Home Video (VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, 4k)

In recent weeks, we here at JoBlo have written some wild stories about how physical media has sometimes fallen flat with consumers. The idea with physical media was always that, in an era where many people own things digitally (which they don’t really own at all), having a film on Blu-ray meant that it would always be yours. However, collectors have been somewhat shaken up lately by the spectre of laser rot, where, after a certain time, discs simply go bad, regardless of whether you play them or not. As I previously revealed, pretty much every DVD (and HD-DVD) Warner Bros manufactured between 2006-8 fell prey to this, and our own Tyler Nichols followed-up with his own piece, listing hundreds of Blu-ray’s which have always gone bad – for whatever reason.

However, as Tyler notes, in many cases, especially when a disc comes from a specialty label, they’ll do everything they can to replace a defective disc. In fact, even WB has gone on record saying they would replace discs, no matter how old they are (although several readers have reached out to me saying that WB is taking a lot of time to get back to them). Criterion has been especially good at replacing discs that no longer work, and I imagine the same would go for any 4K specialty label, although so far, their discs all seem to work just fine.

With that in mind, we want to celebrate some of our favourite specialty labels. Mine is probably Arrow Video, which is like the Criterion Collection of genre films, but there are plenty of great ones to choose from. Take our poll below and let us know!

That page is such a mess, I can't even see the poll, so throw in your suggestions in the comments below.