Eyes: DVD collection

Do you own a lot of DVDs? I bet you do, even though you may also have a subscription to a lot of TV channels, maybe even Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube Red or others.

The question to ponder now is this one: how often do you realistically pull out a DVD and watch it?

Some thoughts about this introduction to the subject:

There is nothing wrong with watching things online. We all move with the times, we receive offers to subscribe to online options and usually they work for us. For a while. I seem to hear more comments about the limitations of online streaming services, especially when it comes to the selection of things to watch. I keep wondering how this translates into that person’s DVD collection? That set of films and series is pretty limited after all as well.

I’d say that – if they were to compare the streaming offers with their own collection – they’d be hard put to argue their collection has more selection than online streaming. It seems to me that we easily fall into that trap of “ever more” when it comes to the internet. Have you ever thought that you may have exhausted what YouTube has to offer you? Maybe that is down to what YouTube decides to present to you based on your previous choices? When have you last gone on a serious ‘jungle explorer YouTube journey’ with exciting search keywords?

See? It’s been a while, right? We tend to start out excited and curious, and once we have found our regular fare, things slow down very quickly. I’m sure Netflix has hidden gems you just have not explored yet. But because you have watched all the obvious, hyped series, it feels like you are done.

Returning to DVDs, your home collection is only as good as you believe it to be. Are you hanging on to DVDs that you have not watched in many years? Maybe even just once and then never again?

There is good reason to hang on to DVDs, especially if they hold films that are not mainstream: those you are unlikely to find online anywhere because they are just too strange, did badly at the box office, or simply have been made a long time ago and are of no particular interest to the majority of watchers. I’d say: hang on to those.

When it comes to mainstream box sets (maybe Game of Thrones, Entourage, StarGate, etc.), those can easily be watched online and you really have no need to clog up your shelf space with those.

Oh, you enjoy the boxes, the imagery and the extras? Let’s get real for a moment: how often do you actually watch the extras? Maybe once or twice, but then the novelty has worn off. The imagery on those boxes is usually pretty standard, and I rarely find myself entranced by it, the only thing that matters in the end is the movie content. And that could be found online as a stream. See above.

The best advice for DVDs is to keep the ones you cannot otherwise enjoy and ditch the rest. Make space for you, make space for the new.

PS: if you are thinking of ripping DVDs and only keeping the digital files, be aware that this may be illegal where you live…

If you have enjoyed reading this, you may find these other articles interesting:

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• My own troubles with DVDs