The viewers ditching streaming 'rot' in favour of DVDs

James Taylor has over 600 titles in his collection, an array of thrift store found blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD DVDs.

The 37-year-old medical service technician from Hawkes Bay quit streaming services a year ago. Decision fatigue and prices wore him down.

"When I would go on say Netflix, I would scroll through and I'd be like none of this is appealing to me. A lot of it's just like B-grade movies," he told RNZ.

The report said 58 percent of people had access to Netflix, while only 36 percent used the site every day.

Taylor saw DVDs as an investment, rather than paying for one more subscription over months and years. Plus, if you buy the film, you will always own it, unlike how favourites can drop off a streaming platform.

"You don't really own it unless you've got the physical form," Taylor said.

Taylor found movies on Blu-ray and 4K looked and sounded better than when streamed on his fancy surround sound setup at home. His DVDs are displayed like books tidily lined up in several drawers with speakers in the floor, ceiling, and walls.

"The quality that comes through when you invest in good stuff. The difference in quality for a Blu-ray disc compared to streaming for me is chalk and cheese."

Lord of the Rings was one of Taylor’s favourites: "In the scene with Helms Deep, and the rain starts coming down, you can hear all the tinkling of the rain heading armour coming from the speakers above you. It sounds so immersive."

Aro Video, one of the few rental video stores left in the country, said it had been on shaky ground for years.

But after 37 years in business, sales for purchasing DVDs had picked up and collectors helped keep them afloat. In addition, the store carried about 28,000 titles for rent, and a sale shelf on the Aro St footpath offered repaired second-hand discs.

Staffer Tom Hutchison said: "Initially, it was clear that streaming services were undercutting physical media and offering a very affordable service."

But as viewers found they needed multiple subscriptions to watch films they wanted, owning a copy became the simplest guarantee.

He said customers - particularly young people - where increasingly coming into the store bemoaning streaming service algorithms. DVDs offered the chance to find something new and out of their usual picks.

Hutchison reckoned the number one rental was The Castle, the classic Aussie 90s flick. Sam Neill and Dolly Parton films had been in hot demand recently following the stars’ deaths, and Hollywood classics like Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment were consistent favourites.

Hutchinson also observed more parents bringing kids to the video store looking for greater control over the media their children consume. (Parents would try to convince kids to rent nostalgic films like Roald Dahl’s Matilda, but Bluey usually won, he said.)

"They don't want the TV to play the next thing and the next thing. They don't want the media to continue flooding the house.”

The art of buying DVDs – and physical media generally – has previously been saved for a small pool of obsessive collectors.

But staff at Relics, a film and music store in Dunedin, said a new demographic of young people were searching for DVDs.

Employee Lucas Ravenga said: “I was a teenager buying physical media all the time, but I was kind of a film bro. The range of them (customers) is definitely more varying to what it was like when I was a teenager.”

Selling predominately second-hand DVDs, best sellers are School of Rock, Napoleon Dynamite, Predator, and any Arnold Schwarzenegger film.

Ravenga said teens were rebelling against streaming by purchasing new and popular titles on disc.

“Marvel movies never last on the shelf when they get there, which is not surprising because I feel a lot of people are boycotting or moving away from particular streaming services.”

This was true for Trade Me sales too, with the most-searched DVDs skewing towards big name titles you could easily find on streaming services: Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, Disney, Harry Potter and James Bond, alongside beloved British and Kiwi TV series and kids' favourites like Bluey and Peppa Pig.

A Trade Me spokesperson said DVDs sales had been consistent for a long time, regardless of streaming.

The average price of a DVD was $15.50 over the last year on Trade Me, though rarities command a larger price.

Long-time film critic Dan Slevin said he’d seen a shift in consumers opting for a more intentional approach to choosing media. Picking a DVD from a shelf feels more thoughtful than arguing over an endless recommended section.

“Streaming's been around long enough now that we're starting to realise the rot of it,” he said.

A collector himself, Slevin owns well over 1000 DVDs, now following a strict one-in-one-out rule.

“If you love classic movies, if you really are interested in the history of film, then streaming's useless for you because Netflix has almost nothing before 1980.

“With streaming services, because of the way that rights are managed and dispersed and distributed by film companies, films come and go from those services and there's no guarantee that the film that you wanted to watch will still be there when you want to watch it.”

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