Posted on 06/23/2026 7:13:34 PM PDT by Red Badger
People are tired of paying more to scroll longer.
Streaming was supposed to make movie night easier. Somehow, it made it exhausting.
When every app wants more money, the old DVD shelf starts looking sane again.
BRIEFING
Grant here. Streaming literally revolutionized the way we all consume entertainment. Gone were the days of cable boxes and trips to Blockbuster. Instead, from the comfort of your own home, you got to choose exactly what you wanted to watch. But this convenience over the years has morphed. It's become more expensive and more complicated, and people are starting to yearn again for simplicity. Let’s break it down.
A viral X post from Alphafox shows a couple that are ditching streaming services and kicking it retro with a DVD player they randomly decided to buy from Walmart. They say that it's just become exhausting scrolling through the endless amounts of apps just trying to find something halfway decent to watch. So now, they pop over to the store, look at a shelf filled with DVDs, pick some, head home, and pop it into their player. Simple and, as they say, more "intentional."
SOURCE
Honestly, it's easy to relate to this couple's frustration. You open Netflix, then Hulu, then Disney+, then HBO Max, then Prime, then whatever app has the one movie you thought you owned but apparently was rented from the void for $3.99 eight years ago. Then, by the time you actually find something, the dream is dead and everyone is doom scrolling on their phone.
And this whole thing is bigger than just nostalgia, plastic cases, and scratched discs. People are literally yearning for some simplicity. Just going somewhere, choosing a movie and calling it a day. But it's also about the ownership, ritual, shelves, collections, and the strange little thrill of finding something in the wild instead of being spoon-fed another algorithmic menu.
This also comes at a time where streaming services just seem to be getting more and more bloated and expensive. Disney announced another U.S. Disney+ price hike in 2025, raising the ad-supported plan to $11.99 per month and the ad-free premium tier to $18.99, marking its fourth consecutive year of Disney+ fee increases. Netflix also raised prices across its U.S. plans again in 2026, and HBO Max also raised U.S. prices in 2025, including increases across its Basic, Standard, and Premium tiers.
So people are paying more, but the experience isn't getting any better. Nielsen’s Gracenote reported in 2025 that nearly half of streamers would consider canceling a service if it was too difficult to find something to watch, and 19% abandon a viewing session when the search fails. That number actually jumps up to 29% among viewers ages 18 to 24. So even younger folks are feeling the frustration.
And speaking of the youngsters, Los Angeles Times reported that Gen Z is reviving DVDs and Blu-rays, with young customers citing subscription fatigue, scattered content across platforms, and the appeal of physical ownership. It also noted that physical media sales declined only 9% in 2025 after sharper drops of more than 20% in both 2023 and 2024, which suggests the collapse may be slowing as interest returns.
DEBRIEFING
The DVD comeback is still small, but it definitely seems to be picking up steam. And who knows? Maybe Blockbuster could still make its grand comeback, because clearly, streaming has created the same fatigue across many generations. Even the ones that didn't grow up with "Be Kind, Please Rewind."
Us "elders" remember when picking a movie was a simple and rather enjoyable experience. You went to the shelf, grabbed the case, and watched it. That's it. Younger viewers may not have lived through the peak Blockbuster era, but they understand the exhaustion of paying for five apps, scrolling through all of them, and still feeling like there is nothing worth watching.
That's the part streaming companies seem to be missing as they're chasing the almighty dollar. People aren't just annoyed by the price hikes. They're sick and tired of the whole arrangement. Everyone is fed up with content moving between platforms, annoyed with ads creeping into paid services, frustrated with subscriptions stacking up, and tired of needing a search party just to find one friggin movie.
With DVDs, you buy the movie, you own the movie, you put it on the shelf, and when movie night comes, the choice is much simpler. There's no algorithm nudging you, no disappearing title, no $4.99 rental cost attached to one old favorite.
This is why this trend cuts across generations. For some people, DVDs are nostalgia, and for others, they're a discovery. But for everyone, the appeal is the same: less scrolling, less renting, less price creep, and a little more control over what should have stayed simple in the first place.
NOW YOU KNOW
Streaming promised freedom, but a lot of people are starting to miss ownership.
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Craaaaaaap! First I got rid of my Nintendo, then I got tid of my turntable and my vinyl records and then I got rid of my DVDs. Okay. I’m hanging on to my 8 tracks.
Lot’s of Extras on DVDs especially
the Commentaries.
Just like cable when it started, bragged about no commercials and then they lied. Streaming is the same way—those damned interminable ads.
If you don’t hold you don’t own it.
I still have my RCA CED discs, my laser discs, and my DVDs. Having them on the shelves is a security blanket. My VHS tapes ended up in a 16 garbage bag event. Streaming is frustrating because just as you find something worthwhile on YouTube, the uploader takes it down. So much to watch, so little time.
You save “The Apostle” with
Robert Duvall? I picked up
“Ford Vs Ferrari” last week
for $1,25 at Goodwill XLNT Score!
I’m about to build myself a new PC and I’d like to put an optical drive in it. You can still buy them, but I don’t think anyone has come out with anything new in over a decade. I go on-line and I find a drive to buy and I check the reviews, and some guy from 2009 tells me it’s a nice drive. Swell.
Oh, yeah. Thrift stores. Thanks for the reminder. I should look in the attic for my VCR, too.
I borrow DVDs from the county library.
I quite often watch an episode for an hour in bed.
And Director’s cuts, and deleted scenes, and bloopers...........
I have never ‘streamed’ anything, nor do I plan to. No Roku, Hulu or Anything +................
“Just like cable when it started, bragged about no commercials and then they lied. Streaming is the same way—those damned interminable ads.”
For the large fees the streamers charge I expected them to have huge libraries of movies available permanently. what they actually have is a few dozen available at any one time and for a few weeks each.
BitTorrent.
I bought a DVD/VHS player 15 years ago, never used it.
Tubi is still free and carries a lot of the same content as the pay streamers.
Sure you may think you paid for it, but all you really did was pay for access to it for as long as it was available.
Take the movie "Togo" (the dog not country in Africa) Disney decided to pull it. So you can not watch it any more. Anywhere.
If you bought movies from Redbox, no, you didn't. They are not there anymore.
At least a couple of other streaming services did the same in the past couple of years. No service, no movies, no refunds.
P2p
I pulled out a Special Edition of
‘Apocalypse Now’ and here’s
Marlon Brando doing T.S. Eliots’
‘The Hollow Men’ full 17 minutes.
But you gotta use a VPN. My ISP threatens to cancel me if i download p2p without vpn
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