Former Vanity Fair editor Radhika Jones takes to the NYT to explain “Why I Still Own a DVD Player — and You Should, Too.”

Watching TV used to be an activity so passive that a potato could perform it. Now, when we get booted from a platform — because of an update or an outage or just because it’s Tuesday — I’ll stand in front of the screen stabbing the QR code on my phone. I’ll enter my Gmail address via remote control three times over. If I’m not around, my husband will dig up the password I wrote down six months ago, which is now almost certainly obsolete, because some data-hack alert caused me to change it on the fly, panicked that a bad actor — and not the kind you find on IMDb — might gain access to my Hulu watch list on the dark web.

And despite all the data they’ve mined from me, tech platforms don’t really know what I want to watch next. I’ve missed real curation. I want fewer but better choices, and ease of access, especially for comfort viewing.

So last month, after several aborted attempts to make our streaming accounts acknowledge our marital bond, my husband retrieved a decade-old DVD player from a bin of dusty tech in our basement. He brought it upstairs and plugged it in. (Plugged it in!) It was simple to connect, or it must have been, because my husband didn’t send me any expletive-filled texts.

I like that our DVD player is neither smart nor intelligent. You put in the disc, and the movie appears. Instead of searching for Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” — and finding it on Prime, only to learn that I have to pay to rent it, and even that would require reinstating my lapsed Prime account, which would require reckoning with my many feelings about Amazon — I can put on the Criterion Collection DVD of “Rushmore” I acquired two decades ago and spend my mental energy on Bill Murray rather than Jeff Bezos.

While I’ve long since shed my collection of music albums on cassette and movies on VHS tape, I still have tons of music on compact discs and movies on DVD and Blu-ray discs. With the exception of a handful of holiday movies, though, I essentially never actually use them.

I share some of Jones’ frustrations with login challenges, the re-emergence of unskippable advertising, and having to figure out which of the multiple services to which I subscribe the show I want to watch is on. Searching for sporting events on my downstairs YouTubeTV setup is especially annoying. (I usually just resort to finding it on my iPhone app and casting it.)

But let’s not pretend everything was rosy in the days of physical media. For one thing, as I’ve already alluded to, formats changed with some frequency, essentially rendering one’s investments obsolete. Good luck finding a car with a CD—much less a cassette or 8-track—player. And neither DVDs nor Blu-rays work quite the way Jones describes. Most of the discs I own make it hard to simply watch the film. Some have an unskippable animation screen. Most have unskippable ads promoting films that were in theaters or other discs that were available when the disc was first released. Which is even more frustrating when the disc is years—if not decades!—old.

And it’s not like discs just magically showed up inside the player. One had to either 1) go to the store or online to buy them, 2) go to a rental outlet to rent them (and back again to return them, having kindly rewound them), or, toward the end of that era, 3) subscribe to Netflix or a similar service. None of those methods was free or without inconvenience.

Honestly, the main benefit of owning physical media is permanence. You don’t have to worry that the company whose digital movies you’ve paid for will go out of business, cancel your account, or lose rights to the content. Or that the flick will be bowdlerized or otherwise altered.

But having essentially unlimited content steamed into our living rooms for a few bucks a month ain’t half bad.