Stream­ing will nev­er replace my DVD col­lec­tion, but it has improved it

First things first: I love the vari­ety and con­ve­nience that stream­ing offers. As much as I mourn the over­sized cas­es and pro­mo­tion­al standees of a video rental shop, there is a cold Dar­win­ian log­ic to the rise of Net­flix, Ama­zon and the rest. As well as the imme­di­a­cy, I like that I can take a chance on a title I may not be famil­iar with with­out shelling out for it. I also like the idea that film lov­ing young­sters have instant access to the kind of cin­e­mat­ic edu­ca­tion that would have tak­en me months to acquire at their age.

In short, I love stream­ing. I just love my DVD col­lec­tion more.

My first DVD was a fea­ture­less ​‘Vanil­la Disc’ edi­tion of Pulp Fic­tion, bought for my 16^th birth­day. With my 34^th birth­day fast approach­ing, that’s over half my life spent enam­oured with lit­tle shiny discs (most­ly Blu-rays now). There’s no rhyme or rea­son to it – the cat­e­gories are entire­ly my own arbi­trary order – gen­res, aes­thet­ics, and favourites. There’s a director’s sec­tion where film­mak­ers I admire get their place in infamy, as well as the resound­ing shame of any direc­tor who falls out of my favour and has their work dis­band­ed into gener­ic sec­tions like com­e­dy, action, etc. Discs I haven’t watched yet get red stick­ers – they used to not be allowed in the col­lec­tion until they were watched, but my wife com­plained about the stacks of cas­es tak­ing over the liv­ing room and the stick­er sys­tem was born.

The qual­i­ty of the DVD’s are also a hodge­podge. I spent a lot on import­ed Kill Bill DVDs, while var­i­ous signed rar­i­ties sit beside bat­tered old ex-rentals, and those late ​’90s Warn­er Bros card­board cas­es. There’s Franken­steined boxsets (old­er discs inside a nicer box), a Star Wars Hol­i­day Spe­cial boot­leg (not allowed near the canon films at my friend’s request) and a leather-effect Kore­an copy of Van Hels­ing that, to this day, I have no idea why I bought.

It’s jum­bled, cum­ber­some and prob­a­bly worth a lot less than what I paid for it. It makes increas­ing­ly less sense, in a dig­i­tal world, to have col­lec­tions like these, except for the fact that it makes me hap­py. In my expe­ri­ence, if a hob­by or activ­i­ty makes you hap­py (and doesn’t hurt any­one), then it instant­ly makes all the sense in the world.

Equal­ly con­flict­ing is my love of watch­ing movies on phys­i­cal for­mats. I could argue all day about qual­i­ty, spe­cial fea­tures and more, but that’s not why I like it. There’s just a sense of occa­sion to putting the disc in and prop­ping the case against the play­er in the man­ner of a ​‘Now Show­ing’ poster. Wad­ing through the ​‘can­not skip’ ads, then after­wards hav­ing the option of watch­ing enig­mat­i­cal­ly titled fea­turettes like ​‘Anato­my of a Car Chase’ or ​‘Design­ing Ter­ror’. What some view as incon­ve­nience, I view as pageantry. The hap­pi­ness is in the process.

I used to fear the stream­ing rev­o­lu­tion, dis­miss­ing it as a fad with the flip­pan­cy of a cli­mate change denier. Part of my argu­ment was gen­uine opin­ion – the ini­tial utopi­an ide­al of every film ever in one place is unre­al­is­tic- but most­ly it was fear. Fear that the geeky cool of being known ​‘The DVD guy’ for years could go away, that it would be about as hip as being ​‘Dis­c­man Guy’ or ​‘CRT Tele­vi­sion Guy’. I was afraid of being left behind. Cue a brief and ill-advised peri­od of pan­ic, check­ing DVD sales charts and near­ly hav­ing a break­down when Block­buster and HMV floundered.

How­ev­er, with age comes wis­dom (or apa­thy, I haven’t worked out which). I realised some­thing I did for me became some­thing I did for oth­er peo­ple, and if it stopped being fun for me, why the hell did I have these two book­cas­es clog­ging up my office? A change occurred, one that would have been sac­ri­lege to 16 year old me. I threw out about a third of my col­lec­tion, all the filler that boost­ed my num­bers or was part of a fevered five for £30 pur­chase. If it made me go ​‘meh’, it was out.

Stream­ing had done away with one aspect of DVD col­lect­ing – to amass a large vault of every film I’d even vague­ly liked. Now there was a new pur­pose; to tai­lor it down to a col­lec­tion of films that mean some­thing to me. Col­lect in the way some peo­ple col­lect art, by buy­ing things that con­nect with them per­son­al­ly or aes­thet­i­cal­ly. Rather than threat­en its exis­tence, stream­ing ser­vices had remind­ed me why I liked phys­i­cal media in the first place.

Whether it’s the vague pseu­do-phi­los­o­phy of a movie hip­ster, or just a guy approach­ing his mid-thir­ties adapt­ing to change, my love the tan­gi­ble side of movie watch­ing has only increased thanks to this new on-demand dawn. Indeed, it’s led me to draw a new con­clu­sion that we shouldn’t have to choose in the first place. The inter­net has made any­thing pos­si­ble, mean­ing we should pur­sue as many things that make us hap­py. Par­tic­u­lar­ly if they come in a Lim­it­ed Edi­tion, lentic­u­lar steelbook.