The revolution on the shelf? Why physical media still matters in the age of streaming TV

In the world of TV collectables, some items are clearly priceless, others are priced to clear.

Keep vintage comic books and action figures in unsullied states, and you could be sitting on a pension plan. VHS copies of your favourite 90s sci-fi shows? Not so valuable, as it turns out.

For proof, just visit my neighbourhood in south London, where Star Trek: Deep Space Nine videocassettes in the local charity shop can be yours for just 50p a pop.

Oh, the indignity. These faded cultural artefacts, with their cracked plastic cases and sun-bleached sleeves, once retailed at £10.99 each. I know, because I was someone who’d save up to buy them back in an era when storytelling was rationed to two episodes per VHS. Can you imagine the anticipation? How would we fill the time between monthly releases by rewatching what we had repeatedly until we knew the 'stardates' backwards?

Those who grew up in the streaming age, where the Star Trek franchise can be found in seconds on Paramount+, will no doubt find this hard to comprehend. But in the 1990s, collecting contemporary television required commitment. Without Wikipedia, we’d piece together timelines using copies of magazines such as TV Zone and Starburst. Blurbs would be memorised, cover art scrutinised, and on the day of release, we’d race to Virgin Megastore, ten-pound notes and loose change hot in our pockets.

This was a clunky 'rewind and eject' world, one where the only place you’d expect to find an autoplay feature would be on the bridge of a starship. But might this labour of fandom have had its positive facets? Did the effort of collecting intensify attachment in a way that has been lost in today’s frictionless scrolling-and-streaming world?

Compare these past pilgrimages to the modern era, where everything is equally available but equally ignorable. Star Trek is still being made, but a friend was telling me only the other day how his son half-watches the spin-off Starfleet Academy in his bedroom on a phone propped on a stand while playing on a PS5 on a larger screen.

On the one hand, it’s heartening to find that the world of Trek has endured, but dispiriting to realise not only that the medium upon which I watched it is now defunct, but that episodes are just ambiently absorbed, their plots competing with Overwatch and Snapchat notifications. Where once we used to commit, we now just seem to graze, safe in the knowledge that whole seasons are waiting without urgency on a watchlist.

But might a section of Gen Z be rising up? Have some realised that the Shangri-La of streaming offers merely the illusion of ownership? And is there now a secret desire to invest in physical media?

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times reported that Americans spent 12 per cent more on 4K Blu-rays in 2025 than in the previous year, with young customers fatigued by streaming seeing the buying of discs as "a form of cultural rebellion". Dare we believe that obsolescence is making a comeback as resistance?

Said a contributor to the piece, "I want something I can put on my shelf", their words expressing a desire for tangibility and durability, as well as perhaps a recognition that, where streaming is concerned, you’re forever at the mercy of licensing deals where programmes can appear and disappear.

In that simple sentence, there appears to be a need to once again be more than just a passive consumer and instead take ownership rather than rent access to a feed. Not so different, really, from the days of those VHS tapes. Perhaps the art of collecting was never lost – it was just biding its time?

So, might it not matter that those 50p VHS relics of DS9 are currently piled unloved and unpurchased in the charity shop? For a start, the stories they contain are anything but extinct. For while the medium has died, the Star Trek mission continues. And the same could also be true of us. The desire to have and hold may have been hushed by streaming, but it hasn’t been extinguished entirely.

Netflix and the like may have made watching TV effortless, but when everything is in easy reach, it can stop feeling hard-won. But if the next generation is now reaching for something they can slot into a player, there’s evidence right there that progress doesn’t always move forward. Sometimes, like a time-travel plot in an old sci-fi favourite, there’s great pleasure in looping back.

Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.