Why Media Ownership Is Making a Comeback

Streaming is still growing

Any serious discussion about a return to ownership has to begin with the inconvenient fact for physical-media enthusiasts: streaming remains enormous.

UK subscription video-on-demand revenue increased by 8.8% during 2025 to approximately £4.9 billion. By comparison, UK sales of DVD and Blu-ray, including 4K UHD, fell 4.7% to approximately £148.9 million.

Those figures leave little room for the claim that consumers are abandoning streaming and returning en masse to discs.

They are not.

But there is another interesting number inside the same data. The 4.7% reduction in UK physical video was the slowest decline since 2010, following an 8% fall during 2024. Blu-ray and 4K UHD generated approximately £84.2 million, compared with £64.7 million for DVD.

Across the Atlantic the picture is similarly nuanced. Overall US physical-disc spending continued to decline, while reported 4K UHD Blu-ray spending increased by around 12%.

Music may tell us what happens next

The story becomes more interesting when we look beyond film.

Streaming overwhelmingly dominates recorded music too, yet UK physical music has achieved something notable.

Physical music revenue increased for a third consecutive year in 2025, rising 12.8% to £278 million.

Vinyl understandably attracts most of the headlines, with revenue rising by almost 20%. But CD revenue also returned to growth, increasing 3.1% to £99.6 million - its best annual revenue result since 2021.

This matters because vinyl has already demonstrated that convenience does not necessarily eliminate ownership.

Spotify did not need to fail for vinyl to succeed.

Consumers simply discovered that the two fulfil different needs. One provides almost instant access to millions of recordings. The other provides something people can choose, collect, keep and experience differently.

CD may increasingly occupy similar territory - particularly because it remains inexpensive, compact and capable of providing a lossless source for a personal digital music library.

The same principle could apply to film.

Perhaps ownership never stopped mattering

For years, digital entertainment encouraged us to stop thinking about ownership.

Why buy an album when practically every song is available through a monthly subscription? Why buy a film when thousands are waiting inside a streaming app?

For everyday entertainment, that remains an extraordinarily compelling proposition.

The weakness appears when access gets confused with ownership.

A streaming subscription gives access to that service's current catalogue.

It does not give you a permanent collection.

Films arrive. Films disappear. Rights move between platforms. Programmes become unavailable. Sometimes the film you want is on a service you do not subscribe to. Occasionally it becomes difficult to find anywhere.

None of this makes streaming bad.

It simply means streaming and ownership are fundamentally different things.

Even a digital “purchase” may not mean permanent ownership

The distinction becomes more uncomfortable when consumers have actually paid to “buy” individual digital films.

PlayStation has informed UK customers that previously purchased StudioCanal content will become inaccessible from 1 September 2026 because of content licensing agreements. Sony's own notice states that the affected purchases will be removed from customers' video libraries.

Hundreds of film and television listings appear on the affected-content list.

There is no need for alarmism here. Most legitimate digital purchases may remain available perfectly happily for many years.

But the principle matters.

Consumers are becoming more aware of that distinction.

Streaming convenience created the streaming stack

Streaming once promised simplicity.

One subscription could provide what felt like an almost endless library.

Today entertainment is distributed across a much larger collection of competing services.

These are not exhaustive lists. Numerous sports, specialist, free, broadcaster and niche streaming services operate alongside them.

But the scale illustrates the problem.

HBO Max itself only entered the UK market in March 2026, adding another major international service to an already crowded landscape.

Entertainment Retailers Association research says the average UK consumer now has 2.9 video subscriptions per person.

Deloitte's US research paints a similar picture. The average subscribing US household pays for four paid streaming-video services, costing around $69 per month.

Almost half of US consumers surveyed by Deloitte felt they paid too much for streaming, while 41% felt the content available was not worth the price.

Streaming itself remains exceptionally convenient.

Managing an expanding collection of subscriptions, apps and catalogues increasingly does not.

The streaming industry has noticed the problem too

It would be unfair to portray streaming companies as simply adding more and more independent apps forever.

The market is already moving towards bundling, aggregation and consolidation.

That could make streaming simpler again.

It could also create another form of dependence: a consumer's entertainment collection remains governed by whichever platforms, packages, commercial agreements and licensing arrangements exist at the time.

That is not an argument against streaming.

It is another reason why permanent ownership and streaming convenience can comfortably coexist.

Then there is the enormous second-hand market

There is another reason DVD and CD remain particularly interesting:

They can be remarkably cheap.

Millions upon millions of discs produced during the height of physical media are still circulating through charity shops, eBay, second-hand retailers, marketplaces and private collections.

A film costing several pounds to rent digitally may sometimes be available on DVD for £2.

In many charity shops, DVDs can still be found for around 50p.

Entire television box sets can cost surprisingly little. CDs that once cost £15 or more new frequently circulate for a fraction of that price.

Of course, buying discs does not necessarily mean putting a DVD or Blu-ray player beneath every television again.

This is where ownership in 2026 can look very different from ownership in 2006.

Quality still matters too

Ownership is only part of the appeal at the premium end of the market.

4K UHD Blu-ray continues to attract enthusiasts because physical discs can deliver very high video bitrates, lossless audio and formats such as Dolby Atmos without being constrained in the same way as bandwidth-dependent streaming.

For someone watching casually on a tablet, those differences may be largely irrelevant.

The same is true at the highest end of residential entertainment.

Dedicated home cinemas and home theatres are often designed around achieving the best picture and sound available. For those owners, relying entirely upon internet-delivered video and its associated compression can undermine part of the reason they invested in the system in the first place.

This also helps explain why 4K UHD can grow in an important market while the wider disc category contracts.

The customer buying a carefully restored 4K edition of a favourite film is participating in a very different market from the consumer who once picked up a £5 DVD beside a supermarket checkout.

Physical media is increasingly selective rather than universal.

People may not want to own everything.

They may want to own the things they care about.

The future probably isn't physical or streaming

This is where predictions about the “return of physical media” often go wrong.

There does not have to be a winner.

The most logical future may involve three different ways of consuming entertainment.

Ownership without giving up the Netflix-like experience

This third category is particularly interesting because it combines two things consumers once appeared to have to choose between:

ownership and convenience.

A DVD, Blu-ray or 4K UHD disc can remain the physical master while its content forms part of a modern personal digital library.

A CD can remain safely stored while a lossless digital music library is available across phones, tablets and computers.

Film and television collections can be organised through personal-media platforms and browsed through televisions, streaming boxes, computers and tablets in an interface that feels far closer to a modern streaming service than an old shelf of discs.

This is not an obscure technical hobby.

Plex reports more than 25 million global users, while open-source platforms such as Jellyfin continue to support large and active personal-media communities.

There are also mature software, storage and media-server ecosystems built around creating, managing and enjoying personal libraries.

What we cannot responsibly claim is that DIY personal libraries are suddenly experiencing a measurable worldwide boom. Reliable industry-wide figures do not exist.

But the technology is mature, the ecosystem is established and the audience is substantial.

That creates a very different proposition from either traditional physical media or subscription streaming.

Importantly, none of that requires abandoning streaming.

We are seeing hints of this ourselves

At DIGIRAW we spend every day working with people's physical media collections, so we inevitably notice small behavioural changes before they appear in national statistics.

These observations should not be mistaken for scientific evidence.

But recently we have noticed something interesting.

Alongside the expected interest in Blu-ray and 4K UHD collections, we are seeing renewed enquiries about CD ripping and DVD collections.

Some customers want large existing collections made easier to use. Others are buying physical media specifically because they want a permanent copy of something they value. Some are rediscovering discs they already own.

We also encounter customers who are particularly protective of certain older films and television programmes because they worry that changing cultural attitudes, editing decisions, rights issues or future commercial choices could make particular titles or versions harder to access.

The phrase “cancel culture” is sometimes used to describe those concerns, although films and programmes disappear or change for many different reasons - licensing, commercial decisions, rights ownership, restoration choices and changing editorial standards among them.

The underlying behaviour is more important than the label.

When a particular film, programme, recording or version matters deeply to someone, permanent possession becomes more valuable.

Increasingly, the conversation is less about the disc itself and more about control over the collection.

So, is physical media really returning?

Not in the form it existed twenty years ago.

We are unlikely to see supermarket aisles once again filled with hundreds of DVDs, or households routinely buying every film they watch.

Streaming solved too many problems for that to happen.

But the assumption that physical ownership would simply disappear now looks equally simplistic.

CD revenue is growing again in the UK.

Vinyl continues to thrive.

4K UHD remains resilient and has returned to growth in the US.

DVD continues to circulate in enormous quantities through the second-hand economy.

Millions of people use personal-media platforms.

And digital licensing periodically reminds consumers that access and ownership are not always the same thing.

Perhaps this isn't really the return of physical media.

A generation of consumers spent fifteen years discovering how convenient it is not to own their entertainment.

Some are now rediscovering why owning at least part of it still matters.

And this time, we do not necessarily have to choose between ownership and convenience.

We can have both.