I was about to say, what about dvd and blu-ray? I don't plug in to the network...
But then I remembered pausing a blu-ray the other day, and it had this popup showing a thumbnail and the chapter name, something like "Point of No Return". Gah. It pulled me out of the movie.
Blu-Ray is unforgivable. It is a straight-up anti-consumer technology. The Stranger Things season 1 Blu-Ray contains an unskippable, 5 minute long trailer for season 2 which contains spoilers for season 1:
Ironically, one of the several reasons I waited for Stranger Things to come out on BluRay was because I've had the Netflix interface spoil far too many shows for me, with the spoilery episode summaries that pop up automatically whenever a video is paused.
I wasn't aware of that trailer though, because I don't actually have a BluRay player. I popped the BluRay into my computer and ripped the episodes with MakeMKV. :)
Generally I'd consider any pre-MKBv68 Bluray pretty userfriendly if it doesn't use BD+. Fully liberated playback thanks to the internet. Don't throw in a newer disc though, it will chain your drive again.
Unfortunately I think AACS 2.0 has moved to always online. That's a shame because it basically means you're getting sold a disc of bytes noone can use ever again, once the servers go down...
If you refer to the first part of "thanks to the internet": for basic BDs, keys to decrypt are available up to the end of 2019 (depends on the release profile). For newer/4k movies, these keys are not supposed to be used offline and as such have to be checked out (with your client verified) online...
As for your latter part: yes, I guess that's the aim, but piracy generally works just fine for streaming. And as long as China is not the cultural hegemon, some way to grab the bytes off the transport will be available.
Blu-ray elevates it quite poorly. I recently bought a Terminator set where it forced a 3 minute spiel on the blu-ray format on several discs (I couldn't know about it's AMAZING quality after having bought a whole set of them /s).
I just buy to rip/collect, but sometimes I have to navigate menus on a physical player to match features and titles. Lots of releases out there force previews, anti-piracy warnings, ridiculous menu sequences, and a whole host of other content that detracts from the experience.
But then I remembered pausing a blu-ray the other day, and it had this popup showing a thumbnail and the chapter name, something like "Point of No Return". Gah. It pulled me out of the movie.