In the past several years I’ve been making great leaps in the pursuit of a less cluttered existence. The idea of owning fewer physical objects is extremely attractive to me even though I’m something of a collector.

With the availability of reasonably priced, high-capacity hard disks and cheap, always-on broadband connections, numerous digital media services are popping up. Companies like Amazon, Apple (iTunes), and Netflix are offering digital downloads and streaming servers for audio and video at prices that dramatically undercut that of traditional physical media (and often without DRM.) As a result of this, Julian and I have begun paying for these services and buying or renting our media on demand. The ability to browse for a movie, rent it, and have it queued up and ready to view within minutes is invaluable to us, as we often decide at the last moment that we want to watch a particular film. It is extremely convenient.

Additionally, since we listen to most of our music on our computers or portable devices like iPods, Julian and I no longer feel the need to own the actual discs. The last 10 or so albums we have purchased digitally from AmazonMP3 for about $5 or more cheaper than the same thing on CD. And unlike iTunes, there is no DRM so we can both have a copy of the album on any device we choose. Similarly, video games are beginning to follow this trend. We have purchased countless smaller titles from Xbox Live and Playstation Network, which get saved to our consoles’ hard drives. Downloadable content for games such as Rock Band extend the game beyond what comes with the physical disc. Services like Steam already offer full game downloads as digital purchases. If this continues, soon there will be no need for a disc at all.

Back in December we got rid of a significant amount of untouched CDs and DVDs on eBay and found that not only do we not miss anything we sold but it has made us realize that we still own a lot more than we use. There is a lot left to get rid of, so hopefully we can cull our collection down to only those things which we play on a regular basis or are rare and/or collectible.

This leaves us with one question to ponder. Now that Blu-Ray has won the HD format wars, will it remain on top, or will downloadable media send it the way of VHS tapes?