Keep Buying Physical Media: An Imploration
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
With the recent decision by electronics retailer Best Buy to phase out all DVD and Blu-ray sales by 2024, I feel that it is more important than ever to highlight the plethora of reasons why you must consider buying physical media again. I understand that it isn’t feasible to buy every film or television series that has ever interested you because the economy is too challenging at this time (but what else is new), and it is highly unrealistic to clutter up your home with copies of releases you may get around to one day. I certainly wouldn’t be able to live with thousands of discs that would begin to swarm my kitchen and bedroom, let alone remain solely on my shelves and in my living room or study. However, if you have favourite films or television series that you never want to lose touch with, it is crucial — now more than ever — that you buy them on physical media. If you don’t have a disc player, I suggest you invest in one, no matter what kind of player it is or how much it costs (even settle for just a simple, cheap DVD player).
if it isn’t obvious enough in the day and age of streaming, nothing is truly yours unless you own an untouchable copy of it in your domicile.
Before the experts on technicality flood my email inbox with corrections, I understand that you never actually own a film just because you buy it. You own a copy of said film. Buying a Blu-ray of Lawrence of Arabia doesn’t automatically give you all of the rights attached to the motion picture. I also trust my audience to have more intelligence than to make this confusion, so anyone trying to be a litigious hero is wasting their time. My point is that you should not lose access to what you love, and it is best to be prepared for what may be a scary era ahead.
It’s true. Best Buy is phasing out physical copies of films and television series from its stores, which follows a gradual thought process that began years ago with the removal of physical albums in compact disc form. On paper, it seems like the use of streaming and digital purchases has created a redundancy for physical media. You don’t have to worry about the taking-up of space outside of disc or cloud storage. Everything is available at the click of a mouse, controller, or remote (well, almost everything). I shouldn’t be complaining when everything has been more readily available now than ever before, right?
Wrong.
First off, I’m not the right person to be spotlighting the complexities of the illusion of choice, but know that a pool of granted options at your disposal doesn’t mean that you actually have the freedom to select whatever you desire; you merely have the opportunity to pick from what is presented to you, as if it is the entirety of what is actually available. The more options there are, the more you feel like you are in control of your destiny. In the context of this discussion, we’ve all been on Netflix (or any other streaming service, but Netflix’s search bar interface is notorious for squashing the hopes of the user) trying to search for a film or series. The search in question will yield an autofill response, leading you to believe that Netflix has it. Once you complete the search, there’s a message stating that Netflix doesn’t actually have this title; however, it will also offer you similar titles that it does have in hopes that you’ll select one of those instead. So, what do you do? Do you pick one of the offered films or shows? Do you hop over to another streaming service that does have the title (which includes paying for a new service you didn’t already have just to watch this one title)?
Picking either option is playing into the illusion of choice because you are sticking with what is made available for you, not what is actually available out there in the world as a whole. You are sadly playing into the system. Now, before I continue, I don’t want to seem like I am completely against streaming services. They do have their major benefits, including (what used to be) affordable ways to access media that you don’t presently own and swift access to titles if you’re just looking for something to put on. There are also the many original projects (well, the good ones, anyway) that hit your living room in an instant. Additionally, whether physical media is preserved well or not, there are ways that DVDs, Blu-rays, and the like can deteriorate over time (yes, even if they’re not played too frequently at all), which is a realization I want to get out of the way now before it seems too late.
Back to the scenario. If your solution to the Netflix dilemma was to pirate the media you were looking for, it kind of proves my point that streaming services can be so unreliable to the point of negating one of their initial reasons to exist: to cut down on piracy because of inaccessibility (there’s the cost factor as well, and that has also been nullified by the need to subscribe to many streaming services for higher costs). There’s one other major solution: go physical. Either buy, borrow, sign out (from a library) or rent (from the very few rental stores that are still around).
This is reason enough to go back to buying physical media if you haven’t been doing so already. If you need more reasons, allow me to break them down for you:
A Best Buy film section reduced to the state of a ghost town.
Firstly, the obvious: you cannot guarantee that you will always have access to what you love. With so many streaming services buying, shifting, or losing rights to media, it is never a guarantee that you will know what will be where and for how long. It may seem blatant and foolish to discuss, but this goes beyond what you may have even thought was possible. Since I am a Torontonian, the concept of geo-blocking is not foreign to me (Canada’s considered a “sort-of” America — but not quite — when it comes to digital accessibility). One of my favourite science fiction films of the twenty-first century is Alex Garland’s Annihilation, which was distributed internationally by Netflix. With the big, red letters plastered all over the intro and outro of this film, it would seem like they would be the number one place to watch the film, right? Merely years after its release, Annihilation is nowhere to be found on Netflix Canada (Netflix was responsible for the international distribution of this film, while Paramount was responsible for all of North America, which likely clears things up here). Still, a streaming service being heavily associated with a film and its essence of distribution (and thus, to many, its existence) is misleading. Those who don’t spend every waking moment of their lives fulfilling their due diligence of what services possess which rights and what releases are migrating where may not notice when a film or series they like will vanish quietly in the wee early hours of the first day of any given month. Sure, there are reports on what titles are leaving services, but are we supposed to be glued to these monthly notices like our lives depend on them?
Once we get this unpleasantry out of the way (the fact that you cannot actually depend on services to have certain titles at all times), there’s the other possibility that may leave you a bit flummoxed: what streaming services choose to do with these titles. Yes. This is a reality. There has already been a lot of spotlighting on streaming services culling certain episodes of a series that they deem problematic, but this has gone further with the actual editing of films and series in ways that affect the original art that was intended. An obvious example is when The Simpsons made its way onto Disney+ and was botched with a 16:9 aspect ratio that fully cut out sight gags and other important information. At least now there is an option to watch the series as was originally intended, but that wasn’t the case right off the bat. Aside from aspect ratios, there is something far more nefarious: the actual editing of films and series. I understand that times change and people grow and that art from yesteryear may not be seen in the same light as it once was, but editing works that are deemed problematic is dishonest, especially since the line of what we can edit and what we can’t will only continue to shift the more this happens. A major example was when the Criterion Channel’s version of The French Connection had an example of the character Popeye Doyle’s racism cut from the film. Firstly, I think that cutting this slur misses the context of who Doyle is, who he represents, and the time and setting of the character (I also believe that there’s a misrepresentation that Doyle is the “hero” of the story when he is anything but a role model or a moral citizen). Secondly, I understand why such a despicable and hateful word is deemed unwatchable, but maybe a warning before the film would suffice.
To start editing the work of another — no matter how problematic it may be — begins the slippery slope of questioning what should be edited. Additionally, The French Connection on Criterion — a service/company that promotes the preservation of art as-is first and foremost — is indicative of the Disney version that they allowed the Criterion Channel to use. This is huge because this means that any new copies of the film that Disney releases (as it now owns Fox) will have the edited version. This is all the more reason why I insist that you start buying physical media of your favourite titles now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Now. Before many more films are being affected and the option to buy a film as it was once released is gone. It may make sense to remove a problematic sequence from a film in your mind, but what is deemed “problematic” can easily change and become questionably subjective to Disney and other major companies with these powers, and suddenly your favourite titles will be even a little different. It may be arbitrary, but that’s an even larger cause for concern: when the changes are for no rhyme or reason, and your favourite art is being altered just because (or via the discretion of new “owners” that want to take matters into their own hands).
The decision to alter what you are allowed to watch and how goes beyond just what is streamable. There’s also a major reason why I haven’t suggested digital purchases at all in this article, and it boils down to what happened with Sony and PlayStation last year, where the digital copies of Discovery content — yes, even the purchased ones — would be removed by the end of 2023. Yes. Even buying a digital copy of something doesn’t mean you are safe, and this is most likely the start of more similar instances to come. This leads to another concern I have with streaming services and digital purchases, and that’s the connection to the internet that is necessary for either option. Back when it was first introduced, the internet promised endless searchability and access. Now, I see the opposite is taking effect: constant control and a lack of privacy via permanent visibility. With internet access comes an infinite dialogue between the provider and its consumer, and if you are connected with a host, it can decide what you can watch. Clearly, this extends past just what is streamable, but also what is purchased and in your storage. This is absolutely frightening when it comes to censorship and the control of what you can even watch.
One other major reason why you should buy physical media is so that it can keep existing. With Best Buy removing its DVD and Blu-ray sections, we have yet another avenue to buy said media in this way gone. We are losing the options before our very eyes. Yes, we still have many other ways to buy this sort of media, but that’s the case for right now. One day, it may be too expensive to release media in this way and not enough people are buying these options in order for the industry to be sustainable. We may only be provided digital-only services in the future. By then, it’ll be far too late to even attempt to go physical. By choosing to buy physical copies again, you are doing your part in securing a copy of your favourite films or television series before the possibility that you can’t anymore, and you are also helping the industry keep going. We must learn the ways of vinyl which has continued to exist in tandem with streaming services. It’s because there is still a need and a love for physical music. There’s also the lack of income that streaming plagues artists with that vinyl doesn’t encourage, and it’s another major concern for film and television (if the strikes weren’t indicative of that enough). To go back a little bit, only a few major options are available for buying physical media. They may not be around forever, especially if society continues to try and force a digital-only environment to cut down on costs and labour. If the history of business has taught me anything, where there’s no demand, there’s no need to keep on supplying. We cannot allow big companies to dictate what our demands should be.
You are not in complete control of what you can watch unless you make it so.
Before I conclude this piece, I want to also recommend the best disc and player preservation practices, so you can guarantee that you yourself are even capable of the long-term goal of complete accessibility (if walk-in and online stores are cutting down on what we can buy, there may come a point when we no longer have the option to create physical collections and viewing methods). Here are some tips:
• Store your library in a cool area: not too warm/hot, and not too cold. 60-70 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15-21 degrees Celsius. Extreme heat and cold are bad for any artifact, and this obviously includes discs. Having your collection near a vent, a window, and other hot or cold environments is a recipe for deterioration.
• Store discs in their cases and upright. A random tip for those of you with VHS tapes (or any type of cassette): storing them flat is the way to go, as having cassettes in their cases with the reel locks holding them upright is pulling on the tape, thus slowly distorting your cassettes overtime.
• Grab discs by the inner hole and outer edge, as to minimize damage created by fingerprints and oils. Clean dust off with a soft cloth, and wipe from the centre of the disc out (do not wipe arbitrarily in a circle, which can haphazardly affect the readability of the disc).
• Of course, don’t just leave discs out to collect dust and dirt. Return them to their cases as soon as they’re done.
• Additionally, leaving discs in a player for too long is bad both for the disc and the player; it may seem fine to leave a disc on a menu while you go about your chores, but it’s actually not a good practice. When done with both, return the disc to its case and turn off the player when not in use.
• If you want to get extreme, there are archival-safe containers that you can opt to use instead of what your media comes in, and you can buy some such examples here. I, too, am a sucker for original casing, so I don’t fault you for not wanting to buy alternatives. If you do want to, or if you have a loose disc without a case that needs to be protected, this is the way to go.
It’s time to get physical again, if you haven’t been already; to preserve film; to help the industry; to protect what you love; to ensure that you can get to watch whenever and however you want. Before it is too late.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.