Every September, my husband and I sit down to go over our household budget – an annual ritual I shamelessly stole from an old boss (thank you Jason). There’s just something about that back-to-school buzz that makes it the perfect time to get serious about money. This year, though, a delightful not-so-little mortgage hike has us scrutinizing every dollar. And with Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and Disney+ all quietly siphoning cash from our checking account, we’ve hit our limit. At least one has to go.
But which streamer to ditch? We can’t possibly get rid of Prime, can we? That free, next-day delivery has got us out of some serious scrapes – forgotten birthdays, DIY emergencies, last-minute party outfit panics, someone leaving their MacBook charger on the train.
So maybe Netflix gets the chop? Or can we live without the House of Mouse? It’s not like we have little kids. Just us big ones. But then it dawned on us. Do we really need streaming at all? There are plenty of good reasons why we’re going to try life without the streamers, at least for a while…
1. Money
Let’s do the math shall we? On average, Americans spend $69 a month for subscription to four paid streaming services combined, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends report. Or $828 a year. Meanwhile, a cursory glance at Amazon reveals you can currently pick up The Complete Series of The West Wing on DVD for $79. Yep $79 for 45 discs and approximately 85 hours – or three-and-a-half full days – of gripping drama.
And if Aaron Sorkin’s ‘Walk ‘n’ Talk’ political chit chat isn’t your thing, you can get the first four series of Yellowstone for $55, The Boys (seasons 1 & 2) for $22.99, The Gilmore Girls Complete Series for $59.82 and my personal favorite, Mad Men, for $91.99. That last option doesn’t just include 92 episodes of the show – they even throw in a commemorative book, two handmade lowball tumblers, and four cork coasters (handy for watching with a Don Draper-style Old Fashioned in hand).
Add that up in order and you get around 85 + 31 + 16 + 105 + 92 = 329 hours of viewing for a grand total of $308.80. Equivalent to four-and-a-bit months of access to four paid services. According to the Deloitte survey, we watch TV on streaming services for an average of 1.34 hours a day. So it’s going to take us 245 days to get through the box sets. Or around eight months. A clear win for DVDs, yes?
Well sort of. Obviously the elephant in the room here is image quality. Gilmore Girls is presented in NTSC – a standard definition format for DVDs with a resolution of 720×480 pixels. It’s definitely not HD, let alone 4K. Streaming services will be able upscale your experience – in the case of Gilmore Girls, Netflix applies techniques to improve the clarity and detail of the images so things look less pixellated on your big screen.
Older shows shot in SD will always have this trade off. But if you can pick up a good deal on new shows available on Blu-ray/4K Blu-ray, you might yet still save money versus streaming and get comparable, if not better, image quality.
2. Ads
Streaming services used to be the great escape from the traditional commercials you’d have to endure on cable. But now, many platforms are sliding ads back in, sometimes even after raising subscription prices (see Netflix’s prices are going up, including its ad-supported tier). And it’s not easy to skip them. Most ad blockers won’t work, and though we have found a workaround by using VPNs for countries that show fewer-to-no ads, it’s extra faff and unlikely to be a long-term solution.
So we have two choices – pay more for an ad-free experience, or resort back to our ad-free Blu-rays and DVDs. For now, it’s looking like the latter for us.
3. Convenience
My husband and I are a certain type of movie buff. Not in a ‘cinema as high art’ way, more ‘quoting Grosse Point Blank at each other while buying cereal’. While everyone else was busy re-watching Titanic, we were memorizing lines from Big Night. And I’m about the only person in the world that thought Robert Downey Jnr was robbed of a Best Actor Oscar for his turn in Chaplin (he lost to Al Pacino for Scent of a Woman by the way, but most people think it should’ve gone to Denzel Washington for Malcolm X).
Anyway, Oscar travesties aside, the point is how difficult it is to find these movies on streaming services. I have managed to catch Chaplin on Amazon Prime, but only while I was on holiday in Türkiye. At time of writing, Grosse Point Blank isn’t available. Nor Big Night. Nor The Last Days of Disco (it’s all about the cult nineties cheese in our house). All must be rented for an extra fee. Which is why I bought them all on DVD or Blu-ray many years ago and can bore people with watch them whenever I like.
4. Censorship and re-editing
Director’s Cuts always used to be a bit of a joke chez Cutmore. Certain studios and franchises had no shame on putting out re-edits every couple of years, seemingly as a way to extract more cash from completist fans. But now we’re taking them a little more seriously.
As reported by Newsweek back in 2020, Disney has taken to editing and censoring various content available on its Disney+ service. Two of the most talked about are the renaming of a Hannah Montana character from Isis to Ice. And, in Toy Story 2’s mid-credit ‘bloopers’ role, a ‘casting couch’ joke that sees Stinky Pete flirting with two Barbie Dolls, implying he can get them into the movie, has been taken out.
Much of this editing is welcomed – for example, the removal of historical racial slurs or offensive stereotypes. But when does it become too politically or ideologically motivated? And just how far could it go? As back catalogue rights change hands, will the original director and producer’s vision become lost? Will actors’ performances be butchered? Could movies be subjected to the kind of heavy censorship seen in China? There’s one easy way to avoid this sinister scenario. Yep, buy the original hard copy…
5. Reliance on an internet connection
Internet outages are becoming more common across the United States, and unfortunately, it’s not just because a cheeky neighbor is piggybacking onto your Wi-Fi. Remote workers, box-set bingers and online gamers are all competing for bandwidth – much of it on an infrastructure built for a simpler era, when Netflix movies came in the mail.
Severe weather, cyberattacks, and even simple construction accidents (like someone with a backhoe cutting a fiber line) add to the problem. Recent examples, like the AT&T nationwide outage in February 2024 or the global CrowdStrike software glitch that even grounded flights, show how internet dependent we’ve become.
Granted, an outage might only last for a couple of hours – but what if it’s longer? With the geopolitical climate as it is, at least we have our DVD collection to see us through the potentially dark days ahead.
So there you have it – five good reasons why our physical media collection is yet to premiere at the local thrift store just yet. Let’s see just how long we can last without the convenience of paid streaming…
