Physical movie collections are still a common sight in a lot of households, and they're usually a mix of two media types: DVDs and Blu-rays.You might think the DVDs would have been thrown away by now, but if you think about it, why would anyone do that? Watching older media on an older format is hardly jarring, and if you know you have the DVD, reaching for that is much easier than trying to find out which streaming service, if any, has what you're looking for.The DVD's persistence makes sense from a technical perspective, too.
It was the biggest storage leap of the 1990s, and since movies haven't gotten any longer, they're still a perfect and inexpensive format for sharing movies and other media.The DVD almost turned into another format war Then the computer industry stepped in Close We all know the stories of the VHS versus Betamax war, and in the early '90s, it nearly happened again.On one side, we had Sony and Philips with their Multimedia Compact Disc, and on the other side was Toshiba and its Super Density disc, backed by Time Warner, Matsushita (now Panasonic), Hitachi, and a bunch of other heavy hitters.
If things had gone a little differently, half of us would have wasted a whole lot of money buying the eventual loser.What stopped the war was the PC crowd.A group made up of IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Compaq, and HP announced that they'd only back a single unified format, and IBM basically played referee.
It wasn't easy getting everyone to work together, but the finished standard landed in December 1995.It was originally called the "digital video disc," but it was changed to "digital versatile disc" because the computer companies wanted everyone to know it wasn't just for movies.If you think about all the AI companies out there today shipping their ever-so-slightly different versions of the same product, it puts into perspective how crazy it was for an entire industry to agree on one standard before shipping it to consumers.
It was a ridiculous upgrade over everything that came before Same size as a CD, about seven times the space Despite being the same 12cm size as a CD, a single layer of a DVD holds 4.7GB (compared to a CD's 700MB).And once you add a second layer, you get about 8.5GB altogether.That was enough for a film, surround sound, scene selection, menus, and even commentary tracks.
In 2026, 8.5GB might sound tiny, but in the late '90s it was enormous.The trick was a red laser with a shorter wavelength (650nm versus the CD's 780nm infrared), which let manufacturers cram smaller pits onto tighter tracks.The format launched in Japan in November 1996 and hit the US in March 1997, with players going for roughly $600 to $750 and around 32 movies available on day one.
By the end of 1999, over 100 million discs had shipped, DVD players outsold VCRs in the US in 2001, and by 2007 about 80% of Americans owned one.PCs adopted it for software, and consoles like the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox used DVDs for games.Streaming knocked it down, but never quite out The big retailers left, the discs didn't It was probably inevitable that streaming would take off as soon as we had fast enough internet to pull it off.
Netflix may have started off as a DVD delivery service, but it and just about everyone else gave up on DVDs eventually.The numbers are kind of crazy, really.US spending on physical discs fell from about $6.1 billion in 2015 to roughly $870 million in 2025, while subscription streaming now gobbles up more than 92% of all home entertainment spending.
So why are we still using DVDs in 2026? Ownership, archiving, and a very unexpected Gen Z twist You've probably already heard that the younger generations are into retro tech lately.It was inevitable, if you ask me.Having everything you need on a little touchscreen slab in your pocket is convenient and all, but there will always be something undeniably cool about having different gadgets for different jobs.
Tiny, cool, custom-made tech designed to do one thing and do it well.What we have now is the opposite—it does everything, but it kind of sucks at a lot of it.Well, the youngsters' retro curiosity extends to DVDs, too.
In 2025, the drop in US disc sales slowed to about 9%, after falling more than 20% in each of the two years before.Indie video stores in Los Angeles are reporting record rental months, and Barnes & Noble says its DVD and Blu-ray sales grew by mid-double digits.Even if some of these kids are young enough to know nothing other than streaming, they still get how much it sucks when content you love disappears because a licensing deal ran out.
And no one wants to pay for six subscriptions to track down one movie, no matter how old they are.Physical media still beats streaming in a lot of ways, and it doesn't seem like that will change any time soon.Quality isn't much of a problem, either.
A lot of older TV shows only ever existed in standard definition, so the DVD is often the best version you'll ever get.Not to mention that streaming services can be really lazy with old shows and just shove them online with terrible playback quality.DVDs are still handy for data, too.
A burned DVD-R sitting in a drawer is offline and can't be changed, so ransomware and accidental deletions can't touch it.That's a storage trick SSDs still can't quite match.And if you're worried about compatibility, SATA optical drives still work fine in modern PCs, as long as you can find a case with a bay for one (or just use a cheap USB drive).
The humble DVD has earned its spot on your shelf DVDs solved a real problem in the '90s, dodged a format war, and pushed VHS aside in just a few years.They're not the king of home entertainment anymore, but they still work, they're still watchable, and they give us a kind of freedom we're sorely lacking in recent years.Sounds pretty impressive to me.
Related CDs solved every problem vinyl had, but that's exactly why they'll never come back The audio CD shines twice as bright, but burned half as long.Posts 47 By Sydney Butler
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