Alex Brooks keeps her collection of about 300 DVDs in a $50, leather-bound CD holder so her favorite films are easily accessible and transportable.
“It’s always my fun fact when people ask,” Brooks, a senior studying sociology criminology and mathematical statistics, said. “I’m like, ‘My movie collection, I guess, is pretty good.’ ”
Even though Brooks prefers to watch movies on DVD, sales have declined since 2006. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was the top-selling DVD in 2006 with more than 14 million copies sold, according to The Numbers, a movie data website. So far, the animated film Zootopia tops the DVD sales list for 2016 with just fewer than 1.9 million copies sold.
Despite a decrease in DVD sales in the past 10 years, some students continue to watch their favorite flicks on a disc format.
“I like the special features option,” Brooks said. “When I was younger, and I got the Harry Potter movies for the first time, they had the games on the special features and I love watching the deleted scenes and the bloopers, which you just don’t get with streaming.”
Before streaming and DVDs were introduced, VHS tapes were popular. When DVD sales started to rise in the early-to-mid-2000s, VHS tapes became obsolete. The crime thriller A History of Violence, released on VHS in 2006, was the last major Hollywood film to be sold on tape, according to Forbes.
The Japanese company Toshiba produced the first DVD player in November 1996, according to the company’s website.
Even though DVDs are still being sold, watching movies on streaming platforms, such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and HBO Now, has become more common. Netflix has reached approximately 47 million U.S. subscribers since it was founded in 1997 and implemented streaming in 2007, according to a Netflix report on Statista.
Mia Coyle, a sophomore studying applied nutrition, said she likes the immediacy of streaming websites.
“You can get exactly what you want in a moment’s notice, and if that’s not what you want to watch, you can change it instantly,” Coyle said.
Brooks has not completely ruled out streaming. She said she uses streaming websites for television shows and films that are hard to find in disc format, such as some TV movies.
“The ones I tend to struggle finding on DVD are the ones from my childhood,” Brooks said. “I really like Disney Channel Original Movies ... and very, very few of those are on DVD.”
The optimal time to add new additions to Brooks’s collection is during holidays, she added.
“That’s still pretty much all I ask for for Christmas,” Brooks said. “It builds up really quickly, but I’ve been collecting for a long time.”
Alex Penrose, a freshman studying media arts and studies, has combined his DVD collection with his roommate’s. Together, they have between 250 and 300 DVDs, he said.
“We prefer DVDs because the quality is always better,” Penrose said. “I could see going totally streaming if in the future ... streaming quality is always as good as the Blu-ray quality.”
Penrose said he does not envision the shift from watching movies on DVD to only streaming will come anytime in the foreseeable future.
“I think (collecting DVDs is) like people (who) collect vinyl,” Penrose said. “They like the quality and it’s something to have. It’s just like a little niche market.”
