Picture this: the year is 2015. I, Minty Parker, am seven years old. In typical seven-year-old fashion, I had arbitrarily decided that I wanted to watch only one show on loop for the next month and a half: Disney’s 2008 Cars Toons: Mater’s Tall Tales. For hours on end, I would sit down, insert the DVD into my DVD player, and watch the collection of shorts once or twice until I got bored. Then, the next day, I would return to do it all over again.

Now imagine someone randomly decided to break into my house and steal my Cars Toons: Mater’s Tall Tales DVD. In that case, if seven-year-old Minty wanted to watch Tow Mater as a matador, they would have two options: pirate it, or simply give up on watching it altogether. That scenario is more or less the state of animation in our current world.

For the past several years, streaming services have had a pattern of spontaneously removing animated programs from their service with no prior warning. Take recently when Max (formerly HBO Max) took off a significant chunk of their animated programming- specifically Cartoon Network programs like Chowder, Steven Universe, and The Amazing World of Gumball. This precedent of suddenly deleting programming with no explanation has been firmly set by this point- most notably with the removal of Infinity Train from Hulu back in 2022, which caused a massive internet uproar. 

Of course, on streaming, nothing lasts forever. Inevitably, content is going to get removed one way or another. However, our problem in an increasingly digital society is that some shows, once they’re removed, can never be accessed legally again. With shows that have physical releases, this isn’t a problem- but that happens less frequently, and with younger people, even owning a DVD player is becoming more of a rarity. If you want to access content without a physical release, then you have one route left: piracy. Unfortunately, that’s illegal. 

So, let’s consider the original scenario: say that a kid is currently obsessed with a show like Ben 10, which was recently and inexplicably removed from Max. They don’t have a DVD player, or can’t come by a copy of the DVD. Piracy is dangerous, especially for a kid, so that content is now entirely inaccessible to them.

Why are they doing this? The answer is unclear. However, it seems to be monetarily motivated- i.e. tax breaks. If shows get removed after only a short period of time, companies can write them off as a loss. They don’t have to pay licensing fees or residual payments, and since the service doesn’t gain money when shows are watched more frequently— there’s really no good reason for companies not to remove shows.

Who cares? Kids move on. The real problem is the precedent this sets for preserving media in the future. If a streaming service will remove a kid’s show for a tax break, they will remove any show for a tax break- and they do. But when original content, made for streaming services gets removed, where does it go? Piracy websites, or places like archive.org— the chances of most modern shows getting physical releases are slim to none. When those piracy sites get taken down, that content goes… nowhere. It’s lost. 

In the grand scheme of things, a single TV show or movie is a drop in the vast ocean of content that is accessible in the modern world. But every show that has ever been created matters to someone- think of Minty circa 2015 and Cars Toons: Mater’s Tall Tales. While objectively not a great show, I still loved it oh-so-very-much. So, I kept the DVD, which no one can ever (or will ever want to) take from me. 

I don’t think companies will go back to producing physical DVDs. The demand for them simply isn’t high enough- the convenience of streaming is far more alluring. However, the problem lies within streaming’s sustainability. How long can Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ keep pumping out limited series, only to cut them when they get good? How long until TV just isn’t worth watching, or worth creating, because everything that doesn’t already have a major IP attached to it gets cycled out too fast to keep up with? If I’m being honest, I can’t tell you when that will happen, or how streaming will save itself, or if it’s really burning out that quickly at all. What I can tell you is that if you love a show or a movie, consider buying a physical copy of it. Nothing lasts forever- but you can always make it last a little longer.