Renting a DVD in 2025
We’ve got a wonderful independent cinema in town, The Pickford Film Center. They recently inherited the film library of a now-defuct shop, Film is Truth, and now offer their entire collection of DVDs and Blu Rays for rental.
It’s nothing like a friday night 30 years ago at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video though. This service is kind of a pain to use and loaded with friction. You have to search a giant spreadsheet on a dropbox link, fill out a form, and wait until your request is fulfilled, usually a few days (so plan ahead). Then pick up a physical DVD to watch (And you’ve still got a working DVD player, right?).
In 2025, where endless streaming choices abound, I don’t suspect this rental system is very popular. And yet, we’ve been hooked on it - and I think it’s because of all the friction.
So much of media consumption these days is about endless options. There’s no risk of making a bad choice when all the choices are available, and you can switch at any time.
Access and choice are nice, but they can be paralyzing. I spend more of the evening trying to figure out what to watch than actually enjoying what I eventually picked. It also doesn’t help that the available selection is fragmented across dozens of services, so even the choices you have are just a drop in the bucket to what’s really available. There’s always something better on the horizon. This isn’t just an issue with movies and TV. It’s prevalent in video games, and to a lesser extent, ebooks and audiobooks too.
It’s all a bit miserable, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the opposite is so appealing to me.
I like having to commit to a decision days in advance, and then be given a due date to adhere to. It’s a process that forces action.
The other happy discovery with this approach is that it’s caused us to find a through line between each movie we pick. For instance we were watching an episode of the The Studio (yep, on streaming service, don’t DM me) that referenced the movie Chinatown. We rented it, and that got us onto Jack Nicholson movies, so One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest came next.
We’re fortunate to have access to The Pickford’s wonderful library. But there’s no reason you couldn’t do this kind of curation purely on streaming services or with your own media collection. In fact, services like Criterion Channel even organize collections of films as limited-time events. There’s also the the film lending at your public library. All great options to add a little friction back to your media consumption.