Do you have a "My List" with hundreds of titles that you sort of want to see, but you can never settle on anything to watch? Do you find yourself actively looking for titles that don't have the red N logo on it? If you are a more than casual viewer, are you really getting your film needs met with streaming?
Last month our Netflix subscription expired after 8 years. I did enjoy Netflix for a long time, yet I couldn't help but feel streaming fatigue over the past year. I never got rid of my DVD collection. I was raised with the idea that a DVD collection is a part of your identity. Like when a guest comes over to your house and browses your collection, they could tell right away if you were a man of good taste. When we moved to our new place last year, we realised how many DVDs we had never watched. At that point we decided to take a break from streaming and spend some time just watching plain old DVDs.
This decision has had the unintentional side effect of me rediscovering the hobby of collecting films. Not having a streaming subscription means that if I want to watch a specific title, I have to either buy it or borrow it. I'm not much of a pirate so I try to find legal ways to get my copies. Since DVDs have lost most of their value, it is very easy and cheap to establish a nice DVD collection right now. Go to any thrift store and you will find a corner where DVDs are being sold for a euro or less. Some places even give them away for free! The funny thing is that now that I don't stream, I am starting to see the value in these products again.
Owning physical media actually has more benefits than one might think. First of all you get to decide exactly what you're next watch is going to be. You are not limited to the curated lists of Netflix or Prime, or the archives of one of the big film studios. Browsing through shelves of second hand DVDs, you start to get an idea of what streaming services DON'T offer. The older the film, the less likely you will find it on streaming. How often do you see films like Casablanca, Ben-Hur or Doctor Zhivago recommended to you by an algorithm? Also, foreign masters such as Fellini, Wenders, Kurosawa or Bergman are often overlooked or stashed away on niche arthouse film platforms. Then you might argue that I should just take a subscription to an arthouse streaming service, but the thing is that I love big budget Hollywood films as much as I like Paris, Texas or Seven Samurai. I'm not in the mood for heavy drama every night, sometimes I just want to turn off my brain and enjoy a wild ride. My point here is that the content on streaming platforms is curated to appeal to the average viewer of the platform. Meaning that there will be a tendency to go for recently released, mainstream titles or popular arthouse titles. If you are like me and visit the cinema frequently, chances are that you have already seen most of the good stuff that is added to Netflix. This is what I mean when I say, you may not be getting your needs met.
In addition to giving me more freedom to choose what I am going to watch, not paying for streaming also gives me more freedom to NOT watch anything on television. This was a very suprising side effect for me. I always complained that I was not reading enough books, but since I stopped streaming I have actually started reading a book (it's Dune in case you were wondering). This made me wonder if having a streaming subscription creates some internal pressure for people to get on the platform even if you don't have a specific desire to watch anything. Since you have already paid some money, you feel the pressure of getting value for that money. This might lead to logging in to Netflix without a specific desire to watch anything. This happened to me and my wife a lot. We would scroll endlessly through the recommendation lists, ultimately just giving up because we were not in the mood to watch anything at all. Not having Netflix relieves me of this pressure and gives me more freedom to pursue other hobbies in my free time.
My renewed interest in buying physical media actually goes back a bit further. Two years ago my oldest son was starting to develop the attention span to watch feature films. We started with some Ghibli classics like Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service, but he was also interested in Disney films. We had a Disney+ one month free trial, but I noticed how bad most of the recent Disney content was. Disney is a legacy company. People love it for the wonderful animations they made in the past, but in the last decades they have lost artistic relevance completely. If it was not for the Pixar aqcuisition they would have become irrelevant much longer ago already. Sadly, even Pixar has lost it's momentum and is starting to rely on known IP too much (is anyone really looking forward to Toy Story 5?). I decided then that I don't need a subscription for Disney+ to satisfy my child. I just had to buy the legacy Disney and Pixar films in thrift stores. My kids have seen several Disney classics by now. They loved Peter Pan, Toy Story and Aladdin and they still have a stack of second hand titles to go.
This experience with Disney+ does not stand alone. You often hear people say that streaming is killing the film industry and I agree. In the beginning, when it was just Netflix, streaming was a great experience where you could find great flicks and shows from all the major studios in one place. Of course, this was not going to last forever and both Netflix and the Big Five studios knew it. Netflix knew it had to create their original content and get audiences hooked before the studios started their own streaming platforms. Meanwhile, the studios wanted to create a platform as soon as possible because they realized they helped create a rival by giving Netflix their content. I think the best time to have a Netflix account was between 2013 and 2018. Netflix was investing money in quality shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, but still streamed a lot of Warner Brothers, Disney and 20th Century Fox films.
Once the streaming wars started it has been one big shit show of who can get the most subscribers. Studios try to persuade customers by relying on existing IP, but 90% of that content is bland and forgettable. Relying on known IP is a great way to pull subscribers in, but eventually people are going to notice your content lacks quality. What made a lot of great franchises like Indiana Jones, Alien, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings so good, is that they were made with a creative vision. Sure, they were big budget studio productions, but at least they were made first and foremost because a filmmaker wanted to make them. In the current streaming wars content is made to catch new subscribers, not to prevent churn (subscriber loss). I think this is the main reason why it has been so easy to quit my Netflix subscribtion after 8 years. I don't feel like I am missing out on anything because the original content is really just that. Content. Made to be consumed, not to be remembered.
Hollywood is self destructing right now with the streaming wars. They have contributed to make physical media lose most of it's value. They have started a race to the bottom by offering subscribers extremely cheap deals in order to increase their subscription rates, but these platforms have to become profitable at some point. Platforms are already increasing their fees and banning account sharing in order to increase revenue. I predict that this is going to be the downfall of a lot of streaming platforms. Because when prices go up, more people are going to start to wonder if paying 30 or 40 euro per month for 3 streaming platforms is really worth the money. More people will realise that buying (second hand) DVDs is a more feasible alternative and quit their subscriptions. If this happens, obviously the prices for second hand films is going to rise, same as what has happened to vintage clothes. We might see a revival of physical media. Who knows, it may become cool again to boast about your DVD collection to your friends. Perhaps things will eventually get better for consumers and for the film industry as a whole. However, I am convinced that before that things will be getting worse for some time to come.