Latest news with #Blu-rays
The Star
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
When streaming won't cut it and you need the DVD
Last month, a young man walked into Night Owl, a store in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn that sells Blu-rays, DVDs and even a few video cassettes of movies and television shows, and browsed for several minutes. Eventually he plucked a case from a shelf: A handsome Criterion Collection release of The Royal Tenenbaums, the first Wes Anderson movie he had ever seen. 'I had a ton of DVDs growing up,' Noah Snyder, 27, said. But reading about the way contemporary conglomerates treat films and television programs on their streaming services had prodded him to acquire physical media again. Snyder cited actress Cristin Milioti's recent comments about Made for Love, her show that was not only cancelled, but removed altogether from the HBO Max streaming platform. 'The stuff the CEOs do, they're bad decisions,' Snyder said. 'I don't want something I love to be taken away like that.' In the last decade or two, the story of physical copies of movies and television has been overwhelmingly one of decline. Blockbuster is essentially gone, streaming is ascendant, Netflix no longer sends DVDs through the mail, and Best Buy no longer stocks them in its stores. Many manufacturers have ceased making disc players. Retail sales of new physical products in home entertainment fell below US$1bil (RM4.26bil) last year, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, an industry association. Yet amid the streaming deluge, there are signs – small, tenuous and anecdotal, but real – of a rebellion. Alex Holtz, a media and entertainment analyst at International Data Corp, compared Blu-rays to vinyl albums. Holtz, an audiophile, gladly streams new music while on walks, but he buys records he loves. 'We're in a back-to-the-future moment,' he said. Similarly, some movie fans are deciding to reinvest in the old-fashioned notion of owning copies of movies and shows. They often look and sound superior to streaming and, at least as importantly, they can be held in your hands and, absent burglary or a covetous brother-in-law, they cannot be taken away. 'THINK: of your favorite film,' the producers of the 2022 indie comedy Hundreds of Beavers wrote in a viral manifesto last year, as they prepared to drop their physical release. 'Now think again: where's your personal copy? You probably 'stream' your movies – from some faceless, centralised data server. But WHO owns that server? WHO decides what stays and what goes?' The manifesto concluded, 'This isn't just about nostalgia – it's about survival: Blu-rays are freedom in the face of digital control.' Increasing numbers of film fans agree. 'People are getting wise to this idea that you don't really own the digital things you supposedly own, and the only way you truly own something is to own it physically,' said Aaron Hamel, who, with his business partner, Jess Mills, opened Night Owl earlier this year. There are hobbyists and collectors constantly building new shelf space and scanning notices of releases from obscure imprints. Johnathan Lyman, a software developer in Washington state, supplements his many streaming subscriptions with physical media. He subscribes to HBO Max, but he also has all of the seasons of Westworld, which streams there, on 4K Ultra HD – because, he said, it looks 'way better.' But perhaps more notable are the casual, less technically savvy, and younger cineastes who wish to own physical copies of their first Wes Anderson film, or the complete run of Twin Peaks, or the movies that were their favourites when they were 11. 'With streaming and with how things are being changed and banned and challenged, it feels important to keep movies I love,' said Avery Coffey, 25, the host of 'Unbound & Rewound,' a podcast about horror books and movies, who was also browsing Night Owl last month. Coffey bought a DVD of High School Musical recently, she said, 'to show the children in my family things that are important to me.' Buying a physical copy of your favourite movie is not a purely sentimental decision. When you stream, say, Casablanca, you are in effect renting it – it is available only so long as a streamer chooses to make it available and you choose to subscribe to the service (or, in the cases of free streamers, view advertisements). And when you buy Casablanca digitally, typically through Amazon, Apple or YouTube, you almost always are actually licensing it – and licenses can be revoked. Users of the anime service Funimation learned this the hard way last year, when the streamer was acquired and some earlier digital licenses were no longer honoured. And Amazon users allege in a pending class-action lawsuit that they misunderstood the nature of digital ownership, leading them to pay higher prices than they might have otherwise. Digital versions can also be altered by their owners. George Lucas added numerous computer-generated scenery and fauna to Star Wars, and even reversed a shootout between Han Solo and the bounty hunter Greedo; the version streaming on Disney+ is not the original. Streamers have removed nudity and cigarettes from films. Episodes of 30 Rock that used blackface were taken out of circulation at the creator Tina Fey's request. Netflix deleted a graphic scene from the first season of 13 Reasons Why two years after it released the show. 'When consumers purchase media, they believe they have a series of rights, including that of permanent possession: the ability to loan it, to give it away, to resell it,' said Aaron Perzanowski, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. He added, 'We still see consumers being frustrated, outraged,' when they realise they do not have that right after they have bought something digitally. The streamers are fickle. Movies cycle on and off services (many outlets, including The New York Times, publish lists of movies on each one that are updated every month). And while physical media is often not cheap, the streamers' prices are also daunting: This year, the combined cost of ad-free subscriptions to, for instance, Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu and Criterion Channel summed to more than US$700. 'I continue to be an advocate for streaming, but it doesn't strike me as an either-or proposition,' said Jonathan Marlow, the executive director of Scarecrow Video, a nonprofit archive in Seattle. (Others include Kim's Video in New York and Vidiots in Los Angeles.) The streamers do not possess infinite films, Marlow noted. Netflix recently had around 16,000 titles; Scarecrow boasts nearly 150,000, many rentable by mail from across the country. 'When everyone says, 'Everything's available online' – which it isn't – they look at Scarecrow as an anachronism: 'Why should such a thing exist?'' Marlow said. 'It exists because people are not satisfied with the choices they already have.' For many fans, streaming itself – the unprecedented instant accessibility of thousands of movies and TV shows – has goosed demand for the earlier technology. 'The proliferation of media has maybe even overstimulated the appetite for newcomers to the world of film to be interested in film, and they suddenly discover that it's enjoyable both to watch something and to have something,' said Richard Lorber, the chair and CEO of Kino Lorber, which has a streaming service and also distributes physical copies of movies – and whose physical business, Lorber said, is up 15% this year. The Criterion Collection similarly views its streamer, the Criterion Channel, as 'a gateway back to physical media collecting,' the company's president, Peter Becker, said in an email. Another thing driving renewed interest in physical media is quality. A decent disc on a decent television typically provides stronger picture and sound than streaming. 'Those are highly compressed files, in order to pass across the internet easily,' Douglas McLaren, a film archivist at the University of Chicago, said of streaming. His university's film studies center does not have any streaming subscriptions, he said, relying instead on its library of more than 7,000 videos and discs and more than 3,000 film prints. What has maybe most marveled the more serious physical media boosters is how their hobby or passion has become kind of … cool. Criterion Closet videos, in which film personages stand in the middle of Criterion's roster of discs and excitedly snag their favourites off the shelves, has become a viral hit. And Williamsburg – a neighbourhood that has exported its sensibility across the world – now has a video store. 'We're older millennials,' Hamel, of Night Owl, said. 'We're shocked by the number of college-age people coming in and buying a couple US$5 DVDs to go home and watch together.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
In the age of streaming, why is physical media seeing demand?
Walking into Rough Cut Video in Calgary's northwest community of Varsity, the store's owner Pascal Fortin says expect to see films that would never be found on streaming services. "Harder to find stuff like Japanese monster movies, old kung fu movies, Italian horror movies," he said. "Cult cinema." The shop's shelves are lined with Blu-rays, 4K discs and VHS tapes imported from across Canada and internationally from countries including the U.K., Australia, Germany and the U.S. Fortin says when he opened the physical media store in 2023, he thought it would eventually succeed but didn't anticipate business taking off right away. Now, he says, he gets new customers all the time — and a new generation of collectors are eager for his inventory. "We're not far from the university, so a lot of young kids come in here to buy VHS tapes. [They're] nostalgic for a time that they didn't even live in," Fortin said. "They think it's cool to actually own and hold a movie rather than just watching it on streaming and then it's pretty much gone and forgotten about. When you actually own your movies, you kind of curate yourself your own collection and it says something about you rather than, you know, a watch history." Fortin says he's seeing a new generation of young collectors eager to pick up VHS tapes and other physical media. (Rukhsar Ali/CBC News) Fortin said he has customers as young as 16 that regularly visit the store. He became a film enthusiast at a young age, watching 1950s Japanese monster movies and branching out to more "obscure" movies from there. 'A physical, tangible thing that isn't going to disappear' Calder Fertig is a long-time film collector and a regular patron of Rough Cut Video. Part of the allure of collecting physical media, he says, is the joy of discovering something new to watch. "Some of my fondest memories are going with friends to the video store on a Friday night and you'd always go to rent the big new movie and 90 per cent of the time it was rented out," he said. "So you'd be scouring the shelves looking for something else, and that's where you end up finding some of the hidden gems." And another reason to collect, he adds, is being able to actually display those films on a shelf. Calder Fertig is a proud collector of physical media. (Submitted by Calder Fertig) "In an era where we're seeing just how transitory, maybe, files on the internet are, it's kind of nice to have a physical, tangible thing that isn't going to disappear," Fertig said. "There aren't going to be ads put on it, you know. No rising subscription rates." The cost of streaming In October, Disney+ increased its cheapest monthly subscription plan for Canadian streamers from $7.99 to $8.99 per month, which includes ads and limits streaming to two devices at a time. Netflix discontinued its cheapest ad-free subscription plan in Canada altogether last year. "I think we're all kind of getting a little bit frustrated every time there's a [price] hike every few months on our subscription services," Fertig said. "And, you know, you don't want to kind of lose access to everything that they contain." Charles Tepperman, an associate professor of communication, media and film at the University of Calgary, says when streaming was first introduced, there was "the hope or promise that you would maybe pay a subscription to one service like Netflix and that you'd be able to get everything that was released through that service." Fortin's store is frequented by customers as young as 16. (Rukhsar Ali/CBC News) He explained many people have had the experience of looking through multiple streaming services for a particular movie that they want to watch, and then not being able to find it on any of the services they own. "Instead now there's this kind of patchwork approach [with movies spread across various streaming services]. And so you start to wonder how many of these you need to subscribe to in order to watch the shows that you want to watch." The joy of discovery Fortin's store has held special screenings at Globe Cinema and other venues in Calgary to bring Rough Cut Video's selection of hard-to-find films to the community. Audiences have come to watch without knowing what film they'll get to see, and so far, Fortin said he's had positive feedback from attendees. LISTEN | Physical media is back For Fortin, finding something new and unexpected is what it's all about. "Getting that sense of discovery when you come in here to look for something that we have and right next to it on the shelf is something that you never heard of but looks cool too," Fortin said. "That's just part of the whole experience of being in an actual physical media store."
