The joy of discs: Has streaming reached oversaturation?

Stephen Price

I wrote recently about a desire to disconnect more often from the scroll and screen, something so many friends of mine are also hoping to do.

Constantly contactable twenty four hours a day, our pocket computers we call phones (that we are all afraid to actually use as phones) full of distraction after distraction, minor task after task – a friend or relative to reply to, a meme to react to, a reel of zit-popping or powerwashing to keep us up long into the early hours, strangely tired in the disconnect, but awakened by the scroll.

Along with an attempt to return to the land of the living, away from the endless, pointless phone-gazing is also an aim to return to ‘purposeful’ watching of TV and movies – something else I’m not alone in wanting to do.

Thankfully, I never took too much to streaming music – my love of CDs and now records and tapes too strong – and every time I do casually stream music, I’m annoyed by ads, I’m annoyed by autoplay, and I’m sad for artists whose hard work and dedication isn’t rewarded sufficiently.

Streaming television, however, most of us took up unquestioned.

In a Medium article from Stephan Joppich from all the way back in 2021, Joppich wrote how cancelling Netflix was the best decision he’d made that year.

Listing three chief reasons, he shared: “Binge-worthy shows like Dark, Atypical, and Black Mirror rank among the best storytelling I’ve ever experienced. And amazing content like this keeps popping up weekly. It’s unlimited entertainment.

“But now that I went down the rabbit hole, I’ll never be able to look at Netflix the same way. I’m far better off without it.”

“Netflix’s biggest competitor is not HBO, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, or DisneyPlus. It’s not even old-fashioned television.

“It’s your sleep.”

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said it himself in 2017: “You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.”

The second reason Joppich quit was his realisation that it not only competed for his sleep, but also his attention span and his motivation. He writes: “What’s worse, this behavior has been normalised — particularly among millennials. It has become “a thing” to spend an entire day in bed, watching Netflix. I’m all for taking a day off to stay at home, journal, read, and relax. But spending 8+ hours passively glued to a screen?

“That’s not normal.

“That’s a loss of control.”

Of course, most of us aren’t that bad.. but should ‘rotting in bed’ be a fun thing to admit to of a weekend? In a nation with the kind of scenery we have? Not for me.

His third reason, much like the scroll, was the dopamine hit of Netflix bingeing. He writes: “In fact, research confirms that binge-watching TV classifies as a behavioural addiction that resembles many symptoms of substance abuse.”

“We used to wait”

As a child, one of the highlights of the week for my sister and me was a ride in the car to the nearest village that had a shop still open to choose a video from.

Blockbuster was a thing for city-slickers or American TV shows, not for us. A little paper shop in Gilwern, that was all we needed.

The deep joy of those memories. Four walls of classics and new releases alike, all to be taken home, watched with friends and family, re-wound for the next person to watch.

And in its simplicity, in its focus, was appreciation. In its ownership, or rental, was a valuation that can rarely be found in ‘My List’ – ‘My List’ that isn’t actually mine any more if I need to cut back on expenditure and cancel Direct Debits as I’ve been faced with having to do more than once in my adult life.

As time went on, in to my teens and twenties, it became about DVD purchasing, DVD rental, and then a very short-lived postal DVD-rental account with LoveFilm and others where forays into art-house and world cinema became much easier.

Shitflix

In its earliest incarnation, Netflix looked doomed to fail. Made-for TV movies and American rot.

For a while though, it soon began to capture the moment. House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, acquisitions of existing shows like Black Mirror and more.

Binge-watching became a thing for everyone, not just the geeks, as we watched entire series in one sitting, but baulked at the idea of a movie that took longer than an hour and a half to tell its story.

I fear, however, that Netflix is returning to what it once was. Too much. Oversaturated. Self-made. Soulless. Only with a token touch of UK rot to add some balance to the American filler.

The Netlix model of us being owned, rather than being media owned by us, is no longer for me. And their clamping down on password sharing, their abuse of power and market share and other things, make it feel like less of a company to want to support.

Tiering their price plans too – OK, it’s their business, but one thing streaming offered in its early days felt, to me at least, to be a democratising of media. Now, those who have deeper pockets have the less-shit experience.

Of course, things have changed now, and streaming has huge benefits – I recently watched Disclaimer and Bad Sisters on Apple TV, Wuthering Heights on iPlayer and so on and so forth. My time with BritBox was really special too, getting to view past brilliance from the golden era of TV.

Adolescence, The Crown, The Dark Crystal.. Netflix has brought us some classics. But will I sit and watch Love is Blind again just to hate-watch? Will I watch another Harlan Coben adaptation and wonder if this is really what we’ve become?

And then there are the sheer number of streaming platforms, all competing and offering a handful of decent things to watch, with most of us feeling the only solution is to join them all. Sod them all, I say.

In the Netflix model is no value – we don’t own it, we’ll never own it, and our evenings are devalued and there to slob out with, to give away precious irreplaceable hours to content with no depth, nothing to say, and now with added adverts to monetise us even more.

The key, then, is moderation, and giving a chance to other platforms such as BFI. Stops and starts. Add to the list, purposefully watch, retreat again. Ad infinitum.

But for the most part, and perhaps from here on in, it’s back to DVDs for me. Yes, they might cost more sometimes, but most second hand ones cost very little, and the joy in hunting them down is back – eBay, Vinted, charity shops.. Then, if they become unwanted again, they can make money for another charity shop (should they accept them which many seem not to do any more).

In ownership of a disc is a level of valuation we simply don’t have for things that are streamed.

In place of scrolling or flicking through channels this year, so far I’ve been watching the incomparable Brideshead Revisited from ITV, the 1983 BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre (Timothy Dalton is just exquisite…), and I’m currently halfway through Twin Peaks – enough said there.

Next up, A Dance to the Music of Time, And Then We Danced, Tár and countless others. With me in the driving seat not an algorithm, a top ten or a marketing guru from Los Gatos, California.

Slowness, being in the moment, waiting.. watching the credits, the anticipation of things making their way in the post. Owning and not being owned.

Realising that more is not always more.

Taking time out, active time out.

And most of all, valuing what I have.

Bliss.