Generation Z has found the remedy to streaming subscription fatigue: buying DVDs again
Sales of DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD stopped their decline in 2025. They only fell 9% compared to declines of more than 20% in the previous two years. What is the reason for this slowdown? To an unexpected factor, an unforeseen audience: young people from Generation Z who are filling video stores, promoting labels boutique like Criterion and Arrow and turning the physical format into a gesture of resistance against the massification of streaming. Plummet. For more than a decade, the physical format market in home video followed a downward trajectory that seemed irreversible. Between 2019 and 2023 it was reduced by 40% in the United States alone, and the disappearance of chains such as blockbuster it reinforced the feeling that the album was an exhausted medium. In 2024, DVD and Blu-ray sales were below a billion dollars for the first time. Gasping. However, in 2025 a different phenomenon has been detected: the physical disk market generated 870 million dollarsthat is, it only decreased by 9.3% compared to the previous year. What’s more: in the 4K UHD segment (which allows high-quality viewing at home), US consumer spending grew 12% year-on-year. All this in an extremely unfavorable context: with the unstoppable growth of streaming (19.8% in 2025), the physical format represents only 1.4% of total home entertainment. Fed up with streaming. The overdose of supply in streaming is ultimately causing a tiredness effect. According to recent studies47% of American consumers say they pay too much for their insurance services streamingand 41% consider that the available content does not justify the price. The average number of subscriptions per household has been four for a couple of years, an amount that could be at its critical point. DVD solution. Added to this saturation is a problem that film fans know well: the platforms are unreliable and the catalogs change without prior notice. Movies and series disappear for reasons ranging from the completion of exploitation contracts to tax reasons. In a ‘Los Angeles Times’ piece that has investigated this interest Of the youngest to recover physical formats, some young people under thirty spoke about how they became interested in cinema during the pandemic, describing DVD collecting as an act of rebellion against the fragmentation of streaming. Blockbuster, meeting point. That same article talks about renovated versions of old video stores as meeting points for these new collectors. Of course, it is something that mainly concerns the United States, where such specific types of businesses make sense: Vidiots, in Los Angeles, also functions as a movie theater, and is registering its highest revenue peaks since its opening, with an average of 170 daily rentals. Also from there is Cinefile, which has 500 paying members. Visiting the video store functions as a social activity that streaming cannot offer and the community dimension is key to understanding why the phenomenon exceeds pure nostalgia. And you don’t have to go to such specialized stores: Barnes & Noble, one of the few large chains in the country that maintains a space dedicated to the physical format after the withdrawal of Best Buy and Target, speaks of a double-digit percentage growth during the last year. And they point out that the demographic profile of their buyers is increasingly younger. Stamps boutique. The situation experienced by domestic editions is completely unprecedented in the history of the medium: while the major studios reduce their commitment to the physical format, independent labels are experiencing a moment of expansion. Criterion Collection speaks of “significant year-over-year increases” in sales. The cult film specialist Vinegar Syndrome also experiments similar trends. Of course, sales are incomparably lower than the good times of the physical format, but we are not talking about residual phenomena either. In Spain alone, for example, there are half a dozen labels specialized in reissues of films that cannot be found in streaming (El 79, Cameo, Gabita Barbieri, Trashorama…) that survive crises and recessions alluding to a loyal audience and a cinema that cannot be seen any other way. The inevitable comparison. It is inevitable to think of an analogy with the vinyl recoverythe cassette and the VHS that the previous generations, Millennials and Gen-Xers, have carried out. This has been going on since the mid-2010s, in a mix of nostalgia, vindication of the physical and endless discussions about audio and video qualities. Two decades latervinyl is facing its eighteenth consecutive year of growth, with $1.4 billion in sales (the highest figure since 1984) and 44 million units in stores, surpassing the CD for the third consecutive year. The key difference is that vinyl has an industrial infrastructure that supports it: record companies that prioritize the format, active manufacturers and a distribution chain. The physical video, on the other hand, loses player manufacturers and the big studios prioritize streaming about the disc editions. Video game consoles, eternal support of the format, already have institutionalized versions of their hardware without disc readers. At the moment, the recovery of DVD and Blu-Ray is an isolated phenomenon. But those who we keep listening to cassettes We know better than to look over our shoulders at a format that seems dead. Header | Photo of Lance Anderson in Unsplash In Xataka | Despite streaming, I still buy Blu-Rays and DVDs. But the reason has nothing to do with image quality.
