I built a tiny movie library around films no streaming service can be trusted to keep

Published Oct 20, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. Streaming has made watching movies incredibly convenient, but that convenience comes at a higher cost than just the rising subscription fees. Movies can disappear from services, or the available versions can change. I decided to build a small permanent library of movies I don't trust streaming services with. Movies often disappear from streaming Rights issues can make even famous movies impossible to access Credit: Sony Pictures Entertainment When a movie you love is on a streaming service you subscribe to, everything is great. You can watch the movie whenever you want without having to pay anything extra. You know that you can always find the movie the next time you want to watch it. The trouble is that it isn't always true. Movies don't always stay on streaming services, and in some cases, when they disappear from one service, they don't appear on any of the others either, making the movie impossible to stream. The movie 28 Days Later is a prime example. Fox Searchlight Pictures, which was then bought by Disney, distributed the movie. Ahead of the release of the third movie, 28 Years Later, the rights to the original movie moved from Disney to Sony, meaning that Disney could no longer stream the movie on its services. Sony hadn't yet put a new digital release into distribution, so for several months in 2024, the original movie wasn't available to stream on any platform. Even worse, it wasn't available to rent or purchase digitally, and the DVD and Blu-ray releases were out of print, leaving second-hand physical copies as the only practical (legal) way to watch. Thankfully, the movie is now available again through Sony. This is far from the only example. Movies regularly move to different platforms or disappear from streaming entirely. Sometimes the movie stays, but the version changes Availability isn't always the problem Even when movies don't disappear from streaming completely, the versions that are available on streaming services may change. You may still be able to watch the movie, but not the version you'd always enjoyed in the past. One example is the classic 1971 drama The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. In 2023, users started to notice that the version showing on streaming platform Criterion Channel was missing a six-second sequence containing a racial slur. The edit wasn't particularly skillfully done, with the scene jumping to a later point in the conversation. Perhaps the most famous examples of movies changing significantly from the original versions are the original Star Wars movies. George Lucas, in his infinite wealth wisdom, has made multiple changes to the movies over the years, including several edits to the scene with Han and Greedo and completely removing an actor from a scene and replacing him with a different actor. Some of the most painful edits are the shoehorning of terrible computer-generated scenes into movies famous for having incredible practical effects. Buying digitally isn't always the solution Even downloaded files aren't under your full control You might think that if you buy a digital copy of a movie, you no longer have to worry about the movie disappearing or being changed from its original form. This isn't always the case, however. People who had bought The French Connection found that the copy that they had access to was also missing six seconds, even if they had bought the movie before the edits were made. There was also a Reddit post that blew up recently, from someone who had bought the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings movies, only to find that they could no longer access them. While Google eventually put this down to a UI bug rather than access having been revoked, it's still the case that the poster was initially unable to watch the movies they'd bought and paid for. Apple currently offers one of the best solutions in terms of purchased content. You can download movies you purchase from Apple and access them offline, and those files will remain unchanged even if the movie is edited at a later date. However, even then, you can only watch the content via your Apple Account, and if you lose the downloaded copy and Apple loses the rights to the movie, you may not be able to download it again. My tiny movie library is safe from the whims of streaming services Physical media for safety and streaming for new content All of the above means that it's simply not possible to rely on streaming or even digital downloads for movies. Those movies can be changed drastically or even completely disappear, leaving you without access to the version of the movie you want to watch. That's why I've built a small library of the movies that I absolutely don't want to lose access to. I've bought and kept physical copies of movies such as The Lord of the Rings extended editions because I watch them at least once a year. It would break my heart to lose access to them, as well as the huge amount of incredible extras that come with the DVDs. I also have copies of other movies I couldn't live without, such as the original theatrical cut of Star Wars, The Third Man, The Big Lebowski, North by Northwest, and Way Out West. I've ripped all of these movies, and they're part of my Jellyfin library, but I'm keeping the physical copies of these movies along with multiple backups. Even physical media doesn't last forever, but these are movies that definitely deserve the extra insurance. Don't expect your favorite movies to stay on streaming services If there are movies you really love, don't rely on streaming services as the only way you can watch them. I still use streaming services to watch movies all the time, but some movies are too good to risk losing access to.