When Blu-Ray players came out, I wasted no time in buying one. Well actually I wasted no time in buying an HD-DVD player. Then when that technology died, I switched to Blu-Ray pretty quickly.

I had bought maybe 30 or so movies when it started to become clear that for most purposes, physical media was becoming obsolete. At least for movies. I’ve got a huge TV show collection on DVD which consists of a lot of things not available from iTunes. (iTunes being my chosen source for media.)

So my Blu-Ray purchasing tapered off and my policy became to buy on iTunes. Even when there was a good sale on a movie, if I already had it in Blu-Ray I resisted temptation. Ok, mostly resisted temptation.

Now that Apple has announced the 4K HDR AppleTV and that many movies will be automatically upgraded to 4K HDR I’m pretty pleased with my strategy. I’ve been scorning 4K because I just could not bring myself to buy the same movies in YET ANOTHER format, and for full price again. Yes I have in some cases purchased the same move in VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-Ray. Not many did that full ride, but some. And a lot of movies took at least a couple of those segments of the trip.

So obviously the news that I can maybe move into the glorious new 4K world without feeling like an idiot for buying movies in 4K that I own in Blu-Ray makes me really happy.

As of this date, 16-Sep-2017, about a week before the 4K AppleTV ships, I’m already seeing a few movies I own showing up as 4K HDR in iTunes. Hoping more will follow!

Now my only “problem” is that my 1080p plasma TV is still going strong so I cannot readily justify getting a new 4K TV. I’m going to resist as long as possible, in part because my Panasonic plasma still has superior picture quality to any LCD TV out today. It’s looking like OLED will be a worthy replacement when the time comes, but the size I want is still a bit pricey. Another 6-12 months and just maybe I’ll be selling a nice plasma TV…