Troy Tomson

Shelves of blank CD’s and DVD’s at Staples, one of the last stores in the Quad City area that still carries blank disc media.

The CD has been around since 1982 and the DVD since 1995, making them two  of the oldest storage mediums still manufactured today. But this may finally be the end, as major companies are beginning to ditch these discs in favor of streaming and digital downloads.

When the CD first launched, it was revolutionary. CD’s are thin, portable and have zero moving parts, meaning they are much more reliable than a cassette. The CD disc also made more complex operating systems possible, due to the 700 megabyte capacity, as opposed to  the miniscule 1.44 megabyte capacity offered by floppy disks.

As the years passed, the VHS, a larger version of a cassette tape that stores movies, was replaced by the DVD, an improved version of the CD. The DVD is faster and can store five times as much as the older CD standard, which means it can play a full length film at 480p, about 25% of the resolution of 1080p HD.

But now, DVDs are falling out of fashion. Netflix recently stopped their DVD rental service, even allowing users to keep their DVDs during the last month of the service. Best Buy will also stop selling DVDs in store by the end of this year. 

However, DVD rental service RedBox is evolving to meet current needs, even having a stock surge recently. RedBox DVDs can be rented for just a few dollars, and kiosks can be found just about anywhere. But now, anyone can stream movies on an endless number of streaming platforms. 

Even with RedBox’s current success, very few people go out of their way to rent a DVD when streaming costs just a few more dollars and is much more convenient.

Senior Ethan Cline often watches movies in his free time. “My family has a Netflix and Amazon Prime subscription, so we don’t really buy DVDs anymore. I don’t remember the last time I used a RedBox, because there’s barely any cost difference between renting a DVD and renting on Amazon,” Cline said. The hassle of driving to a RedBox, renting the DVD, then driving back home means the time spent and the gas money saved far outweighs the small discount from renting a DVD.

PV graduate Isaiah Steele also has an interesting insight. “In the past I only rented individual movies because I don’t consume enough media to justify a subscription, but I have recently been buying DVDs/Blu Rays of movies. I am building a media server so I can copy the movies from those discs, put them on that server, and stream them to my TVs like it’s Netflix or Disney Plus, except I own all of the content. It might seem like a weird solution, but I know that I don’t have to depend on a big company to watch movies that I’ve bought,” Steele stated. 

People like Steel prefer to “own their media,” and a DVD can easily be converted into a digital file, allowing a viewer to watch that on any device without an account or internet connection.

In addition, with portable consoles, such as the Nintendo Switch, that use cartridges, money-saving digital only consoles, and larger storage drives becoming more affordable, discs have fallen out of fashion among gamers. Additionally, modern game discs simply act as keys to “unlock” a game and allow users to play, as DVD and Blu-Rays are simply too slow to play modern video games.

Senior Landon Asta has both an Xbox and PlayStation. He only buys disc games because, “If I get tired of playing a game, I can usually take it to a video game store and they will buy it back. Even though it won’t be the price I paid for the whole game, I will get some money back.” Because of the transferability of physical games and the ability to resell them, physical games may be the last physical discs, aside from hard disc drives, to leave the market.

While spinning discs are slowly leaving the market in favor of faster flash storage on both the consumer and corporate level, for the time being, media discs like Blu-Ray, 4K UHD Blu-Ray and even the humble DVD still give owners the most control over their media, as opposed to streaming or digital downloads.