Netflix has gone up in price quite a bit over the past decade. If you want a no-ad plan, you’re looking at spending $20, and that’s just for 1080p. If you want the high-end 4K options, you have to go even further. That’s a tough pill to swallow for something that used to represent such great value. The strange thing is that even at the price it’s at now, Netflix still has a lot of value.
Original content is coming out all the time, and if you watch several movies a month, you’re essentially saving yourself hundreds of dollars. The real downside is that you don’t own the content itself, and if preservation is something you’re passionate about, you won’t get that with Netflix. I’m a big physical media lover, so that is a big deal, but it’s not as much of an issue for people who treat their movies as one-and-done experiences.
I don’t know how much attention you’ve been paying to physical media prices lately, but they feel like they’re on the rise. Aside from your boutique sellers like Criterion and Arrow, even regular versions of the latest Blu-ray release cost a lot. If you’re trying to buy the latest releases, it might actually be more cost-effective to stick with Netflix, despite the price hike. I don’t like that reality, but it might be true for a lot of people.
A rock and a hard place
Big studio movies feel like they get priced affordably, or at least they used to. It was just a few years ago that I felt like I’d always be able to find great deals from Amazon and Best Buy, but the latter has left the physical media industry completely, while Amazon’s sales are fewer and farther between.
Send Help, a film that released in theaters earlier this year, is up for pre-order on Amazon for $50 at the time of this writing. This is the 4K Blu-ray version, but you’ll see that the DVD is priced at $35. There’s no way I can justify spending that much money on a 4K Blu-ray, let alone a DVD, in 2026. I know the price will eventually come down, but even if it gets cut in half, $25 is pretty expensive for a movie. To help put that into perspective, if you watch just two movies a month on Netflix, you’re arguably getting more value, with the tradeoff being that you don’t own the movie. Obviously, that’s a big tradeoff, but it’s one that a lot of people don’t care about, or else streaming wouldn’t be the powerhouse that it is today.
Another thing you need with physical media is something to play a disc on and somewhere to store your discs. If you’re a gamer, then you’re in luck because both your Xbox and PS5 can play these discs for you, provided they have disc drives, of course. Neither of these consoles supports Dolby Vision, so you need a dedicated 4K player for that. Naturally, these Dolby Vision players cost a few hundred dollars, so it’s really not a cheap hobby.
A PS3 is still a decent Blu-ray player if you have an old one, but it won’t play 4K Blu-rays.
A big appeal of physical media is the superior audio and picture quality, so a lot of that is lost if you don’t have high-end gear to go along with it. I spent a lot of money building my setup and collection, and while I don’t regret it at all, it’s easy to see how it’s a high barrier for somebody. This is why physical media isn’t the answer to somebody dumping Netflix. It’d make a lot more sense if you could get into it in a cheaper way, but things feel like they’re trending in the opposite direction.
You have to know where to find sales
Don’t ever pay full price
The good news is that there’s little reason to ever pay full price for a Blu-ray. Amazon frequently runs sales for buy two, get one, so that’s a good way to stock up. You can find similar deals at Target for the same thing. Criterion runs half-off deals a few times a year, and Barnes and Noble has a monthly half-off Criterion sale annually. GRUV is also a good pick for getting a bunch of movies for a low price, and they recently rolled Shout Factory films into the storefront.
If you watch just two movies a month on Netflix, you’re arguably getting more value, with the tradeoff being that you don’t own the movie.
Used video stores are also an excellent way to stock up on releases, although those have been more Blu-ray than 4K Blu-ray, at least in my experience. If the goal is to simply own what you watch, then there’s no issue with Blu-ray, and you might even notice that it often looks better than even a 4K stream. This is all great for older releases, but I do wonder what it means for modern releases. I can’t imagine somebody actually paying $50 for Send Help, and that’s a movie I enjoyed quite a bit when I saw it in theaters. Even I balk at prices like that, and I can’t actually remember the last time I bought something for full price.
My library hasn’t grown very much in the past year, and while that’s not a big deal for me right now since I still have so much in my backlog, it could be a problem down the line if prices keep rising like this.
