How long do you think until DVDs are gone?

[Oly J]

Hi all, just alone with my thoughts right now, and as often happens in those moments I get to thinking about things that seem weird to me, namely in this case the fact that DVDs are still produced with the frequency that they are.

I was born in 1991, as such I experienced a rapid growth in technology from the moment I was old enough to know what was happening. VHS? who remembers? videotapes were great weren't they? they were like big chunky durable cassette tapes that had pictures too, (who else had a cassette walkman by the way?) it was around 2000-2001 that this "DVD" thing came along, by then CDs had pretty much killed Cassette tapes as I understood and everything was disks now.

Me being the luddite that I am, I kept my videos, with my little TV with the video slot under the screen, they were still awesome, eventually though you couldn't even get things on video anymore, (I still have a VHS copy of "A New Hope" which just says "Star Wars" on the tape)

I think the last VHS tape I got was LOTR Return of the King, around 2003, though they may have been around for a bit longer



Blu Ray was introduced about 10 years ago, now, I'm a bit less of a luddite about DVDs, Blu Rays are clearly better, they look better, the disks are more difficult to scratch (when you come from a large family that never stops being a concern no matter how many years it's been since any disk stopped working) and you very often don't need a separate disk for the special features I never bother with, yet a good decade after the introduction of Blu Ray, DVDs are still around.


I think a large part of the reason for this is that the technological leap this time around is much smaller.

thinking back to the transition from VHS to DVD, the leap was huge, I remember the first DVD my family got was Gladiator. (I wasn't a fan of live-action at the time, if it wasn't animated I didn't want to know unless it was something I already knew I liked...I was a strange kid) but I watched it, and when it finished I remember wondering, "how long does it take to rewind a DVD?" (I was 10) then my older brother hit the menu button and my question was answered, "you don't need to" and I was like "WHAAT!?"

so yeah with DVDs rewinding was a thing of the past, you could skip to whatever scene you wanted, and there were all those extra features that you wouldn't get on a video.

in comparison the leap between DVDs and Blu Rays seems, sort of smaller really, the picture is better, other than that they're functionally the same, (although why the crap does the blu ray version of the LOTR extended trilogy still need 2 disks per movie? I refuse to accept that as a necessity)

so I do kind of understand why DVDs are still around, but I always go for Blu Ray when possible and I imagine others do to, but I suppose resolution just isn't as sought after by some others.

anyway, the point of the thread, how long do you give DVDs? do you think they'll even go out, or will there always be that slightly cheaper option until we go full-digital? (I am dreading that day let me tell you)

 

[Aerith]

Most people will always go for the more cheaper option, when given the chance. Especially in today's economy. [Ech, adult speak] I highly DVD's are gonna go out any time soon. Especially considering many, many people have created a vast library of DVD's. *glances at DVD cabinet*

 

[Niflhel]

I think DVDs will stick around for a long time, because the only real benefit of Blu Ray (okay, extra content can be fitted on one disc - Who would pay a small-but-not-that-small amount of extra cash for that feature alone?) is the fact that it delivers HD video - A feature that require a significant extra amount of cash to take advantage of for a lot of people, namely a HD TV, not to mention the Blu Ray player itself.
When the DVD replaced the VHS, people needed to make a comparable smaller investment to take advantage of it.
A company who discontinue producing DVDs will sell significantly less products, and it's therefor an unsound business strategy with fairly few benefits, such as... Uh... Can't see any, assuming they already got the nececary machines to produce the DVDs.

 

[mad825]

Considering that Blu-ray are loaded with draconian DRM, we may even see the death of Blu-ray before the end of DVDs.

Hell, the typical PC user cannot play Blu-ray without specialised software that costs money. VLC isn't up to the trick atm.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Not untill The Abyss finally gets a blu-ray release. Seriously, what the fuck is keeping them!?

 

[Bizzaro Stormy]

DVD will die the moment I figure it will stick around for a while. The world just works that way.

 

[Armadox]

I'd think DVDs will die when the first generation ones start scrambling. That's usually the only thing that makes people change to new tech is when their old tech either fades or breaks or is no longer preferred..

I tend to be about 3 generations away from where tech is now. I just bought my first flat screen last year.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Wait, DVDs are still a thing? I thought BlueRays supplanted them years ago, and BlueRays themselves are dying out in favor of HD streaming...

 

[FalloutJack]

The rule of retro says it will never actually disappear. It will follow the path of the old and cherished and receive a cult following that is essentially forever.

 

[Fox12]

Most people will always go for the more cheaper option, when given the chance. Especially in today's economy. [Ech, adult speak] I highly DVD's are gonna go out any time soon. Especially considering many, many people have created a vast library of DVD's. *glances at DVD cabinet*

I thought that HD-DVD got bought out by the blu-ray blokes. Isn't that why the DVD's and blu-rays are packaged together now? I thought the companies were trying to gradually phase DVD's out of existence.

All I care about is getting the original Eva dub, to be honest. If Funimation recasts Haworu with Johny Yong Bosch or whoever for the blu-ray release, then I may have to go on a shooting spree. Seriously, some of my DVD's are hard to procure. I don't care to track them down again.

 

[Marik2]

When Blu ray players are $10

 

[Ratty]

VHS tapes beat the superior Betamax format in the early 1980s for 2 reasons- it was the first to have blank tapes that were long enough to record an entire TV show/movie (which did not crash the movie industry, contrary to what their lobbyists claimed at the time when trying to ban home recorders) and VHS got the backing of the porn industry.

VHS reigned for about 20 years after that, then DVD beat it with obviously superior picture and sound. But it was less than 10 years later, while people were still getting used to DVD, that HD DVD and Blu-Ray started duking it out to see what would come next. Thanks to Wal Mart picking Blu-Ray they won that fight, but most consumers were having none of it. The prices on blu-ray players have never seen the kind of drops DVD players have, particularly when you consider all the updates blu-ray players need. If you don't keep it updated (if you CAN update it) your player might not run new discs, who wants to deal with that?

And how many times do you really need to rebuy the same movie in a 20 year span? Now that streaming is becoming the norm the answer to that question is "0" for an increasing number of people. If blu-ray really does supplant DVDs it will be because the only people buying physical media will be a relatively small group of collectors, and prices of blu-ray players and discs will have dropped to the levels DVDs are at now. Personally I think physical media is only viable on a mass scale now because internet infrastructure in the US and some other places in the world is so terrible as to make DVDs a reasonable alternative for people who's internet just isn't fast enough for reliable streaming.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

I think it will be around for much longer than VHS had for its rule. Bluray doesn't have the adoption rates and isn't as big of a leap as VHS to DVD was (or even laserdisc to DVD). DVDs are cheap to make. The players are cheap and, unlike bluray, should work on all discs with the matching region code without firmware updates.

Even after DVD is done, I think physical media will still have a large enough audience to be a large market and a viable way to sell movies. Bluray will probably last for about 20 years, and possibly another format (stupid prediction: the holodisc!) that holds a terabyte or more will come out around then. After that format gets to where bluray is now, the generations that only trust physical media will probably be too old to care and that future format will just be used for backups and cheap way to send files to recipients without buying thumb drives or rely on the internet.

 

[Zontar]

Wait, DVDs are still a thing? I thought BlueRays supplanted them years ago, and BlueRays themselves are dying out in favor of HD streaming...

HD streaming is a long ways off as a mainstream means of watching entertainment, with a decade being an optimistic estimate for it going mainstream. Most people still buy disks for a multitude of reasons (not the least of which being that they can actually watch it when they want, something streaming is having a LOT of trouble accomplishing).

OT: Quite some time. DVDs have an advantage that VHS didn't: it doesn't degrade over time and use, at least not in a precipitable way. Unless it's scratched or otherwise been damaged, a DVD from the first line made twenty years ago will still run just as well now as it would when it was made, even if its been used a thousand times.

There's also the fact that it's downright cheap, with movies being as cheap as 2$ in a lot of places, compared to the 5$ those same titles will cost on Blu-Ray. When it comes to old movies, most people just don't care for the slight, pretty much impossible to see difference a DVD of a pre-HD movie and a Blu-Ray of that same pre-HD movie. The cheapness of them also goes so far as to have DVD/Blu-Ray combo packs be common today.

When I think DVD will end as an era will be when manufacturers simply stop making them, which will be not when Blu-Ray players are completely ubiquitous in the first world, but when they are in the the whole world. Much of the market for these films is developing and third world nations, almost none of which have the same level of Blu-Ray playing systems available to them. This market is one which is too large for them to ignore, and if they're making them for these markets making more for the first world only reduces the cost of production.

I'm thinking 10 more years of DVDs being normal and being gradually phased out, then another decade of it being around after that. I don't think Blu-Ray will be removed as easily though, as unlike DVDs they where created with self-perpetuating upgrades being part of the design, meaning they can be continually upgraded over time as technology advances in a way that DVDs could not (Blu-Ray is basically just an upgraded DVD after all). I also don't think that streaming will kill physical copies. Ever. This is for two reasons: first is that even in the countries with the best internet infrastructure, we are decades away from them running on a level that people would not have regular issues happening, and when you want something now, you want it now. A physical copy will always be there, a digital one will not, either for legal reasons or technical ones. The second is that a LOT of people want physical copies. Say what you will about it, but the whole reason the western anime market even exists is because enough people want to own a copy of the series they like for the market to be sustainable. The continued existence of consoles and music disks shows this isn't limited to anime, but is across all entertainment. We don't just want the entertainment in question, we want to be able to hold it in our hands.

 

[Zontar]

I think it will be around for much longer than VHS had for its rule. Bluray doesn't have the adoption rates and isn't as big of a leap as VHS to DVD was (or even laserdisc to DVD). DVDs are cheap to make. The players are cheap and, unlike bluray, should work on all discs with the matching region code without firmware updates.

Even after DVD is done, I think physical media will still have a large enough audience to be a large market and a viable way to sell movies. Bluray will probably last for about 20 years, and possibly another format (stupid prediction: the holodisc!) that holds a terabyte or more will come out around then. After that format gets to where bluray is now, the generations that only trust physical media will probably be too old to care and that future format will just be used for backups and cheap way to send files to recipients without buying thumb drives or rely on the internet.

I don't know, I know a lot of people who have a "physical copy" mindset are pretty young (20somethings) so I don't think the physical copy market is going anywhere any-time soon. I know the internet infrastructure of the world isn't going to improve enough over the next two years for all streaming to be viable either. It may not have the same level of market dominance it does or did, but I think physical will be around for at least another 40 years, even if Blu-Ray is replaced by another upgrade that brings up a few inches closer to the maximum resolution the human eye can perceive (though I think current Blu-Ray hardware may be already capable of doing that, which, if that is the case, makes software the only real issue).

 

[DeaDRabbiT]

It'z ah lazahdisk. There's a movie on dere.

I like the aesthetics of physical. That being said I'm diligently digitizing the whole library as I find that whole HTPC thing much more convenient.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

I don't know, I know a lot of people who have a "physical copy" mindset are pretty young (20somethings) so I don't think the physical copy market is going anywhere any-time soon. I know the internet infrastructure of the world isn't going to improve enough over the next two years for all streaming to be viable either. It may not have the same level of market dominance it does or did, but I think physical will be around for at least another 40 years, even if Blu-Ray is replaced by another upgrade that brings up a few inches closer to the maximum resolution the human eye can perceive (though I think current Blu-Ray hardware may be already capable of doing that, which, if that is the case, makes software the only real issue).

Maybe you're right. I'll add another format generation to my predictions. I myself have said that the condition of the internet in many areas of the world can't reliably do game streaming or HD video, especially if more people turn to streaming without ISPs improving their networks. Maybe the recent FCC ruling has made my outlook foolishly more optimistic than usual.

(I think the standard dual layer bluray holds 50GB. The average size of a 4K movie (according to our friends at Google) is also 50GB. So the rare tripple layer Blurays or swapping discs in the middle of a movie (Hey, it's like laserdisc!) would be necessary for them. I don't even know if many players work with triple or quad layer discs. Now, that I've looked at that, I would bet HD and bluray will also be around longer than I originally thought. Most people won't care about 4K, like how DVD is still beating Bluray and HD today.)

 

[Weresquirrel]

I'd hope that physical media sticks around for a while. Honestly, if given the choice between a digital copy and a physical one, and the price isn't vastly different, I'll pick the physical one. Technology has a habit of buggering up too often, and if I were to wake up one morning and find all my movies gone because of a computer hiccough, I'd be pretty upset.

Besides, I'm one of the mutants who actually likes the director/cast commentary on movies/series, and you don't really get that from streaming/downloads.

 

[CrystalShadow]

I think part of what keeps it around, aside from some people simply not caring about blu-rays is surpringly, backwards compatibility.

DVD drives play CD-ROM's (and audio CD's), and similarly, a blu-ray drive plays all the previous optical formats too. (DVD, CD).

This helps keep DVD's alive, because it means that the technology to play them won't just vanish.

There wasn't much around before VHS (ignoring the betamax format war thing), and what there was certainly couldn't be played without specialist equipment.

Meanwhile, it took a few years, but when DVD's appeared, they quickly killed off not just VHS tapes, but in fact, equipment capable of playing VHS tapes.

A format only really truly dies out once the equipment that can read from that format becomes hard to get.
Once you reach that point, only people that are slow to adapt to new technology will keep buying it.

DVD's will only disappear in one of two ways
1. A new technology comes along which is clearly superior in every way.
2. A new technology which isn't backwards compatible appears, and takes hold.

These two are kind of related, in that 2 also implies 1, (because if the new technology wasn't better somehow, nobody would bother).

Bluray was also held back by the lack of HDTV's...

DVD is much better quality than VHS, but it is still within the bounds of SDTV quality. - The same basic level of visual quality that TV's had for going on 50 or more years.
blu-ray is a completely pointless upgrade unless you also have a new TV, so... it wasn't exactly going to stand any chance of taking over until High definition television became more common, and well, that took a very long time.
And by that time, the very concept of distributing video using an optical disk medium has started to look a little less useful. Not gone yet, but certainly on it's way out...

 

[JayRPG]

It seems crazy but there are people over here (in Australia) that still don't even know what a Bluray is.

At JB HiFi (big electronics store) our bluray section is now twice the size of the DVD section, which has gradually happened over the last few years, but people will come in and ask for X on DVD, whoever is helping them says "We have it on Bluray, no DVD stock at the moment" and then the customer just stares blankly and says "..blu... ray?" or "what is a bluray" like.. wtf.

Bluray has been around for ten goddamn years how could you have not heard of it? What are these people doing... every other advertisement is about a movie coming to retail and usually ends with "available on bluray and DVD".

I wish DVD would die already, they are shit, I don't even know anybody who doesn't have at least a 720p TV nowadays, hell, even my 70 year old nan has a full HD LCD TV.. they aren't exactly expensive: a full HD 32" JB hifi's own brand TV is only $199AUD/$155USD, sure it's not going to give you additional features or the greatest power rating or the best motion for watching sports.. but it's going to be a hell of a lot better than that 18" tube TV that weighs 4 tons and takes up the same amount of space as a mini van.

Bluray players aren't even expensive either, you can routinely find them for under $70 here, not to mention the amount of people that already own PS3/PS4/Xbone consoles.

And blurays themselves are now no different in price (at JB hifi at least), or if there is a difference, it is at most $2.

Also, it's not as if you have to throw away all of your DVDs the second you get a bluray player... Bluray players play DVDs, a HD TV will still display DVDs.

There are so many advantages to them I just can't understand why anyone continues to buy DVDs. The scratch resistance shouldn't be disregarded; we have to defect (send them off to the refurb centre to be resurfaced) close to 80% of the Xbox 360 games we receive as trades because of their scratches, Less than 10% of the PS3, PS4, and Xbone games we receive get the same defect treatment.

Better quality, not having to have 42 disc collections for a single movie and it's special features, 3D (if you are interested in that kind of thing).. and I'm going to say better quality again because I cannot now stand to watch anything at DVD quality - it looks like a blurry mess.