asianxcore

I own about 3,100+ DVDs/BDs and don't see myself selling it off.

Though I have a lot of studio titles, I also have a lot of out of print titles that are sought after, including a ton of Horror/Exploitation films that have fetched silly amounts on Ebay recently.

Having just bought my first house last year, I thought I would buy more, seeing as I now have a lot more space but have been noticing myself buying less.

As a few posters in here have already mentioned, I love my collection and though I use streaming, I prefer physical media.

GoldenJCJ

I noticed this too when I became a home owner. I think it’s mainly because priories have changed. I tend to spend less on Blu-rays/DVDs and more on home upgrades.

In a perfect world, I’d choose physical media every time. It’s just become far more convenient to stream movies. My movie watching time has been limited to one or two movies a weekend. I rarely re-visit old favorites that I own and instead choose to rent a new release via Amazon or other streaming service.

Neil M.

I pretty much just buy new releases in Steelbooks and boutique label releases. I'm pretty much done with tv shows unless it's something I will watch multiple times. Also, really don't care about the value as I have no intentions of selling the valuable stuff.

tonyc3742

Yeah, I prefer the ownership and being able to find physical, but the convenience of digital. At least three times a week, "Where do we watch Movie X/Show X"? (as in, what service.) But it's nice to be able to pick up Show A, B, or C, or movie X or Y, on virtually any device.
I've bought one release set this year, 4 in 2020, and 18 in 2019. And most of those were either hard to find/soon OOP, gifts received, or came with a digital version.
Of course, I've bought a ton of stuff digitally over the last two years (or converted via Disc to Digital).
According to the DVD Discount Report, which may or may not be accurate anymore, I've spent just under $7.5k for a 'value' (MSRP, so yeah, not really a reliable metric) of 25.8k. Some wonkiness there, gifts are entered as either 0 or .01, but of course someone had to buy it.
Somewhere between 1626 and 1800 titles, about half of which are TV.
So what's it worth - MSRP 25k. Replacement cost, who knows. Resale value, I'd be surprised if I could gross 2k, and that's not even taking into account time and energy parceling it out and selling/shipping.
I think I've already sold most of my 'valuable' titles, and while physical media may not be dead, I think the population of 'collectors' or even those who are interested in physical media is drastically dwindling.
Every now and then I get a burst of energy and pick out half a dozen titles or so to just donate and hope someone eventually finds value in them.

John Galt

I got hooked into DVD like a lot of us on here. And after discovering Columbia House (what brought me to this site in the first place) and being a college student with disposable income, I started amassing quite the collection. I had a townhouse with a basement theatre, so I loved collecting and having a huge variety when friends came over for movie night. Between Columbia House, DDD sales, and all the other dot com sales of the early 2000s, I think I got up to about 1400 movies. Then Blu Ray came out and I started to look at my collection and some of the stupid shit I had, plenty of it I actually hated but kept around just to pad my numbers. I knew better versions of the movies I did like were coming out and the old ones would be junk. I also started renting out my townhouse and moved into an apartment where space was more limited.

So purge number one happened. I probably sold everything except 50 of my favorite movies. I think I got about $8k back then as DVD still had some value. No doubt I lost some money, but because I was probably averaging less than $10/DVD it wasn't too bad. I still planned on buying Blu Rays as they came out, but swore to myself I wouldn't compulsively buy physical media again. For several years I was pretty good. It was much harder to find deals, although I do remember a $10 off, no minimum purchase promo Google was running that I probably used over 100 times. Then I found GoHastings promos and started going nuts again. It was easy to justify since I could pick up used Blu Rays for $2-3 each, which was cheaper than renting. I was a lot better about not blind buying crap I knew I wouldn't like though.

Then came purge number two. I had over 1000 Blu Rays and had to move apartments again. At this point streaming was becoming mainstream and I really loved the convenience factor. So again, I threw everything up on ebay except maybe a small box worth. For a couple years, streaming served me fine, but I came to realize all the downsides. The selection of old content sucked and was completely discretionary based on the studios. There was buffering, the PQ and AQ couldn't compare with physical media. I also moved into a new house where I was able to have a dedicated theatre again and missed having a library.

So what did I do? I hit up yard sales, estate sales, and craigslist and starting amassing a huge collection at insane prices. DVDs for a quarter and Blu Rays for a dollar were my target price points. I would pick up a new collection 1-2x a month with a minimum of 500 titles. It was a hustle and my ex wife loved things like that, even if she didn't care about physical media like I did. The best part (other than the ex volunteering to list on ebay, pack, and ship) is I would almost always at least break even by selling duplicates or titles I didn't want. You could almost always count on 1-2 OOP titles per lot that would fetch a good amount. I had kept spreadsheets of all the DVDs and Blu Rays I had previously sold, and after a couple years had replaced every movie I still wanted to own. At this point, home libraries were considered an eyesore, so I built a faux wall in the theatre to display the projector onto, and then had a walk in closet on the back side that had all of the equipment and all the media organized for easy browsing.

Nowadays, I've converted all my physical media to digital and built a 100tb Media Server to stream throughout the house. There's about 2,400 Blu Rays, 150 3D movies, 125 TV series, and a handful of DVDs that still aren't out on a better format. The physical library filled up, so I just boxed everything up and threw it in storage. I collect UHDs now and assume it will be the last physical media format, so I'm just having fun with it while I can. I have about 200-300 titles and just blind buy what I want to watch now since there aren't any good rental alternatives. What's the stash worth? Probably not a lot considering the quantity. Maybe $4,000-5,000, but it's been a fun hobby for over 20 years now. I stupidly spent too much early on, but reigned it in over the years to where I don't really worry too much about the value like I did in the past. My big complaint about streaming services is how segregated they all are. Even if I can't physically "own" a movie on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, or the many others, I'd love to have them all in one place for simplicity.


And for those of you considering selling on ebay with any regularity. Pick up a scale, thermal label printer, bulk labels, and bubble mailers. The printers are about $100, labels are less than a penny a piece, and envelopes are about 10-20 cents. It will save so much time from addressing, cutting and taping, and traveling to the post office and waiting in line. Just print, stick, and put in the mailbox.

morriscroy

Back in the day, the ex-wife was more into the dvd + home theater thing than me. She would bring friends over to watch movies and singe karaoke all the time. (ie. In those days, nobody in my then-local social circles had any kids and most still had a lot of free time). I only accumulated about a dozen or so dvds over the entire 2000s decade of dvd's heydays. Mostly stuff the ex-wife really hated, such as Cheech and Chong, etc ...

I started accumulating a large dvd/bluray collection after 2011 or so, where $5 (or less) dumpbin blurays were already commonplace. So I knew all along from the start in 2011, that such a dvd/bluray collection would have very little to no resale value.

Why So Blu?

I wouldn't even start there yet. Some folks will get anxiety that they have to "invest" in equipment and supplies and it'll kill their buzz. Folks can start with what they have and once they start making some profit then they can invest in a label printer and all that jazz.

PerryD

I once paid an officemate $1 per movie to sell hundreds of my movies. She was willing to do it as an easy way to beef up her eBay score. When another girl in my group found out, she wanted a cut of the action too.

milo bloom

Yeah, you don't need a lot to sell on eBay. We've got a regular home printer and we just print our labels and use packing tape to put them on the package. We did buy a packing tape dispenser to move years ago and we've held onto it. We have a roll of bubble wrap and some mailing envelopes, but you don't need a lot of them.

orangerunner

My tools of the trade over the last 10 years selling DVDs on eBay have been:

-computer w/ internet connection
-ballpoint pen
-#0 size bubble mailers w/ adhesive strip
-access to local Post Office

Gizmo

And the ability to take photos and deal with dumbass eBay buyers “any scratches? How big? Does it work? Insert? How many times did you play it” bla bla bla. For a $5 movie

John Galt

What region is the blu ray?

orangerunner

... yes, and a digital camera!

Luckily I haven't had to deal with too many challenging customers. I take pictures of the front and back with a description that usually states something like "the disc has a few light scratches that do not affect the playback". I describe the trap sheet and case and that's about it.

The biggest challenge is people impulsively buying stuff on their phones and failing to read the description.

milo bloom

The eBay app on my iPhone walks you through it. You even take the picture with your phone to put right into the listing. You can scan the barcode of your item to find a similar product and just go off of that.

maxfisher

When I built my home theater 10 years ago, I put in a walk-in media storage closet that has shelving running the perimeter. Seven levels, each with ~40 feet of shelving that I thought I’d probably never fill. It’s now full. CDs take up ~65 feet, blu-rays/4k/dvd ~140, videos games ~5 and books ~70.

I figured with a projector and 10’ screen, I’d want physical media forever due to the higher quality. I failed to imagine that streaming would so quickly improve to where it rivals or surpasses blu-ray. Over the last year and a half, I really only buy movies if 1) they’re something I really want to see and unlikely to stream soon or 2) something I love so much that I want it in 4k. And even with the latter, I take into account that I probably won’t be able to tell the difference between a 4k disc and streaming within the next decade.

That said, I occasionally thin the collection out to make room for new titles, but have no desire to get rid of it. My wife and/or kids can deal with selling it all off when I’m dead, hopefully in 30+ years.

asianxcore

Definitely spending more on home upgrades & maintenance.

I also noticed that moving from a small apartment to a house (as well as upgrading to the largest TV I've ever owned), I'm getting new enjoyment & mileage over re-watching so much of what I have in a completely different environment.

That alone has slowed down a lot of my new purchases for sure.

milo bloom

We moved into a condo from a house about 6 years ago and we bought a set of 5 IKEA Besta shelves for my collection and it's been bursting at the seams ever since. I've slowed my buying way down but we watch almost everything on streaming now, I rarely get the chance to put a disc in to watch, especially since my wife would rather watch 2 hours of TV episodes than a 2 hour movie.

Josh-da-man

I wonder if there's any chance we'll see DVD and blu-ray discs explode in value at some point in the future.

We're currently at the "we can barely give these things away" stage of the format.

But vinyl records went through a similar period.

I remember, about twenty years ago, I went on a vinyl buying binge on eBay. I could buy just about any album I wanted on vinyl for under ten dollars, often in the $4-6 dollar range.

I went online and discovered that I had quite a few CDs that were quite valuable (out of print, and selling for $50 or more), while the LPs of those same albums were only selling for $5 or $6 in mint condition or even unopened. So I started upgrading those albums to vinyl, and selling off the CDs.

Now a lot of those LPs that I bought for $5 are selling for $30+ on the collectors market.

I wonder if, in the future, after everyone has dumped or thrown out their DVD/Blu-ray collections in favor of streaming, and the studios let everything fall out of print, there won't be a similar seller's market for the format, at least for certain titles.

The digital DVDs and Blu-rays don't seem to have the same cultural cachet that vinyl does, and the format is probably a lot more ubiquitous now than vinyl was before it was supplanted by CDs and cassettes, but I could see a lot of cult titles on blu and DVD increasing in value.

Josh Z

Doubtful. Vinyl appeals to an audience that fetishizes its analog nature, which allegedly can't be reproduced digitally.

milo bloom

Yeah, anything that could be valuable (because of certain extras or such) is probably already rising in value.

For most everything else, there's just so many copies out there. Every thrift store has tones of copies of all the mainstream stuff that everybody bought then got rid of. I mentioned elsewhere I recently hit a garage sale where they had a huge bin of DVDs that were 5 for $1. And I still only found two I wanted.

slop101

Until recently, I had about 2,000 blu/dvds.
I got rid of about 1,500 and kept 500 (which I'll probably pare down further to about 200).
I was able to sell some sought-after OPP titles for a good deal of money, but only about 20 titles of that 1,500 - they rest I gave away to friends and the local library.

slop101

Unlike digital discs, due to the nature of the media and the way it's produced, vinyl is difficult/nearly-impossible to keep in print/press like CDs/DVDs, which is why so many titles can and do go out of press and end up commanding so much $, before they get a re-press. But many never do get repressed.

Gizmo

I can't imagine people getting nostalgic for DVD/BD in the future. Vinyl seems like its more "hip" to have, along with people who claim it sounds better etc. aka Portlandia

PhantomStranger

Movies with licensing issues and/or difficulties will likely retain real value on physical media. Common blockbuster releases? Likely not.

Some of this depends on how streaming shakes out. We are nowhere near the endgame of how the streaming market will look like in 2030.