There are certain TV shows I always return to. I must have watched Futurama, Parks & Recreation, or Seinfeld from start to finish dozens of times. But I could have saved myself a pretty penny—and had a better experience—if I’d just bought them instead.
Most of My Streaming Is Comfort Shows
I love having access to a huge library of content on streaming services, but if I’m honest with myself I know that I barely use it. More often than not, I only use streaming services to watch the same handful of comfort shows.
It’s one thing to watch a comfort show on a streaming service if you’re certain you’d be paying for that service anyway. But more often than not, when I’m rewatching one of my favorite shows from start to finish, that’s the only content I’m streaming for months on end.
Most of my favorite shows have hundreds of episodes. Even if I watched three episodes per day, it’d take me over a month to get through them. Usually, it takes me two or three months instead.
If I’d just bought the DVD, Blu-ray, or iTunes box set, I could happily cancel my streaming subscriptions for a few months while I worked through it. And I’d save money if I did so.
You Only Need to Watch a Box Set Twice to Save Money
To show how you can save money by buying a box set, let’s look at Friends as an example. This is one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, so it could well be a comfort show you already revisit a lot.
You can buy the Blu-rays for all 10 seasons of Friends on Amazon for $95 (though checking Amazon’s price history tells me this is usually discounted to just $57). This is a great example, as most box sets I’ve looked at fall between this $50 and $100 range. You can save even more money if you buy second-hand DVDs or Blu-rays.
There are 235 episodes of Friends. So, assuming you watched three episodes per day on average, it’d take you two-and-a-half months to get through the whole show, not including any bonus features you get with the box set.
Friends
$53 $95 Save
$42
Friends follows a close-knit friendship group of six people living in New York City, as they find love, change careers, and experience all of life’s ups and downs together.
Now let’s compare that to streaming services. Friends is available to stream on Max, which costs $16.99/month if you don’t want to watch ads, which matches the box set experience. That means you’d need to pay for three months of Max to stream the whole show—since you can’t pay for half a month—costing a total of $50.97.
At first, it looks like streaming is the cheaper option. But how many times do you think you’ll rewatch your favorite shows over the rest of your life? In this example, you only need to cancel streaming to watch Friends twice in your life to start saving money.
This seems to be about the same for other box sets I’ve looked at, which all tend to pay for themselves by the second watch. Though, of course, the exact calculus could change either way if you take advantage of discounted box sets and bundled streaming services, or if streaming continues to get more expensive.
MAX
While no streaming service is one-size-fits-all, Max gets pretty close. A wide selection of content and same-day theatrical releases on the service help it stand above the rest.
So, assuming you’re going to watch your favorite comfort shows at least twice, you’d definitely save money if you canceled your streaming services and bought the box sets to do so. As well as saving money, though, the physical box sets will give you a better experience than streaming.
A 4K Blu-ray easily beats a 4K stream, but even an HD Blu-ray can offer better quality than a 4K stream. Although 4K streaming ought to give you a higher resolution, the limited bitrate of streaming means that the video and audio suffers in other ways due to compression. You’ve probably seen blocky artifacts in dark scenes or banding across a color gradient while streaming, both of which can be much more distracting than 1080p resolution.
Alongside the quality improvements and consistency of physical media, you also get bonus features! These offer an insight behind the scenes of your favorite shows, into the production and development of them, offering you greater appreciation and—also important—hours of extra content to watch.
You’ll Only Save Money if You Cancel Your Streaming Services
I’m in favor of buying the media I love even if it costs more. I like building a library of my favorite movies and TV shows, I enjoy getting lost in all the bonus content they come with, I appreciate the improved audio and video quality, and I like the deliberate ritual of selecting a disc and putting it in the machine.
However, if your primary goal with buying box sets of your favorite shows is to save money, you need to make sure you cancel your streaming services whenever you go back to watch a show you already own. If you keep paying for streaming, you’re just doubling up on your expenses.
The good news is that the bigger your personal library of TV shows and movies gets, the easier it becomes to wean off of streaming entirely. Most of the time, I stream a new show simply because it’s there. If I had a vast library of DVDs and Blu-rays to choose from, I like to think I’d turn to that more often instead.
