i think the difference between "physical media" and "digital media" (or whatever the conceptual opposite of physical media is) is the physical media contains only The Thing on it. it is The Thing, as a physical object. a hard drive contains Many Things (generally).
the dvd /is/ the movie while the hard drive /contains/ the movie
It's not just that it's a discrete Thing, it's a matter of level of transience. Like, yes, you can glibly say everything degrades, but there's a difference between "this clay or stone tablet will degrade over geological periods", "this book on vellum will eventually degrade after a thousand years or so", "this book on paper will degrade over centuries" and "this pattern of bits will probably disappear between here and the next time you move to a new place thanks to filesystem corruption". Not only that but most digital media is not actually on a hard drive in the way op is expressing; for you it's not anywhere and only exists long enough to stream it, and then upstream it's in a CDN cache somewhere that will get invalidated automatically, and upstream from that it's in an encrypted store somewhere and will effectively disappear when a certificate expires. It's fundamentally whether the information is intended to last some amount of time greater than none and could in principle be preserved or is specifically designed to vanish in spite of anything anyone might say or do.
I disagree! Everything is physical! It’s a useless term to me!
Edit: also just wanted to point out that the hard drive thing at the end was in reference to home computers! I don’t know all the ins and outs of information storage for things such as Netflix and the like but I still strongly believe physical media is a useless term! Everything in this world is still physical! When I say I own something personally I state the storage medium I own it on! I don’t appreciate being talked down to however!