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May 16, 2022
It should come as little surprise to anyone who knows me personally that I am a big fan of physical media. I don't consider myself a "collector" by any means because that hobby tends to lend itself to buying pieces for the novelty of owning them rather than their utility. As a starving undergrad, that's not exactly feasible for me, but I enjoy buying games and music that I plan on utilizing in a physical medium where possible.
There are a few reasons for this, but key among them is preservation. I've watched Nintendo shut down online shops for two of their consoles thus far, (with two more on the horizon,) so my 3DS games sit on their shelf in their egregiously large plastic cases. I've seen enough quarrels between musicians and Spotify to know that their relationship is tense at best, so my mountain of CDs rests atop my dresser.
Recently, I've been giving some consideration to extending this hobby further by venturing into the world of Blu-ray. I've already had a brief affair with DVDs, but to be blunt, watching a modern film in anything less than HD nowadays really does a number on the suspension of disbelief.
Unfortunately, while investigating whether another stack of plastic cases is worth the trouble and expense, I've come to the realization that I outright cannot own much of the content that I would like to. Certainly, there are Blu-Rays available for a number of series and films, as a brief trip to your local Target will show. What's concerning is that nearly all of these are series that were created for cable networks or cinemas. If you want to own a physical copy of your favorite piece of streaming-only content, there's a significantly higher chance that such an item doesn't exist.
Take for example BoJack Horseman, a deeply influential Netflix series with multiple awards and nominations to its name. Despite being critically acclaimed and extremely well received by audiences, the show has yet to receive physical releases of its last four seasons. In 2018, The Tornante Company and Shout! Factory made a deal to release the first four seasons of the show on Blu-ray, and the first two have since been released as a bundle. Notably though, seasons three and four have yet to even see a date for their physical releases, and seasons five and six, the latter of which was released on Netflix over two years ago, are currently locked into streaming-only for the foreseeable future. It is a dream of mine to someday own a complete set of the show that impacted me deeply, but the odds certainly do not appear to be in my favor.
In the sphere of movies, consider Bo Burnham's Inside. Released approximately a year ago from the time of writing on Netflix, the film is an excellent depiction of the struggles of living through the COVID-19 pandemic and the difficult realities of modern life. Yet, despite its widespread appeal and critical acclaim, there has yet to be any indication of a physical release. For the time being, any appreciation of the film remains locked behind a high-speed internet connection, an email address, and $9.99 per month.
As an aside, it's not as though these pieces of media are not without other forms of physical evidence. BoJack Horseman has its own set of collectibles and the CD soundtrack to Inside is still readily available in stores to this day, but physical media for either is still largely impossible to find.
The reasoning behind this isn't hard to figure out. Popular media on Netflix and its competitors exists to onboard people to the service in hopes that even if someone is interested in only paying for a single show or movie, they'll find something else that motivates them to stick around (and keep paying) for another month. Physical media and its encapsulation of content into a singular entity spits in the face of that business model, making it an unappealing option for executives regardless of what the content creators or fans want.
Frustrating as this reality may be for myself and other fans of these works, it becomes outright problematic when considered in the context of Netflix's financial struggles last month. Regardless of whether a 35% downturn in stock price spells doom for the company, its influence extends well beyond a single ticker. The event has revealed to Silicon Valley and Wall Street that streaming services - and the growth-based companies that back them - are not guaranteed safe havens for content. They can fail, and the recent murmurs about bubbles in the tech sector show that people are catching on. As much as I hate to stand on the street corner and scream "The end is near!" the downturn of a given streaming service and the fate of its content is looking more and more like a concern to be dealt with rather than ignored.
There is a possibility that I'm overblowing this concern, and that the failure of one company will just result in its content shifting hands to another. Perhaps if Netflix's headquarters was struck by a meteor tomorrow, BoJack Horseman would end up at Hulu and Inside at Disney+. Unfortunately, this isn't a reality that media preservationists can rely on. Even the most centralized streaming services have failed to deliver content in the form that fans want, and censorship of a movie or show before its streaming debut regularly occurs. Occasionally, even the most sensible of streaming releases fail to come to fruition. For instance, Disney's Buzz Lightyear of Star Command has never been made available on Disney+ despite the impending release of a film starring the titular character. Since the show was never released on home media with the exception of its first three episodes, fans of the series are still trapped in a web of online hosting that hinges on the good will and support of the individuals maintaining it.
I suppose that leads to the other factor at play here: piracy. Controversial as it may be, piracy has thus far played an essential role in the preservation of lost media, and that position is unlikely to change regardless of the fate of any given streaming service. This is far from a perfect solution, however. Piracy is still an inconvenient task at best that most consumers simply don't feel comfortable undertaking, and that's to say nothing of the legal issues associated with it. Regardless of whether a piece of media can be found via piracy or not, the fact of the matter is that such a state regales it to a commodity to be stolen rather than a work to be owned and appreciated.
Perhaps this is an issue that streaming companies are aware of internally. I have no means of knowing whether that is the case or not. What I do know is that the demand for physical media is unlikely to go away any time soon, but the nebulous state of the streaming art doesn't necessarily guarantee that same certainty. The relationship between streaming services and preservationists may be adversarial, but I hope that we can find common ground somewhere along the way.