I have a lot of things I collect. I like to put these things on display. When the pandemic hit and we began spending a lot more time at home, there came a need to reclaim some space in the house and I was faced with the dilemma of deciding which shelving unit would need to give way and therefore, which collection would need to be boxed up.
It actually ended up being not too difficult a decision, but a symbolic one nonetheless. The CD and DVD cabinet would go.
A few hundred albums and films / box sets, purchased over the space of twenty years. From a humble beginning when I could probably carry the lot in one hand to the merging with my partner Sam’s own collection when we began living together in 2014.
There was just as much sentimental value held here as there is to be found anywhere else in our house, if not more so. So why was it so easy to let go?
It had been a long time coming.
On Thursday 2nd January 2014 I joined Netflix. I was probably a little late to the party. I’d tried streaming content before this and always felt taken out of the viewing experience by the occasional freeze to buffer or frame rate and resolution issues as a result of dips in bandwidth.
I preferred the LoveFilm DVD rental through the post model. Streaming was something I did on my laptop, it was less of an event than sitting down to watching a film or working through a box set. A reluctant fall back option for catching up on something I’d missed on TV and forgotten to record.
I joined Netflix because they’d added a complete series I hadn’t seen since I was young (*cough* it was Mighty Morphin Power Rangers *cough*) which I wasn’t overly fussed about owning (this would probably be a one time rewatch thing). It wasn’t the easiest series to find a physical copy of and the price reflected that. £5.99 a month for Netflix, with my first month free began to seem like an attractive proposition.
It didn’t take long for me to apply this same mindset to other content once I’d broken the seal.
No, it had been an even longer time coming.
On Thursday 16th August 2007 I bought my first car. There she is in the photo above on the day she was scrapped. ‘Betty’. Named after a character in the Motion City Soundtrack song The Future Freaks Me Out (a quiet irony for you there). My subsequent cars have also been named after characters in songs by the same band (‘Coraline’ from Hold Me Down and ‘Antonia’ from erm, Antonia).
Some friends called her “Liam’s Party Bus”. I get the sense there might have been some irony to that also. This was a vehicle that required you to unlock the passenger door and reach across to open the driver door. When the same issue occurred on the passenger side I had enter via the boot, much to the shock of one my former colleagues. It is crazy to think now that this was my car for the 10 months of my career.
More importantly to this story though, she had a CD player (player, player, player, player). It was about as good as a 1990’s disc-man in that it skipped constantly whenever I went over the smallest of bumps. I didn’t think I could afford to change it for something that would connect to an MP3 player so I continued buying CDs at £9.99 + a go (a false economy?) well into the next decade. Even when vinyl made it’s comeback, I was still championing it’s pint sized successor.
Despite all this, on Thursday 12th January 2012, I signed up for Spotify. I might have been limited to CDs in the car, but there was no way I was passing up the opportunity of having “almost every song ever recorded” at “just one click away”.
Back to me staring at a wall in my box room in 2020
So, I’d adapted to streaming for video (helped along by improved broadband speeds and better TV functionality for running the apps) and the spell of buying CDs had been broken by a pre-longed period at home during the lockdown with little need to use my car.
I didn’t have a functional need for the discs which would make it awkward if I needed to regularly access them. Shelves of spines aren’t all that visually impactful when you compare that to having nearly 1,000 Pez dispensers to display. My mind was made up. I was calling time.
Before I started boxing the DVDs up I cross referenced our collection against the titles that were currently available on the streaming services we had access to. For anything that wasn’t on there I took the disc out the case and put it into another almost redundant product, the disc wallet (“you can still find ’em”).
See if you can guess how many times we’ve resorted to this condensed selection? Answer at the bottom of this article*.
Back to Netflix
101 months and four price hikes later, I’d paid the Netflix corporation a grand total of £776.01.
An average DVD might have cost around £10 in 2014. I could’ve owned an additional 75 for the same money that I’ve paid for this streaming service alone. Except, it would probably be more than that figure by now as streaming services have devalued the DVD to the point that the average price has dropped closer to peanuts. (In fact, actual peanuts probably cost more!)
With content, we’ve accepted a world where we have access to everything, but own nothing.
I know that sounds dramatic and poetically dystopian, but in a very real sense it has helped solve my space issue.
*Ps. The answer is none, of course.
Liam Toms 