I think with everyday use of the BR vs HDD, the BR has the regular HDD beat in terms of longevity, but this includes constantly using the HDD for saving/deleting/reading different movies in this case, and many other uses, as opposed to only using the specific BR when you want to watch a movie, you could only use the HDD to only watch movies, and it'd last longer, but then again, you can always transfer everything to a new HDD and it's still cheaper than owning BRs.
An SSD is a different story, you can treat those like a complete troglodyte and they'll probably still last longer than a BR, this includes writing/reading GBs of data at a time, several times a day.
Also, video formats come and go every few years, so I don't see many advantages of physical over digital tbh. Not to mention that physical comes from digital to begin with, I mean, they do burn the BRs on computers, those files you're watching on your BR, they're made and they come from a computer....
KitFisto, you can watch movies without internet, and you can buy a 50gb HDD for like $50 and you can store at the very miserably least 50 movies there, that's if you don't rip them down to the essential files, if you do that you could store hundreds of movies, also, you don't need FTL internet speed, I think with a miserable 40MBps you could manage downloading anything you need in minutes... You don't really own anything that you can't have safely stored in your drive.
