Why You Give Up DVD's at Your Peril

Over quarantine I have been using some of the money I've saved from not eating out for lunch & from not commuting to invest in my entertainment collections.  I have a pretty robust film, TV, and book library (though it's worth noting that quite a few on Film and Book Twitter put me to shame), and am relatively choosy about what I buy, but if I like something, I try to purchase it, especially if I own a few discs in a tv series.  This was the case over the weekend when I finally completed the Jane the Virgin series with the delivery of Season 5, a show that I loved at the beginning (and at random parts in the middle), but is definitely the type that I'll want to revisit, 3, 5, 10 years from now as it has a homey "rewatch" aspect to it that I like.  The reason it took so long is that it took nearly a year for it to finally be released on a (bargain-basement) DVD release.

Oftentimes when I buy things like this, I get comments from my friends about "why do you still buy DVD's?" and there is to some degree a point.  Jane, for example, if I was going to re-watch it I might   just as well watch it on Netflix, where it's currently streaming, and to be honest if I was going to rewatch it as part of my "quarantine binging" that's how I'd catch it.  It's easier than dealing with the DVD's and changing them in & out, season after season.  But I feel like the DVD investment is extremely wise, and why the recent news about Disney abandoning 4k physical releases is so disarming.  

This is illustrated through the difficulty that comes with finding other shows on major platforms.  A cult classic like Undeclared is only available to purchase through digital downloads, as it isn't on any streaming platforms.  Pushing Daisies, a personal favorite, is available through CW Seed, which includes commercials, while another show that I enjoyed in the early 2000's, That's Life (starring Paul Sorvino & Ellen Burstyn) isn't available anywhere despite the fact that its lead Heather Dubrow was a recent lead in the popular Real Housewives franchise.  The reality is that while a show like Jane the Virgin is popular now, and safe on a platform like Netflix, it's probable that unless one of the stars becomes a breakout figure in a different movie or TV series, that it will shift from public consciousness, becoming more difficult to find...except for those of us who invested in the DVD's.

One of the shocking things about the advent of streaming is that for mild convenience, you're giving up a lot of freedom.  Before home video (specifically the VHS), whether or not you saw a movie was entirely dependent on movie houses and studios to re-release the films. VHS, DVD's, and Blu-Rays all gave the audience something they hadn't had-true ownership of the properties that they loved.  You didn't have to worry about whether or not a film was famous enough to get another outing or be released on television-you could own a copy of it forever.  When broadcast networks started to see the enormous success of putting shows like Friends and Family Guy on DVD, it became the norm for television series to enjoy what pretty much every new release had-a home release, something you could count on so that not only you could have GoodFellas at home, you could own The Sopranos and not worry about keeping your HBO subscription forever.

I'm not a luddite-I get the appeal of streaming platforms, and I subscribe to (by my count) at least four of them, and regularly purchase films or TV shows off of a couple of others for rental or ownership.  But we are giving up a lot for that convenience.  People have seen the uproar that Friends or The Office have had when they left Netflix, but instead of focusing on the obvious culprit (Netflix), we should examine our own roles a little bit here.  Eventually the cost of monthly streaming when it comes to chasing these series from platform to platform is going to be more than the cost of the box set (I own all 19 seasons of these two collective shows), but we aren't acknowledging that DVD ownership might still have its place-instead, we just shift our money over to HBO Max or NBC's streaming platform to keep watching these shows.

And these are famous shows-what happens to other shows that we loved but weren't zeitgeist hits?  It's probable Friends will have a home forever on a platform, but what about the Pushing Daisies, the Jane the Virgins, the Undeclareds?  If you don't invest in them in the one way you know you can always access them (physical media), you're eventually going to hit a point where you can't get them in any capacity.  Streaming platforms cut content all-the-time, and some of them don't release all of the content they'd even have access to.  I recently saw a Disney film featuring one of our upcoming 'Saturdays with the Stars' actresses, one that was a huge box office hit in its days, and features two recognizable stars...and it wasn't on Disney+ for reasons I don't understand.  Studios and broadcast networks sit on hundreds of different titles from their catalog that they don't make available in the way a Blockbuster or your own home library would.

I feel a lot like a panicked crier on a mountain that is getting lonelier each day on this issue, but every time we hear something, like Disney shifting almost all of its back catalog of Fox titles away from 4K releases, I feel I still need to speak up.  Our convenience and indifference to whether or not we'll have access to our favorite movies and TV series right now is resulting in an artificial iconoclasm.  Despite us claiming we hate such things, we're sacrificing our personal access to artistic creativity for some minor convenience, giving our hard-earned power of choice to corporations.  At the end of this, it's going to be those people who collected DVD's, who didn't throw them out or dismiss their value, who end up being the keepers of a lot of film and television history, as streaming giants continue to do what they were made for: focus on the bottom line.