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Over the past year, I have taken a giant leap into the cloud. Before explaining the process, I should note a few aspects of my personality. The primary one is that I am a packrat. Try as I may to rid myself of this habit, it has proven instinctive. I am also a collector, the worst personality trait to possess in combination with packrat-itude. Finally, I am an obsessive movie lover, something you have probably deduced by now if you are a long time reader of the site. And oh yes, I married something with all three of these traits as well. When we moved in together, we unintentionally doubled down on physical media in this regard.

You do not want to look in our closets. You will never see the skeletons, because the mess is so significant. This is what we presume will save us if the cops ever try to CSI us. But I digress.

Several years ago, I purchased a Sony 400-DVD movie jukebox. And it was not big enough to store my entire catalog. So, I bought another one. Yes, we owned enough titles to fill multiple 400-DVD movie jukeboxes…and we had to make some tough choices about what to exclude. My wife mentioned removing the James Bond collection once. Only once. The basilisk stare provided in return taught her an important lesson about sharing. The Wes Anderson discs would have been ripped out right after the James Bond titles and a Cold War would have ensued for many moons. Fortuitously, we achieved détente before then.

Such is the negotiation among movie lover packrats when space is limited. Then again, these concerns were but a trifle in July of last year. As my wife and I waited to watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II in IMAX on its opening day, fate intervened. She had taken a vacation day and was doing some laundry, ordinarily my chore, while we waited for our 2 p.m. showing. Then, she asked the fateful question that would change our lives, “Why is the dryer orange?”

I am certain you have heard of the urban legend about the dryer catching fire. I can tell you with fierce sincerity that this is no myth. We were lucky in that my wife, a hero through and through, noticed the flames immediately. This allowed us to control the fire until the fire department arrived. We were able to save our pets and escaped with no real harm done to our persons. I did wind up maintaining the fire extinguisher a bit too long and had to be escorted out before I passed out, but that was as close as either of us came to real danger. We consider ourselves quite fortunate.

Our massive media library was less fortunate. Countless CDs, DVDs, books and videogames were rendered useless due to the smoke. For various reasons that are not important to this conversation, we were also forced to move from our dwelling. Because of this, we found ourselves living in a hotel for a month followed by spending the next month unpacking our remaining media in a new residence. Not coincidentally, we determined that our massive physical media collection had become problematic. Our path was clear.

We stepped into the cloud. The process for this is one I will describe in a future column. What is important to note right now is that a lot of the decisions you face as a consumer are impacted by your current viewing habits as well as how forward thinking you choose to be.

What we decided is that since the insurance company was paying for a lot of our selections anyway, we would ignore cost to a large extent and instead focus upon rebuilding our movie lover identity on someone else’s servers. Yes, there is inherent risk in this. I will discuss our experiences with Amazon, Vudu, Cinemanow and Blockbuster next week. What I will say right now is that we have pressed Amazon and Vudu (owned by Wal-Mart) for assurances that we are covered in the event that they decide to exit the cloud video marketplace. This is a legitimate concern as you consider options. For our part, we determined that the risk was insignificant enough that we were comfortable making the move.

The end result is that we went from having virtually no online media presence to a current library that approaches Netflix in terms of content. I am not even being hyperbolic. We currently own over 800 full seasons of television on Amazon as well as 85 movies on their service. We also have utilized the Disc to Digital program recently added to Vudu to purchase a few hundred movies at an equitable $2 each. Next week, I will discuss the services, the process and the results with regards to our user experience.

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