The Stories We Keep

I wasn’t expecting a few plastic totes to make me think about the streaming age and what we have lost.

I have some totes tucked away with some old computer cables and forgotten bits of technology. It is my old DVD collection that I have brought with me through life. A bit of a nostalgic rush hits me every time I open the boxes. Recently I went looking for a film — Lars and the Real Girl — one of my favourite Ryan Gosling films and found it, but being a DVD it wasn’t the 4K experience we’ve come to expect these days.

Amongst the collection of television box sets (do you remember Thirtysomething , and Mad About You?) director’s cuts of treasured films, special editions with commentaries and films that seem to have quietly disappeared from streaming altogether there are lots of memories in these boxes. I’ve gone to throw them out occasionally, but then seen that boxed set of Sea Change and thought “I’ll watch those again someday…”

Rifling through them feels very different from scrolling through a streaming menu and trying to find something – anything – to watch.

Recently I read about the unlikely resurgence of the humble DVD player which piqued my interest. It seems almost absurd that in 2026 people are buying a device many assumed had gone the way of the VCR. In other ways there’s something profoundly logical about it. After years of being told that the future was frictionless streaming, people are rediscovering the simple pleasure of owning the stories they love rather than merely renting access to them.

Finding my collection reminded me that we’ve quietly surrendered in the age of convenience.

Streaming offers infinite choice but what tends to happen is that we don’t own a film anymore – it is essentially leased to us until it no longer belongs to the lessor. We are living in an era where films appear and disappear according to licensing agreements and corporate strategy. A favourite movie can simply vanish overnight. This has happened recently to people who bought movies on the Playstation platform and people are rightfully a little browned off about this.

As I looked through the collection, I realised each case has been carefully collected. My favourite film. The television series that I religiously watched. The science fiction films that first sparked my fascination with the relationship between technology, ethics and what it means to be human. The collection wasn’t simply entertainment it’s like a physical archive.

Perhaps that’s what physical media has always been.

We often think of technology as relentlessly moving forward, but sometimes progress involves recognising what we’ve lost along the way. Vinyl records have definitely made a comeback. Independent bookstores seem to be having a moment. The old Polaroid is cool again. Maybe DVDs belong in that same conversation. Look, admittedly the low res DVD can’t really complete with the HD media, but it has its charms.

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And it’s not really about nostalgia because increasingly our digital lives are governed by subscriptions. We subscribe to music, films, books, software, even the features built into products we’ve already purchased. We own less than we imagine. Instead, we lease access until the terms change.

That subtle shift changes our relationship with cultural artefacts.

When everything is available, nothing feels especially valuable. When films are endlessly recommended by algorithms, we can forget the joy of deliberately choosing something because it means something to us. Remember the days of wandering through a video store and carefully collecting a film. The nostalgia of visiting the rental store is so much a part of people’s experience that it has been created online as a virtual experience at bingebuster.net which is worth checking out. And then there is the personal collection of your favourite films.

There’s also something wonderfully intentional about watching physical media. You don’t spend twenty minutes deciding what to watch. In a distracted age, that’s tantamount to a spiritual discipline.

It made me wonder whether our relationship with media reflects our relationship with much else in modern life. Stories require attention. They ask us to slow down long enough to encounter another person’s imagination. That’s true whether the story is told through ancient scripture, a Christopher Nolan film or a forgotten DVD rescued from a storage box in the shed.

As I stacked the cases back onto a shelf, I wasn’t thinking about obsolete technology. Some stories deserve to be preserved because they help us understand who we are. They challenge us, comfort us and remind us that every generation wrestles with power, hope, justice and the human condition.

Not every film belongs in a streaming catalogue forever. Commercial realities make that impossible. But perhaps that’s exactly why our own collections still matter. The old DVDs sitting on my shelf aren’t relics of a bygone age.

They’re a reminder that memories and stories are worth keeping close.

In an era when almost everything has become temporary, disposable and dependent on someone else’s server remaining online, there’s something quietly reassuring about opening a case, placing a disc into a player and knowing that, for the next two hours, the story belongs to you.

Sometimes the future isn’t found in buying the latest technology. Sometimes it’s rediscovering the stories you already own.