Captain Video in San Mateo is one of the last video stores of its kind. That is largely because owner Ira Belfer simply won’t give up.
Belfer opened the store in March 1985, first renting movies on VHS and Betamax, adding DVDs and Blu-rays as Hollywood changed.
“So here we are, 2026. I’m the last guy left, and hard to believe, but I’m selling VHS like it’s 1985, which makes no sense to me at all,” Belfer said “But younger people are getting into VHS for some bizarre reason.”
The popularity of physical media like CDs and DVDs has been on the decline; in 2024, sales dipped below $1 billion for the industry, according to a 2025 Digital Entertainment Group report. But the rate of decline is slowing. In 2025, sales fell 9% compared to more than 20% in both 2023 and 2024, according to the Los Angeles-based trade association.
Apart from nostalgic value, such forms of media seem to be scratching an itch that streaming services cannot. Last year marked the lowest rate of new signups for streaming services at 7%, down from 12% the year before, according to Fortune. Experts point to subscription fatigue, particularly among younger customers.
A 2026 survey published by CivicScience, a consumer analysis company, found that 37% of Generation Z subscribers canceled one or more streaming services and another 29% said they planned to cancel soon. Eighty-seven percent of Gen Z respondents said they felt fatigue with subscription services.
For two local stores, this dissatisfaction has translated into something of a revival of physical media. Belfer said people miss actually owning the media they are consuming, a feature streaming services don’t actually provide.
“I have so many people complaining about streaming. They think it’s a ripoff,” Belfer said. “They take things off without telling you. You only rent it. You don’t really own any product. If you move, you lose everything and they edit all the movies. … People are getting fed up with that kind of stuff.”
Belfer has felt this pushback against streaming. Some of his customers come from as far as Sacramento just to buy VHS tapes.
“The biggest thing I get asked is, ‘Do you have any VHS horror movies?’ And those are so hard to come by because even though people bring in all the VHS, they’re mostly older people that are bringing VHS, and they never got into horror,” Belfer said, noting he sometimes has the same content on newer forms of media. “When I do get that stuff in, I can get $20 (to) $50 for VHS tape. … It’s a collecting mentality.”
For Athena Saxon, the daughter of Record Man founder Gary Saxon, young people’s interest in records and CDs is nothing new, but greater accessibility to it in recent years has certainly helped. The store is home to about 1 million pieces in its music collection, one of the biggest on the West Coast, according to Saxon.
“There have always been young people that have been interested in physical media, in records, in collecting, in CDs, in DVDs, in VHS and cassettes,” Saxon said. “In late ’90s, early 2000s, if they weren’t a big music person, they weren’t really jumping to go for that kind of stuff, especially if they were looking for new (music). … Now, you get a lot of people that come in, and a lot of young people, and they don’t know anything, and I enjoy that.”
Saxon said collectors can be pretentious, hoarding things like records and CDs, which makes people who are just now getting into it feel discouraged. The fact that new artist releases can still come in such forms has helped empower more young people to dip their toes into collecting, Saxon said.
She noted that now artists will digitally record and then put their music on analog media, a departure from the original recording process that has faced some backlash from purists. Still, she thinks anything making music more accessible is important.
Adapting to the ever-changing music industry has not only helped the Record Man continue reaching customers, but also draw in the younger crowd, according to Saxon.
“We started as a record store, and then, when the CD boom was really happening before I was born, the CDs became a very big part of the business, and the entire front store was all just CDs,” Saxon said. “We had like four CD players, listening stations, so people could just pull up, sit there and listen to the CDs before they buy them. And then CDs kind of (started to) stop being as popular, … and then eBay then Amazon came around, and that was scary for a lot of people and a lot of businesses.”
While the change was daunting, Athena’s mother was quick to embrace it. Making the decision to start selling on such platforms was vital for the store. “Because of my mom’s flexibility and drive to stay with how the world is evolving,” Saxon said. “We were able to survive when a lot of other stores were not able to survive.”
For Dana Neitzel, curator for the San Mateo County Historical Association, the importance of such physical artifacts encourages further exploration of any given topic or industry.
“When you actually see it, when you’re next to it, you get a better sense of what it was, how primitive it was, or how far into the future it was for its time,” Neitzel said. “When (people) look at a real object, it piques their curiosity, and then they’ll read the label, and then they’ll learn more, and then hopefully they have more questions.”
Saxon said these physical objects helped safeguard the past and form a deeper connection with the listener than any streaming service can.
“We need to keep it because it’s important, it’s history. We learn a lot. We can’t forget. If you forget the past, you’re doomed to repeat it,” Saxon said. “When you get to hold things in your hand, it feels more real than it does online. … I listen to Spotify every single day, but I jump from song to song to song to song. When you’re listening to a record, you don’t have that. You have to listen to the entire song. You need to learn so much about that artist in that moment of their life.”
