Who would watch a Blu-ray nowadays, eh? You have to take it off the shelf, prise it out of the case, put it into the player and find yet another remote before you can settle down to watch. And that’s after you've gone through the faff of buying the physical disc and waited for delivery. Or even – gasp! – gone to the shop yourself.
Much easier just to trawl the streaming services, right?
The good old days
Streaming undoubtedly has its advantages, but the downside is how ephemeral it makes movies and albums. No one owns anything any more. Without wanting to sound too much like a grandad, it was all so much simpler in the olden days.
Then, you bought a Blu-ray, or a piece of vinyl, and it was yours for ever. True, some physical media formats fell by the wayside – though nowadays few will mourn the passing of Betamax or HD-DVD – but the best ones endured. And while some may have seen their popularity wane, a resurgence was always a possibility; welcome back, cassette tapes!
But no matter how unpopular a format might become, you could rest assured that no one was going to take it away from you, or charge you in perpetuity to access the films and songs you already own.
Even if you’re the only person still supporting a particular format, as long as you don't lose your discs and your player still works, you are free to enjoy that content whenever you like. You have paid for it and it’s yours for ever.
Streaming has turned this on its head.
The great streaming rip off
The subscription model is a fraud. It's sold as greater choice, and yes, paying as little as £5 a month – with ads – does get you a lot of content for less than the price of a DVD. But the fact that all of this disappears the minute you stop paying seems to me a great injustice.
What's even worse are the services that let you digitally purchase content on top of your subscription. Yes, you can watch them as many times as you like – and as I'm seeing, now that my son has got into Harry Potter, that's a lot. But that content is only ever accessible on the platform on which it was purchased. If we ever cancel Sky, Harry and his pals are gone for good. Try explaining that to a seven-year-old.
The Harry Potter films currently go for around a fiver a pop on Sky Store. That's £40 for the lot. Whereas if we had bought the DVDs when they came out, they would still be watchable today. True, we would probably have spent a little more than £40 on eight DVDs. But we would have had 20-odd years of viewing opportunities behind us before they found a new lease of life with my son.
They would also work in any DVD player, and not be imprisoned inside one specific box.
Trophy content
How many films do you really want to watch more than once, though? So runs the counter-argument. And it’s a good point. It's like that Seinfeld line about people lining their shelves with books “like they’re trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?”
As someone who has sat through Ghostbusters: Afterlife, I'll admit that a lot of films really don't need a rewatch. And a few years ago, faced with a house move to navigate and beguiled by the brave new streaming landscape taking shape in front of me, I was tempted to throw out all my DVDs and go fully digital. Considering the tectonic shifts still affecting streaming, I am very glad that I didn't.
Instead, I bought a CD wallet with space for hundreds of discs and got rid of the cases instead. That way, I solved the storage issue while still preserving the films and TV shows I cherish.
Because, as my son's recent interest in Harry Potter shows, it's always worth hanging onto quality physical media. Even if you don't have children, you never know when you’ll have a friend round who's never seen Die Hard. And with the constant changes in which streamer has paid to license what content, you never know which service is going to host Bruce Willis in his vest.
If you're interested, that Seinfeld line is from the episode The Ex-Girlfriend in series two. The complete Seinfeld series 1-9 boxset (complete with coffee table book) is one of the few bits of DVD packaging I couldn't bring myself to part with – it was spared the CD wallet, and currently resides in a drawer, not quite like a trophy, but still as something to be treasured. And when my son's old enough, I look forward to sharing it with him.
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