Something this week reminded me that my dad had a collection of DVDs in his room that must’ve cost him over four figures. Some of my love for film can be traced back to trips with him to the cinema, and that wall of DVD’s I had a free choice of when I visited. He also got me games consoles. So really my geeky interests are all his fault. 

I’m 31, and I don’t own a DVD wall. In fact the last one I bought was The Dark Knight Rises steelbook in 2012. So I’m nearly 13 years clean. As for video games, they lasted a little longer in physical form, but I have not purchased a single physical game since the release of the PS5 and the Xbox Series X. They both have plenty of storage for whichever game I want provided I delete games when I’m finished. 

In terms of buying my own content, my generation has had some great luck in terms of timing. Sure we might never own our own homes, but we can watch anything we can think of on one of the many streaming services we all definitely pay for ourselves and don’t share passwords around. And we don’t even have to watch them in a living room, we can watch them on planes, trains or automobiles. We can watch on a tiny 5 inch screen on our phone, or in Virtual Reality on a seemingly limitless screen. 

I’ve traded flicking through rows of DVD’s reading the blurb on the back of the case to decide what to watch, for the endless scroll through the cavalcade of content on streaming services. I’ve done the Service Quickstep more than one time, going from Netflix, to Disney plus, to Amazon, and even YouTube, before inevitably putting on The Office for the dozenth time (the US one, it’s clearly better, let it go).

The arguments against digital media are well known. “But you don’t actually own it then” I hear you screaming. To be clear, you are right. I understand I am paying for essentially permission to play Call of Duty for as long as the Call of Duty servers are online. I also pay Netflix to allow me to watch The Office (US), fully aware they could drop it off their services, leave me Dwightless, and I’d still continue to pay for it. Perhaps it would be cheaper to buy the full seasons of The Office and Brooklyn 99.

Where do you stop though? I live in a flat with limited storage space. The shelves we have are reserved for nerdy merchandise, tabletop games and books. I can’t imagine where I would keep the 100s of video games I can install on my consoles, let alone the thousands of movies and TV shows I can watch within 3 clicks of my TV remote. 

It could seem like this part of my psyche is at odds with my passion for going into a cinema and sitting to watch a film on the big screen. Why not just watch it streamed at home? Well it’s obvious that the experience is wildly different but even on a purely technological standpoint, those of you with mammoth 77-inch OLED TV’s and a surround sound system can’t compete with a Dolby Atmos cinema screen and a reclining chair. 

Sometimes I long for the days of physical media being king. I remember spending hours in Gamestation as a kid, deciding which game I was going to get with the credit I’d get for trading in the previous week’s game. Whatever I picked, that was it. I was playing that for the next week, good bad or otherwise. I’m even just about old enough to remember trips to blockbuster, browsing the shelves for whichever film was going to be the evening’s viewing. No longer am I forced to feel the pain of finding out someone else had already taken Vin Diesel’s “XxX” and having to settle for “Sahara”. That’s right, my taste has always been for those Oscar worthy character studies. 

Now with services like Netflix and Game Pass there’s a legitimate case of too much choice. I find myself installing games and never even starting them up before they get deleted off the hard drive to make room for something else I probably won’t play. At least once I could have watched an entire film in the time it’s taken me to scroll through all the options on Netflix now. The choice is now paralysing. The wall of DVDs at my dads house was a much smaller collection, and even that was hard to decide sometimes. 

That decision paralysis has also lowered the chances of any two people having watched the same film. Go into the workplace on a Monday, there are very few times you’ll be confident of having shared an experience. Perhaps that’s why we now have these cultural waves behind TV shows like Game of Thrones or Peaky Blinders. These weekly events that everyone watches are rare, and in film it’s even more sparse.

Disney’s decision to start throwing their films onto Disney Plus within 45-60 days of their theatrical release has meant people just wait instead of going to the cinema. There is no second wave of income for a film now, something that led to many films in the past finding their audience. I dread to think how poor the DVD numbers are now. That then starts to open a conversation about the risks studio’s are willing to take on movies, but that’s a whole different article.

Myself and a lot of my generation have lived on both sides of the internet’s rise. As such I feel a strange sort of resentment towards both the younger generations and the older generations either side of me. “Why would you want physical media? It’s all available online” younger people cry between swiping onto the next TikTok. “If the internet stops working, what are you going to do then?” scream the 50-somethings with walls of DVD’s.

In an increasingly materialistic world, it’s only worth owning something now if it has some kind of perceived rarity or cool factor to it. Of course, I am a victim of this as much as anyone else. Like a lot of people in their early 30’s seem to, I collect Vinyl records. If you were to ask my slowly growing collection of 12-inch albums how often they’re played, especially when compared to my Spotify playlists that contain the same songs, they’d tell you I don’t even own a record player.