In the age of streaming ubiquity and overwhelming choice, Alex Casey speaks to the New Zealanders who are still flying the flag for the humble DVD.
All I wanted was to watch Bridget Jones’s Diary. A few months ago, in the throes of the build-up to Bridget Jones 4: Mad About the Boy, I wished to exercise my birthright as a woman in her 30s and spend some time with Bridget, Mr Darcy, and those big funny granny undies. Given that we were paying for three of the major streaming services at the time, I expected to have no issue finding the wildly popular British romantic comedy. And yet, after a bit of scrolling, I could only find it to rent for an additional $6.99 on Neon – on top of our $14.99 a month plan.
The experience dredged up some questions that many have been wrestling with in the age of streamer ubiquity: what are we actually paying for? And how convenient are these services when titles are constantly dropping in and out like whack-a-moles? Factor in choice paralysis leading to an average of 10 minutes spent deciding what to watch, concerns that made-for-streaming “algorithm films” are ruining art and the rise in savvy switching, and perhaps it comes as no surprise that Netflix use is actually now in quiet decline in Aotearoa.
Auckland filmmaker and writer Tom Augustine cancelled his Netflix subscription last year, and describes it as a “freeing” experience. While he still pays for Apple TV and Neon, he says that the promise of digital streaming largely hasn’t been fulfilled. “The reality is that we have traded away any kind of permanence for this illusion of convenience, when actually there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s now totally out of our control in terms of what’s available,” he says. “If it’s not on one of the streaming platforms, then it’s like it doesn’t exist a lot of the time.”
Filmmaker Tom Augustine (Image: Tim D) and his DVD collection (Photos: Supplied)
To combat this chaos, Augustine has a 750-strong collection of films on DVD and makes a regular habit of ducking into opshops to look for interesting and rare new additions. “It’s a preservationist instinct on my part – I want to be able to have these films at my disposal whenever I want, forever,” he says. “It started as this angry response to the fact that we’ve basically signed over all our watching to people who are going to charge us through the nose for it, but now it has become more of a fun collector’s thing – and it’s cheap too.”
Along with the odd $2 op shop find, Augustine’s collection is also packed with ex-rentals from Videon, the extensive film library on Auckland’s Dominion Road that closed down in 2018. One of his prized finds was the Apu trilogy, made in the 1950s by Satyajit Ray. “The motivation was to get a whole lot of stuff that just would not be shown on major streaming services anywhere here, because there would be no real financial incentive for them,” he says. “We got heaps and heaps of films that are just otherwise not out there in the world.”
DVD collecting is not just for the film buffs, though. Television enthusiast Lucy Kelly owns dozens of series boxsets on DVD, a collection which she started back in high school. “I was really sick as a teenager, and so I spent a lot of time at home, and there’s only so many hours of Dr Phil that you can watch,” she says. With her local Video Ezy often missing a few seasons of a show, she took to buying boxsets herself, and never stopped. “I like to have them physically there,” she says. “If I ever want to watch them, they’re there, and I don’t have to go hunting.”
A selection of Lucy Kelly’s prized box sets.
Even in the streaming age, Kelly says she is reaching for DVDs a lot more than she expected – just last week she bought a few seasons of The Good Wife on Trade Me after being unable to find it on a streamer. Like Augustine, she has found the erratic nature of streamers frustrating. “I was watching Willow, the Disney+ show that is a really campy and fun follow-up to the 80s movie, but then they cancelled it and just deleted it from the service entirely,” she says. “I had a few episodes still to finish, but I went back it was just gone – deleted from the universe.”
Another plus side to DVDs is that not only are they not going to disappear, but they are not going to change. One of Kelly’s proudest pieces is her Charmed boxset, and not just because of the Book of Shadows-shaped packaging. “The original theme song for Charmed [a cover of The Smiths’ ‘How Soon is Now?’] is really iconic, but they lost the rights to it so now there’s this terrible generic electronic song on when you stream it,” she says. “That’s why it’s important to buy things you love on physical media, because then you get the original version of it.”
That said, flying the flag for the humble DVD in 2025 can have its challenges – particularly as major players like Disney are phasing out physical media entirely. One of Kelly’s favourite sci-fi shows is 12 Monkeys, the 2015 reboot of the 1995 Terry Gilliam film, but she can’t stream it anywhere online or find it on DVD outside of hugely expensive limited edition collectors versions. “The newer shows are not even getting put out on DVD at all, but then you also can’t watch them online anywhere either, so you don’t even get the choice,” she says.
Peter Tonks, co-owner of Alice’s in Ōtautahi. (Photo: Alex Casey)
Peter Tonks, co-owner of Alice in Videoland in Ōtautahi, knows this struggle all too well. Alice’s boasts a collection of over 30,000 DVDs that are available for people to rent in person or through their mail service across the country. His current gripe is how hard it is to find a copy of Jane Campion’s Oscar-winning 2021 film Power of the Dog on DVD. “It was shot right here in New Zealand, but you just can’t get it anywhere,” he says. “I’ve ordered it a couple times and it just hasn’t shown up for whatever reason, so that has taken me a while to track down.”
Constantly curating and updating one of the largest DVD collections in the country, Tonks says the streaming age has put an emphasis on newness over anything else. “Everyone’s always looking out for the latest big streaming release, but some of the stuff they pump out is pretty cheap and nasty,” he says. “Meanwhile there are 1000s and 1000s of old gems that are just as fun as watching the latest brand new release.” Tonks pays for Netflix but doesn’t use it often, adding that he can always select a DVD much more quickly than something to stream.
Alice’s DVD selection has more breadth and depth than many streamers could ever offer, but there are obvious drawbacks to trading in the medium. The scarcity of new releases means many DVDs come from overseas, which requires a multi-zone player. There’s also the skipping and the scratches, with Alice’s losing at least one DVD a week to damage. “Because we send stuff around, we get the odd shipment with a few broken because they’ve been thrown around the back of the van,” Tonks says. “I do my best to replace them, but some are pretty rare.”
Despite these downsides, Tonks says the overwhelm of streaming options has actually seen an uptick in people attending the boutique cinema and renting DVDs out in person over the last year – although their mailout service continues to decline. “The cinema still saves us,” he says. ‘We’d be hard pressed to survive these days just as a DVD store.” In the hopes of inspiring people to take their viewing habits deeper into the back catalogue, they’ve also released a new podcast series in the style of the Criterion Closet and Letterboxd’s Four Favourites.
Because while my coveted Bridget Jones’s Diary is not at any risk of disappearing from the cultural consciousness anytime soon, DVD enthusiasts are well aware that their collections could contain movies and TV shows that could soon be entirely forgotten in the streaming age. “When we move from physical to digital, there’s always going to be things that fall through the cracks,” says Augustine. “This is all tied into my desire to hold on to these things, because if we don’t, that’s a whole lot of history that’s otherwise not there anymore.”