It wasn’t that long ago that I decided to join the ranks of cord cutters and leave my cable provider in the rear-view mirror. For the handful of channels I wanted to have, I had to select a tier containing hundreds of channels I had no interest in and would never watch. And then, I learned that the monthly tab was heading north of two hundred bucks with the next increase.

Fuck that.

I bought and installed a HD antenna, which covers the local channels for news and such quite well, except when the weather is bad. I subscribed to a handful of streaming services, two of which include the local NBC and CBS affiliates, so bad weather occurrences are covered. Plus, they all rotate their offerings, so there’s always something interesting to tune in for, whether it be a good movie or an interesting documentary.

Life is good, right?

Well, life was good. Then, corporate greed began to rear its ugly head, as it always does. The cost for streaming keeps going up, and the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back was when Amazon, after renewing an annual Prime contract in November, decided in February that they’d incorporate ads in the programming we’d already subscribed to, as well as reducing the image quality unless… guess what? You pay MORE to get back those features you’d already contracted for back in November.

I’m no lawyer, but I know what breach of contract smells like. There are class action suits in play against Amazon for this, and I absolutely want to be a part of them… but I digress.

Let’s get back to the point. Chestnuts, remember? Just like the squirrels will hoard and bury them to ensure a source of food, we need to either return to physical media or digitize what we already have as a reliable, untouchable source of entertainment, given the path streaming is heading down. Whether your particular favorites are music or movies or books, collect them. Hold them and keep them. Hell, I’ve read of too many instances where people have “bought” movies in digital format, only to have them vanish in the haze because the company has gone out of business, the format has changed, whatever. What they thought they bought and owned was never a tangible asset, and those ones and zeros somehow fell off a server somewhere, never to be seen again.

Let me repeat myself. Fuck that.

I’m collecting and building a library of media, so that when the time comes to kick the streamers to the curb for the same reasons I kicked cable there, I’ll have a healthy collection to keep me entertained for some time to come, a collection to which I can keep adding as new material comes out.

You might well want to consider doing the same for the things you enjoy… while you can.