We Got Rid of Our DVDs, Now We Pay to Not Own Anything

There was a point when getting rid of your DVD collection felt like progress.

Why keep an entire bookshelf full of plastic cases when Netflix had thousands of movies waiting for you?

Box up the DVDs. Donate them. Sell them for 50 cents apiece at a yard sale.

The future had arrived.

And the future was going to be incredibly convenient.

Then somehow we ended up here.

Pay Netflix.
Pay Disney+.
Pay Peacock.
Pay Max.
Pay Paramount+.
Pay Prime Video.

Then spend 12 minutes Googling where the movie you actually want to watch is streaming.

And sometimes the answer is:

Nowhere.

Maybe we owe that dusty DVD shelf an apology.

Streaming Was Supposed to Solve This

The original appeal of streaming was almost impossible to argue with.

Instead of buying individual movies, you paid one relatively inexpensive monthly fee and suddenly had a massive library available instantly.

No discs.

No trips to the video store.

No DVD player.

No wondering which case someone put the Jurassic Park disc in.

It genuinely felt better.

The problem is that everyone eventually realized streaming was the future.

So everyone wanted their own piece of it.

Movies and shows that once lived together on one or two services were scattered across competing platforms. Studios launched their own subscriptions. Licensing agreements expired. Content moved around.

The simple streaming solution slowly became another version of cable.

Except now we’re responsible for assembling the package ourselves.

We Somehow Recreated Cable

Remember why everyone hated cable?

You paid a large monthly bill for a giant package of channels, even though you regularly watched about seven of them.

Streaming was supposed to destroy that model.

Instead, we’ve basically recreated it with apps.

The difference is psychological.

A $120 cable bill felt outrageous.

But $15 here, $12 there and another $10 somewhere else doesn’t feel quite as painful.

Until you add them together.

And unlike cable, there’s no single channel guide telling you where everything is.

You just open an app.

Search.

Nothing.

Open another app.

Search.

Nothing.

Google it.

Apparently the movie is available on a streaming service you canceled three months ago.

Fantastic.

The DVD Had One Underrated Feature: It Was Yours

This might be the biggest thing we gave up.

When you bought a DVD, the transaction was pretty simple.

You gave the store money.

The store gave you Back to the Future.

You now owned Back to the Future.

You could watch it tonight.

You could watch it next year.

You could watch it in 2042 if your DVD player was somehow still hanging on.

Nobody could suddenly announce:

“Back to the Future will be leaving your shelf on August 31.”

Streaming changed our relationship with entertainment.

We stopped owning libraries and started renting access to libraries.

That’s incredibly convenient when the library has what you want.

It’s slightly less impressive when the librarian keeps moving the books.

Remember Having a Movie Collection?

There was also something surprisingly satisfying about physically owning movies.

Your collection actually said something about you.

Someone could walk into your house and immediately discover that you owned every Rocky movie.

Or 37 horror movies.

Or the entire James Bond collection.

Or Dumb and Dumber, Tommy Boy, Happy Gilmore and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, which probably told them everything they needed to know.

The shelf itself was part of the experience.

You didn’t scroll through 900 thumbnails until you became exhausted and watched The Office again.

You stood in front of your collection and picked something.

Sometimes having fewer choices actually made choosing easier.

And Then There Were the DVD Extras

Streaming quietly killed another great part of movies: all the weird bonus stuff.

DVDs weren’t always just the movie.

They had deleted scenes.

Director commentary.

Behind-the-scenes documentaries.

Bloopers.

Alternate endings.

Cast interviews.

Making-of features.

And, occasionally, DVD menus so unnecessarily elaborate that someone clearly spent three weeks designing them.

For movie fans, buying the DVD could feel like getting the expanded version of the movie.

Streaming mostly reduced the experience to:

Play.

Efficient?

Absolutely.

More interesting?

Not necessarily.

Of Course, DVDs Had Problems Too

We shouldn’t rewrite history completely.

DVDs scratched.

Cases cracked.

Collections took up space.

You’d lend a movie to someone and never see it again.

And there was nothing particularly enjoyable about realizing the movie you wanted to watch was downstairs after you’d already gotten comfortable.

Streaming solved legitimate problems.

Having thousands of movies instantly available from your couch is objectively amazing technology.

Nobody needs to pretend otherwise.

But convenience came with a trade.

We gained access.

We gave up ownership.

And those aren’t the same thing.

Physical Media Suddenly Makes More Sense Again

This is where things get interesting.

For years, keeping DVDs seemed like refusing to move forward.

Now?

A carefully chosen physical collection doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous.

You probably don’t need 700 DVDs stacked around the house.

But your favorite movies?

The ones you watch every Christmas?

The classics you return to every few years?

The movies your kids love?

Owning those permanently starts to sound pretty reasonable when streaming libraries can change.

It’s the entertainment equivalent of keeping a few things in the pantry instead of assuming DoorDash will always have exactly what you want.

Maybe the Best Answer Is Somewhere in the Middle

Streaming isn’t going anywhere, and it shouldn’t.

It’s incredibly useful.

Subscribe to a service. Watch a new show. Discover movies you’d never buy individually.

But maybe we were too quick to assume physical media had become completely pointless.

Because the DVD offered something streaming still struggles to provide.

Certainty.

You bought the movie.

You owned the movie.

You knew where the movie was.

No subscription required.

No licensing agreement mattered.

No searching six apps.

It was sitting right there on the shelf.

Which sounded incredibly outdated about ten years ago.

Now it sounds strangely convenient.

Maybe the future wasn’t getting rid of our DVD collections.

Maybe it was just getting rid of the movies we didn’t care about.

Because after paying for half a dozen streaming services and still discovering that the one movie you want isn’t included with any of them, that old shelf of DVDs starts looking less like clutter.

And more like a pretty good idea.