didn't properly support widescreen tvs or simply were fullscreen format and there was never an up to date version produced. We have a lot of movies that were older classics in less popular genres that a limited audience likes and there are special limited editions of movies that are plainly expensive to get like Criterion and Olive and some Shout Factory and other limited versions that often are also remasters. Disney has limited edition movies that are only available on their movie club and unless you want to join and they are offering that movie to sell you have little choice but to buy it online and pay a premium for them. I've had to buy a few movies made for other regions just to get them as they never released the movie in that format or version in the US.....
Well, this is kind of embarrassing for me. I never left that 'old school' CDs and DVDs world that you talk of.
I agree. And owning hard copies is a poke in the eye to those who want us all to 'Own nothing and be happy'. Assuming that they are successful, and manage to fully implement their dystopian vision, I can well imagine that removing access to Spotify and similar services would be one of their sticks that they use to beat the non-compliant.
I think cassette tapes were only really useful for playing music in cars, and other situations where vinyl was impractical. Also good for taping the Top 40 on sunday afternoon, so that you could listen later and fast forward the rubbish songs.
As people switched to digital streaming, I noticed that the price of CDs plummeted. And at the moment there's a surprisingly large number of cheap, and often mint condition, CDs available in charity shops. Many of these cost more than £10 when released, and they are now being sold for a few £s.
There is a lot of people into retro stuff first it was vinyl records and tube amps and then cassettes are now supposedly cool. Personally when I replaced most of my vinyl and cassettes with CDs I never looked back and VHS sucks compared to DVDs and Blu-Rays. The reason CD and soon DVDs plummeted was because of cheap memory prices in phones and music streaming and digital music online. More and more people don't want to own their music or they are clueless to the fact they own nothing when they go digital. CDs also are cheap because the people with computers in the past copied them or ripped the music onto their ipods or phones and then they didn't need the discs (or so they think). You don't see movies as much because they are typically harder to copy and take up a lot of space compared to music on CD. I wouldn't have a cassette album personally the tapes are too fragile and wear out along with heads wearing out on the players. DVDs are dirt cheap because a there are a huge amount of mediocre movies on them bought and watched a few times and they take up a ever growing lot of space.
Cassette tapes were great as the boombox era started because of them and stereo decks allowed you to record records on them to play in cars and portable stereo boomboxes. With a 90 minute tape you could record 2 full albums on it one on each side and when they invented auto reverse decks you didn't have to remove the tape and flip it over to listen to the other side essentially a tape could continue to play both sides till you shut it off while records could be played one side then another on top of it on a spindle drop and play the next side but after the pile finished that was it till you manually reset the records. I grew up replacing my first car radio with a high power cassette deck and it was wonderful. Now that we have digital everything you don't have to but rip CDs once and most car stereos have either support for bluetooth or external inputs for a phone. Before I got an Ipod I would rip my cds and then take the mp3 files and record them on a CD-R and my next vehicle had an MP3 CD player. With Itunes and streaming services along with cell phones and towers most folks don't even need to tune into a radio station now. I have some 8000 songs on my phone my whole CD collection and play lists
I even still have cassette tapes!! 
