DVDs Are the New Vinyl, and It Took Me a Two-Year Break to Get It

I've owned every format there is, and until recently I'd never taken a break from any of them.

I'm old enough that my first records were vinyl. Not many, I was young, but my sister had stacks of them and so did my parents, and some of those became mine by the slow gravity of a shared house. I drifted into cassettes the way everyone my age did, owned a modest shelf of them, and then CDs arrived and I went all in. I bought CDs steadily into the mid-2000s. I genuinely cannot tell you what the last one was, which tells you something about how the end of a format actually feels, not a clean goodbye but a thing you stop doing without noticing.

Then DVDs, then Blu-ray, then 4K, right up to this day. Fifty years, roughly, of buying the physical version of the things I wanted to watch and hear. No gap. No lapse. Just a long unbroken habit of owning.

And then, sometime around 2024, I stopped. For almost two years.

That break is the part I still find strange, because nothing dramatic caused it. I didn't switch teams and decide streaming had won. I didn't run out of money or shelf space. I just looked at what I'd been doing and lost the appetite for it.

Because by that point, buying discs had stopped being about wanting things. It had become a reflex. I was spending a lot, and I mean a lot, on new releases, mostly films I'd missed in the theater and told myself I'd get to. A new title would come out, I'd think "I meant to see that," and it would go in the cart. Sight unseen. Week after week.

You can guess how that ended. Stacks of them, some still in the shrink wrap. A lot I never watched. A lot I did watch and found to be duds, films I'd bought on the strength of a trailer and a vague intention. I had built a collection that was less a collection and more an inbox. It was accumulation wearing the costume of a hobby, and somewhere in me I knew it, and one day I just quietly stopped.

For nearly two years I bought almost nothing. The longest gap of my life.

Here's where this connects to something bigger than my shelves.

If you've been near film or music news this year, you've seen the phrase everywhere. DVDs are the new vinyl. And the numbers back it up in a way that surprised even me. Spending on 4K UHD titles in the US rose twelve percent in 2025. The overall disc market still shrank, but only by about nine percent, after years of drops north of twenty. Vinyl crossed a billion dollars in US revenue for the first time since 1987. Even CDs ticked up.

The part that stopped me cold was who's driving it. Roughly a third of Gen Z say they're taking up analogue hobbies because of what one survey called digital exhaustion. These are not people reliving a misspent youth in a video store. Most of them never had one. They have access to everything, instantly, for the price of a subscription, and some of them have looked at that and decided they want to actually own a few of the things they love. On purpose. In a form nobody can revoke.

And I realized they'd arrived at exactly the place my two-year break dropped me off, just coming from the opposite direction.

I see a smaller version of it in my own house. My oldest is almost sixteen, younger even than the Gen Z those surveys are about, and when his friends come over he's the one who runs movie night in our home theater, the picky curator of what they all sit down to watch. He's grown up able to stream nearly anything at any time. And yet he's the first to reach for an actual 4K disc instead of a compressed stream, the dark scenes holding together instead of dissolving into blocks, the sound with real weight behind it. He likes that it looks and sounds better. He also likes, in a way I didn't quite expect, simply knowing we own it, that it's ours, on the shelf, waiting for the next time he wants it. He isn't nostalgic for anything. He just prefers the better version of the thing, and the better version happens to be the one you get to keep.

Vinyl didn't come back to beat Spotify. Nobody rips their records because it's more convenient, because it isn't and they know it. Vinyl came back as the deliberate object, the one album out of thousands you decided was worth owning as a physical fact. That's what the disc is becoming too. Not the default way you watch a film, the way it was when I was filling carts with unseen new releases, but the thing you reach for when a film has earned a place you can point to.

That's a smaller market than the DVD boom of 2004. It's also a much healthier one, because it's built on wanting rather than defaulting.

When I came back to buying, that's the only rule I kept. I buy the things I actually want to own. The film I've already seen and know I'll return to. The one that meant something. The edition of something I love that I want to hold rather than merely reach. I buy a fraction of what I used to, and every disc that comes in the door now is a disc I'm genuinely glad to have, which is a sentence I could not have written about my collection in 2023.

A nineteen-year-old buying their first 4K and a fifty-something coming back from a two-year break are, it turns out, learning the same lesson. Owning everything isn't the point. Owning what you actually want is. Access gives you all of it and lets you keep none of it. The disc gives you one thing, and it's yours.

I had to stop for two years to understand what the newest collectors seem to have understood from the start.

When you buy on purpose instead of on reflex, it helps to actually know what you own, so you stop buying the duds and the doubles and put your money on the things you'll keep. That's what I built Arkiv for, a place to catalogue your physical film and TV collection so you always know exactly what's on your shelves. And there are a few genuinely fun things to uncover as your collection grows, which tend to surprise people who thought they were just making a list.