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The main benefit of digital media is that it reduces costs. This includes the costs to produce, deliver, and store the physical formats that contains the movies, TV shows, and music that we all enjoy. Production costs are reduced by eliminating the factories that manufacture the discs that our media is stored on today. These cost will be replaced by the cost to host downloads of the content or stream it from the cloud. While there is a cost involved with hosting the content, it is far less than the cost to build factories, train and workers, and ship in the raw materials to make discs. There are also the costs to distribute the discs to retailers. There is also the problem of the discs being pressed incorrectly, resulting in loss of time and money as well as the cost to get rid of the useless discs. With digital media, a corrupted file can simply be redistributed with no extra cost other than maybe a few angry customers. Storing these discs is also another problem. It costs money to store these discs while waiting to ship them as well. This can also cause problems of discs being taken during manufacturing and being released on the internet by pirates before the official release date.
Another benefit of digital media is that eventually, all physical media will end up in a landfill somewhere. With digital formats, the space it is stored on can be erased and used to store countless other media files or other digital content. This fact along with the reduced shipping of discs, along with the reduction of the mining of raw materials for the discs, further bolster the argument for switching to digital media. Digital media also saves money by reducing the electricity used to view the media. Running a motor to spin a media disc uses far more energy than it takes to read off of a hard drive or flash memory as well.
A third benefit of digital media is that it can be viewed on many different pieces of hardware, while physical media are limited to just a few that are compatible. So, this means that the customer can enjoy much more freedom of choice in how he or she views media content whether it is from a computer, a TV, or a mobile device. The flexibility that digital formats offer over physical ones such as DVDs makes the comparison almost unfair. Digital media is also a great way to watch many great Hollywood movies as well.
