If you haven’t heard, Best Buy will cease selling physical DVDs at the end of this year. If you’ve been to the entertainment section of Walmart or Target, you see their physical media sections shrinking. Almost everyone has a streaming service subscription. Many folks don’t have a DVD player in their home. Blockbuster is dead and Redbox is on the way out as well. It seems that the signs are all there for these stores to be right in their decision. Well, I’m here to tell you, they are WRONG! DVDs are still important and should still be sold in stores.

Owning DVDs is like having a piece of history especially in the age of streaming. You don’t need Wi-Fi when you can pop in a DVD. If you want behind the scenes details, deleted scenes, actor commentary, or other fun stuff, you can only get that with the DVD release. You don’t have to worry about ads, subscription fees, or censorship. Yes, I said censorship! In the past few years, many older TV shows have been edited to “reflect the times” on various streaming services or pulled off streaming services all together! Thats absurd. When you have a DVD copy you have the original format of that film or TV show, and you don’t have to worry about any edits.

I have DVDs from back in my younger days and with the announcement from Best Buy earlier this year, I’ve been adding to my collection. I added some old titles and some new ones. I bought the complete series of Rugrats, which was one of my favorite shows as a kid. Also this year, I bought: Jarhead, Juno, Friday Night Lights(film), Into the Spider verse and Across the Spider verse, Secondhand Lions, Hackshaw Ridge, Coco, The Aristocrats, and A Goofy Movie. There are more titles that I want, that I will be looking out for next year.

Owning physical media is important. DVDs are important. Having unlimited access to the things you OWN is important. Streaming services change all the time. Their contents change, their prices change, and we are worse off for it. Buy DVDs, buy books, buy CDs, buy all the physical media that you can because streaming services will keep being wishy washy.