“Like a DVD in the present tense”: Are we ready to distribute movies via USB drives? | film

TThe movie lover skeptical of streaming faces a dilemma in 2026, especially when it comes to watching movies at home. Increasingly, movies are becoming available via rentals that funnel money to major companies including Amazon or Apple; digital “purchases” from those same companies that can be canceled virtually at any moment; Or, more tempting but still somewhat inconvenient, well-curated physical media special editions that treat films with the respect they deserve (sometimes even the respect they don’t deserve, depending on the title) while taking up a lot of shelf space and hitting your wallet hard. Additionally, as vinyl fans know, dedicated physical media can also be very limited in terms of where you can actually play it. Basically, almost everyone in the home video space is trying to be either Amazon or the Criterion Collection.

Ash Cook, the former Sundance programmer who founded the new distributor Video StoreAge (pronounced like “storage”), is trying to figure out a third way. He described Video StoreAge’s products — indie films sold on USB drives — as “like DVDs in the present tense. It’s a way to get a physical copy of the movie, but in this case you can play it on your computer. It has a digital benefit.” Like almost everything else these days, Video StoreAge is available as a subscription, with quarterly collections of five features and five shorts. The first release includes Vera Drew’s blockbuster The People’s Joker, a homemade superhero comedy that repurposes many elements of the Batman mythos into a transgender story. (Honestly, they’re more fun than the Joaquin Phoenix movies and you might get a better understanding of the Joker, too.) But they also sell individual movies, including Drew’s, or any collections of movies available as a sort of digital indie movie mixtape on formatted USB floppy drives. (The quarter’s short film package is included with every film regardless, and is an automatic special feature.)

Whatever the collection, customers will have that paper-but-digital version forever, rather than being subject to the whims of a digital library that companies reserve the right to change as needed — unless you actually copy the correct format of the file onto your hard drive, which is often easier said than done. On the artist side, Video StoreAge only obtains the printing rights to the titles in question, leaving filmmakers with other options for distribution if the opportunity arises, and it also splits the profits 50/50 with the artists. Cook sees purchasing a copy of Video StoreAge as a way to “pay someone directly and put Amazon out of our business.”

Cook found his way into distribution through his experience at festivals, which he found in turn through a young love of independent filmmakers including Greg Araki and Jennifer Reeder. “I knew my favorite movies all got laurels,” he said with a laugh, referring to the laurel drawings that appear in movie trailers to show that a film has screened at Sundance or Cannes or elsewhere. As a student at Vassar College, he was able to secure a gig over winter break doing “field work” by volunteering at Sundance, using his experience booking concerts on campus to work in festival operations. Getting to know the ins and outs of the festival pushed it to the programming side.

“As a programmer, you are there with the filmmakers at this nascent moment in the life cycle of their films,” he said. “A big part of the job is relationship management. You’re talking to filmmakers, acquisitions executives, sales agents, everyone.” And through Cook’s experience, they all agreed on one thing: distribution no longer worked the way it used to, when Sundance was fueled by big-money sales and splashy advertising campaigns. “There’s a consensus about this,” Cook said. “And I’m starting to feel like, well, we can all agree on this forever. But what’s the one thing we’re going to do?” He realized that the festival wasn’t necessarily in a position to help solve this problem. “A lot of people might ask us as festival representatives, what do we do about this? And that’s not the job of the exhibitor or the festival programmer. In fact, it’s very important that [commercial distribution is] “It’s not their main concern.”

This form of distribution attempts to split the difference between digital convenience and a sense of organization that has inspired what Cook describes as the current renaissance of physical media. “Everyone feels the flow swell,” he said. “We’re like kids in a candy store, and now we’ve got cavities. The audience there says, ‘This doesn’t look very good; I want something that seems more intentional, more human again. The hardest assets are all there: hungry audiences, great movies. And the problem is they can’t reach each other?!’

To facilitate the meeting of film and audience, Video StoreAge has partnered with Slamdance, a long-running Sundance alternative, making two of this festival’s titles, Danny Is My Boyfriend and The Bulldogs, available as limited edition copies during the festival, ahead of the upcoming post-festival release. Viewers can own a copy incredibly quickly — there are rarely any films available for purchase right after a major film festival ends — while still needing to put in some more intentional effort than the usual scroll through Netflix.

Cook is betting that this is the right moment for a new form of physical media distribution. “Every person alive now, and probably now, has some connection or recent memory of the role of physical media in our lives,” Cook said. He goes on to cite HitClips, an early primitive technology that embeds a one-minute clip of a hit pop song on a tiny, self-powered device — and, of course, VHS. “We had five or six tapes that we watched over and over again, like The Land Before Time. The way we interacted with those tapes, they were like our friends!”

Whatever the old form, “We all have some experience of how scarcity and friction heighten our attention, and our focus on a piece of material, and that’s really fun,” Cook said. Video StoreAge attempts to do this using technology that shouldn’t be completely discarded like HitClips or even DVDs that linger. It may not be enough for you to cancel your Netflix subscription, as Cook did, but it may make watching a movie at home more like a trip to the movies.

• Video StoreAge is currently online and holding several launches on March 18, 19 and 21 in Los Angeles