‘like A Dvd In The Present Tense’: Are We Ready For Film Distribution Via Usb Drives?

As big tech continues to dominate the film industry, Video StoreAge is a uniquely crafted company that works with film-makers to sell independent films on USB drives

The streaming-skeptical cinephile faces a dilemma in 2026, especially when it comes to watching movies at home. Increasingly, movies are available via rentals that funnel money to mega-corporations including Amazon or Apple; digital “purchases” from those same companies that can actually be revoked at any moment; or, most enticingly but still somewhat inconveniently, well-curated physical media special editions that treat films with the respect they deserve (sometimes even respect they don’t, depending on the title) while taking up a lot of shelf space and hitting your wallet hard. Plus, as vinyl aficionados know, bespoke physical media can also be severely limited in terms of where you can actually play it. Basically, almost everyone in the home-video space is trying to either be 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 movies sold on USB drives – as “like a DVD in the present tense. It’s a way to have a physical copy of a movie, but in this case you can play it on your computer. It has digital utility.” Like almost anything else these days, Video StoreAge is available as a subscription, with quarterly collections of five features and five shorts. The first drop includes Vera Drew’s buzzed-about The People’s Joker, a homemade superhero comedy that reappropriates many elements of the Batman mythos into a trans coming-out story. (Honestly, it’s more fun than those Joaquin Phoenix movies and might understand the Joker character better, too.) But they also sell single films, including Drew’s, or any combinations of available films as a sort of digital indie-movie mix tape on those format-flexible USB drives. (The quarter’s shorts package is included with every movie regardless, an automatic special feature.)