Amanda Bowman’s DVD collection. ‘I just feel like are trying to herd people into streaming. It’s frustrating. It’s also isolating,’ she says.Amanda Bowman’s DVD collection. ‘I just feel like are trying to herd people into streaming. It’s frustrating. It’s also isolating,’ she says.
And when Universal released Oppenheimer on 4K Blu-ray this fall, the initial run sold out, with feverish Christopher Nolan fans pillaging the same megastores that are moving to drop physical media. 4K Blu-rays are currently the smallest slice of the film disc market, and require ultra-high-definition players and TVs, meaning that the Oppenheimer run was driven by a niche within a niche. But the episode seemed to indicate that a market exists – especially when it has champions.
It’s partly for this reason that the actor Timothy Simons, best known as Jonah on Veep, prefers physical films. There’s a notion that, “you know, ‘Everything’s available on streaming,’” he told me. “Well, it kind ofavailable on streaming could just not be tomorrow, if two companies you don’t care about get in a fight about licensing.
Derek Loman, in Missouri, told me he was so nostalgic for the old days that he turned his home office into a replica 90s video store, complete with a candy aisle and a door in the back marked ADULT. Ken, in Seattle, used to look forward to stopping by retail chains to browse new DVD and Blu-ray offerings; now, “I’ve kind of lost all my interest in visiting Best Buy at all,” he said.
The other irony is that consumers who ditched physical media as old-fashioned effectively downgraded, technologically. Movies on disc don’t get pixelated or need to buffer. Ryan Verrill, who runs a news resource called Disc-Connected, worries that people are so used to streaming that they don’t realize they’re being ripped off. Streamers “say, ‘Hey, you can stream 4K,’ but it’s4K,” he told me. “It’s compressed beyond belief and encoded way worse than even a Blu-ray is.
On a recent podcast, however, he recalled people approaching him after a live event he had hosted: “Almost all of them wanted to tell me about their most recent physical media purchases. There were questions about organization. They wanted to know best labels. Something is happening. Something is growing.”Jesse Nelson noticed things change during the pandemic.