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DVD Player Ownership Surpasses VCR Ownership
An anonymous reader wrote to mention an Ars Technica post stating that, for the first time, more U.S. consumers own a DVD player than own a VCR. The DVD player dropped below $100 quite some time ago, but the third quarter of this year saw the percentage of DVD player ownership reach 81.2. Only 79.2% of consumers now own VCR players, reports Nielsen. From the article: "For all of the talk about the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray, both technologies are far, far away from most family rooms. Yes, the two are just now beginning what could be a long battle for entertainment-center supremacy, but keep in mind that the technology that they are vying to replace has only recently gained the upper hand against the previous-generation technology--a decade after first being introduced. Even if Blu-ray or HD DVD unexpectedly routs its opponent from the market in the next two or three years, it will still be several more years before the victorious format supplants the DVD."
Does this count dual-players, such as a DVD-VCR combos? That's all I really use, anyways.
I'm sure if they were to count that, it wouldn't be important, as it would just even off things, but a large percentage of households actually uses both I would suspect.
"To be is to do." -Socrates
"To do is to be." -Jean-Paul Sartre
"Do-be-do-be-do." -Frank Sinatra
Since VHS is out. They win by default.
Seriously, BluRay and HD won't be common place until 2012 at this rate.
By then, we'll have iPod like devices that could hold more video than a Station wagon full of BlueRay discs.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
...their VCR has died recently, and they haven't bothered to replace it!
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
Wasn't it just a couple months ago that everybody was worried that the DVD format "wouldn't be very popular"....?
I'm still perplexed that there's not been faster and more widespread adoption of DVRs. As a technologist, I tend to be friends with the kinds of people who have DVRs, but I still have a hard time impressing on "regular people" how damn wonderful they are.
I got my wife a ReplayTV 3 years ago, and its been the greatest technical thing in my everyday life (other than internet access -- *maybe*) When the disk croaked a few weeks ago, we were at wits end until we got it back online. (Reimaging it on a bigger disk gave us 3x the capacity, so it turned into a net positive in the end.)
I continually explain that having a good DVR is like having refridgeration -- once you've had it, you don't see how anyone made it this far without it. To that end, my wife and I find it diffucult to watch tv away from home. ("Crap, we can't pause|jump back|jump ahead....ARrrrggghhhh")
-- Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
But then.. who can blame them?
Anyone want to take a ballpark guess what kind of ROI they land if every movie studio had to license Blu-Ray on every movie they released to disc?
I'm guessing (purely from the posterior region) it'd land in the Billions over the life of the product.
-GiH
...magnetic tapes suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
it will still be several more years before the victorious format supplants the DVD.
I will "upgrade" to the best HD format only when it counts as an actual upgrade - Meaning I can play it, in full resolution, on a Linux box.
Note that I don't include the word "legally" in that condition... A broken-feature-reenabling ripper (like DVD Decrypter used to do for region coding, macrovision, and button lockout) will work just as well as an authorized player.
So, which group will give me what I want first? Sony, Toshiba, or DVD-Jon? The winner takes all.
Can any slashdotter convince me that if I had properly stored important video media on a disc in say 20 years ago, this disc would still be readable now? With proper storage, the video cartridge would still be readable now after that long. This is my beef with DVDs.
DVDs beat the pants off of VCRs in the following areas:
Image quality.
Random access.
Extra features on-media.
VCRs still cling to live mainly because it doesn't cost anything to not throw them away, and because of recording.
Let me know when the number of PVRs outnumbers the number of VCRs. That's when the transition will truly be complete.
Of couse p2p Video on Demand services (as represented by YouTube and BitTorrent piracy networks) probably blows both away in the middle to long run.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I dont think the old metric will make much sense with these new HD players. When released they'll probably be able to play both HD (bluray, hddvd, whahever) and standard DVDs. There will be no reason to keep a stand-alone DVD player. They'll just end up as hand me downs to the kids or collect dust.
After a while the HD players will be cheap enough that it will be smart futureproofing to buy a HD player without a HDtv, in the hopes that your next tv will be HD. Hell, there's no shortage of component out dvd players plugged in with composite cables or through RF converter boxes.
Its the pressed media price and everything else. Thats what finally got me. I found VHS/DVD combos just under $100 and my Best Buy offered almost anything I wanted in my library for $10 (simply watching weekly specials) and around $20 for special things or multi-part stuff. I finally said why not. With blank media prices around a quarter or less and burner prices under $50, I finally made the leap. A perfect DVD storm had approached and it only happened to me last spring. And normally I am not a luddite, my computer and gizmos stay leading edge, but DVD needed to put the whole package together.
Now blu-ray and HD-DVD have a lot of work to do. The pressed media prices seem 5x higher than DVD. The players 10x higher. The burners 10x higher. The media I have no idea. The massive back catalogs may takes years to build. And the copy protection will have to be broken. I bet this all takes more than the 10 years it took for DVD.
And the displays that are the platform for all this hi-def are still not ready for prime time. These impress the street, but us computer users have been running CRTs with these display capabilities for decades and in some ways 720p on an LCD is a step back.
DVD isn't a replacement for a VCR, since it can't record and only relatively recently has it become possible for the average Joe to put his own videos (from a camcorder) onto DVDs that play in a normal player.
If you're talking about burned disks, then maybe not. But the pressed ones? Yeah, no problem. Do you have any CDs that are over 20 years old? They play fine and DVD is extremely similar. There's been some isolated mentions of "DVD rot" but I'm not buying into that. I have disks that are ~8 years old and they work fine; I have no reason to believe that they won't last another 12.
Tapes are actually worse, IMHO -- get a magnet too close to a tape and you can demagnetize it. Just don't scratch your DVD and it'll be fine.
Jeez, give it a rest. I have money, but do you honestly think I'm going to subscribe to another new format for at least 10 years? We aren't all tech-writers. I might just skip this technology fasion trend and go for the one in one or two generations, just like I will with consoles. And even then I'll be content with my DVD library. Just like I am with CD-audio quality and good speakers. And I'm speaking as a tech nerd as well. Uprgrading would simply be burning money, which I don't feel, whether I had the money or not, would be a good idea.
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
I thought this had already happened a while ago. I remember walking through WalMart they other day and seeing a DVD player for around $70 and thinking of how affordable they have gotten. They technology is more reliable, I'd even say that for VCRs made recently. I still can't believe my PS2 still plays DVDs after 4 years. And it's been shipped halfway around the world, been left on for days, manhandled by my children, etc. I guess while "they don't make them like they used to" is true for cars, it doesn't apply to high-tech items.
There are many tongues to talk, and but few heads to think. -Victor Hugo
As there are combo DVD and VCR's as well as TV, DVD, and VCR Combos.
these stats do not include the half dozen dead cheap dvd players I have sitting in the garage.
I don't care if it is a brand name of not, the cheap crap or the expensive dvd recorder/tuner, they all lasted just a few days longer than the warranty.
I use the computer to play dvds. At least the internal drives are cheap enough to replace when they die.
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
I'm going to assume they're not counting computers or laptops (heck even throw in those portable DVD players) since those alone should outnumber VCR's. Given that more people are watching DVD's through different technologies I question if the standalone DVD player is a useful metric.
The usage of said VCR. My parents are one of those that own a VCR, but it does not get any usage. They were just talking about that this last weekend that they would probably get rid of it by donating it to Good Will or something like that because it has more usefulness as a tax write off that playing a video.
So, this study begs the question, of those that do own the VCR, how many actually still use it? I would dare say that it would be pretty scant because of the ubiquitousness and superiority of the DVD.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Which is exactly why I'm going to be waiting "several more years" before I bother getting a "next-gen" DVD player.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
The percentage would probably be even less if you discounted those who have VCRs on their equipment shelf just because they're too lazy to remove them.
I have one on my rack, and the only reason I've put a tape in it for the last couple of years was to convert some VHS tapes to DVD for a friend. If there are still tapes around the house, they're in a box in the basement just waiting to be thrown out.
The last possible reason for using it went away when I put the DVR box in place. I'm happy not to be screwing around with worrying about bad quality tapes anymore.
Once I got all the episodes of MST3K downloaded and onto DVD, why would I need my VCR anymore?
Well they did misplace/loose the masters of the moon landings.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
...the DVD player was no substitute for a VCR, but the DVR they bought is. Just because you don't use the recording capability doesn't mean that others do. Personally, I don't watch much broadcast TV because it comes way too late. Did it air in the US/UK yesterday? Do the people I know online talk about it? Yes. Do I want to be left out "Yeah I'll comment on that in a year... maybe"? No. That means I'm going to get it, your only choice is how. Movie theaters have already figured this out, TV stations must be slow learners.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't recall hearing that they were loosed. And I suspect that if they were loosed, they would have been quite easy to capture. I mean, how far do tapes roam in search of food?
I was in Best Buy a couple of days ago and saw Microsoft's 360 HD-DVD player for $150. Anandtech had given it a favorable review and noted that the player could just as easily be hooked up to PC as an xbox. If you already have a hi def screen with an xbox it seems to be a slam dunk purchase. If you don't have the xbox but you have a sufficiently robust pc, you can either watch hi def on your computer monitor or, if your setup allows it, on your HD screen via your PC.
Lots of folks are hedging as to which format will win out but my impression is that if you can buy a player for $150 that gives you an image that's equivalent to a solution that costs 4 times as much and is unavailable, that gives a huge boost to HD-DVD. I say "equivalent" because the initial side by side reviews don't give either format an edge. Another factor is Netflix - you can rent either format from them so your exposure to risking committing to a dead end format is substantially reduced. When the first players came out at $1,000 not many people bit. Now that you can get one player at $150, it strikes me a lot more people will make the jump and it isn't going to be to Blu-Ray.
We own 2 VCRs that we haven't used (for the most part) in years since we have DVD players, a Tivo, Media Center pc, etc now. It isn't surprising that ownership of DVD players just passed that of VCRs, but I bet usership of DVD players surpassed that of VCRs a while back- a few years maybe I would guess...
it will still be several more years before the victorious format supplants the DVD.
If ever. This particular format war isn't being handled very well, it seems to me. Such conflicts are invariably bad for the consumer in the short run since we have to guess which tech will come out on top and whoever guesses wrong gets his fingers burnt. Why can't they all just get along? PICK ONE! I don't really care which at this point. Is it just that Sony is still smarting from the Betamax fiasco? If it turns out after all this hate and discontent that the consumer doesn't find a use for the next-generation of shiny plastic discs it'll be just too bad. Worse for them, sooner or later China is going to be able to foist their version of a next-gen SPD (Shiny Plastic Disc) on the world. They'd better just get with the program and give the consumer what he and she wants now. Period. Or they may find their own technologies irrelevant.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
My local superstore carries a very generic DVD player for $29.99 regular price and they have gone on sale for $19.99. That is absolutely nuts you can get a player at less then the cost of some DVDs.
Since we watch a ton of movies at home, it's nice to be able to pick up tapes for $1. I can purchase used DVDs for $5, but at a dollar a piece I'll get anything on VHS.
And VCRs don't require monthly subscription fees. Hence, why I haven't gotten a DVR. Sure, I can build my own, but that's too much work. I just want a hardware based device PVR, and not a computer based.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
And for the one millionth time Sony wasn't the ONLY ONE who developed and supported Blu-ray.
Have they counted DVD-ROM computer drives? (And, for that matter, PCs hooked up to plasma screens?) I guess no. Why I'd be getting a TV set just to play a movie? No thanks, the computer does this just fine, and with better image quality.
Just by looking around the media stores, I gather DVDs have trumped VHS years ago.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
I should probably get rid of my laser disk player?
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
Do you have an Internet in the minivan? Do you have an Internet on the airplane? If not, how can it replace the DVD player built into the back of the seat?
I wonder if that was a typical 'accounting' issue.
"Yeah, the stuff in this box is over 20 years old, let's store it"
It's like putting the original Mona Lisa in the basement in favor of something new.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
As far as i know, if you have a box of VHS tapes sitting next to a box of DVD discs in storage, and someone or something passes next to it with a large magnetic field, the DVDs won't be erased in the blink of an eye.
These copies fade in and out in time with the Macrovision signals as required by section 1201, right?
And note that this is all despite heavy DRM on nearly every commercial DVD disc and player ever made.
People who still think the populance won't stand for the next wave of DRM merely need to look at the stellar success of the previous wave to see that people just don't care. The frog is still on the hotplate it would seem.
And I'm sure the situation is getting worse. On some DVDs one is now forced to sit through un-skippable previews and sparkly animated corporate logos for up to a minute before the main feature. If I wanted crap like that I'd go to the cineplex.
Speaking of which, does anyone know of a decent DVD player (Linux boxen notwithstanding) that doesn't enforce stupid no-skip flags?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Wasn't this same article reported on Slashdot about a month ago?
I remember someone declared that "There are as many DVD players as there are VCR's?"
Doesn't it stand to reason that by the time people had read that, DVDs had *surpassed* VCRs, when one person bought a DVD?
Really guys- not a news story. Is there anyone NOT in a coma that knows VCRs are dying off?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
I still have a good library of VHS movies, many taken from HBO. Most of them date 5-20 years. Of course, I could buy them on DVD, but why bother if I can still play them? Also, the Fletch DVD is out of print, so I'm stuck with my VHS copy there. :o VHS won't be dead until all my tapes are. (I am considering getting some transfer equipment to burn them to DVD, as some of them are rare. I have Super Bowl XX on tape!)
In which country? And what solution do you propose for people who live in countries that prohibit making, distributing, or importing tools for ripping CSS-encoded DVDs?
All of the Blu-ray and HD-DVD hype is all very nice, but there are two points to consider. First off, DVD players were first released a decade ago. It's only been within the past few years that they've come down to a consumer-friendly price, many of the quality issues have been resolved (I cringe at how much my discs like to skip on the player I have), and they've finally surpassed VHS in ubiquity. At the same time, the industry is heavily pushing not one, but TWO new formats which, aside from the trendy (and I should say money-laden) technophiles, are being almost totally ignored. Even with the greed of marketing departments and yacht-sailing executives, it's going to be awhile before their new conspiracy pays off and we've jumped to yet another format, in a cycle that seems it'll never end. Secondly, if we are going to advance, and lord knows we are, why should we be stuck with a device that can store only 15 or 25 gigabytes per disc layer, when even nearly-5GB DVD-Rs are proving inadequate against the ballooning size of hard drives and the content we store on them? The old tape back-up drives are currently the only relatively common formats even close to keeping pace with real-world hard disk sizes. In my opinion, Blu-ray and HD-DVD should be overlooked entirely. At the same time as we're hearing the hype for 50GB Sony Blu-ray discs, Wikipedia lists no less than six new formats, the more competitive of which store anything from 300GB per disc (Tapestry Media), enough to cover the most common large hard drive sizes as it is; to 3.9 terabytes (Holographic Versatile Disc), which will take care of even the largest of geeks' drive set-ups for months to come; to finally the most promising, the protein-coated disc, which may very well give us up to 50 TB of biologically engineered storage. That's a lot of geek pr0n. ;)
On the whole, it seems that the "Next Big Thing" marketers, while certainly tall enough to see over the giant piles of money inherent in effective consumer manipulation, are too short-sighted to realize that if they try to commit us to these formats now, they'll miss out on the truly Bigger Things coming up... ...and will have to play catch-up in five years with this week's formats, at even greater cost.
Well. Maybe they do know what they're doing after all. :P
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.
I was an early adopter of the DVD, and I'm pleased with my choice. However, what I saw is that post-cutting-edge DVD players were just as good for an order of magnitude cheaper and that this post-edge phase was no more than a couple of years later.
Most importantly, I saw that no-name makers made decent quality DVD players for ultra-cheap, and that they recognized the commercial value of user-friendliness. I'm specifically talking about Apex, who makes players with fantastically-easy-to-break region coding. For that reason, and once I heard from a couple of reputable friends that their quality was good, I've been recommending them all over the place.
Now I'll wait for Apex to make HD players because:
- they'll be inexpensive
- the HD format thing will be resolved by then, presumeably
- they'll probably have some sort of hardware that's either implemented or implementable that defeats HD DRM systems as currently designed.
For that, I'm willing to wait a couple of years for marginally better picture quality.
-Styopa
Mine recently died, some plastic parts in the loading mechanism gave out, rendering it unable to load a tape. It was a good Mitsubishi unit, wasn't top of the line, but cost a few bucks 12 years ago. I am struggling with what to replace it with. I looked into DVRs, and am not entirely convinced I need one. I don't watch that much TV, and many of the shows I like are on expanded cable, and are re-run often. Every person I know with a DVR says they have tons of stuff in their backlog to watch. I don't want that. I looked into DVD Recorders. They seem like a decent option, but I don't know anyone with personal experience with them. I can see some of the pitfalls, DVD media can be flaky, and you can end up with a coaster and not be able to watch what you record. There are the DVD Recorder / VCR combinations. Combo-units usually aren't as reliable over time, in my experience. I would like to dub tapes to DVDs, but that could be done with our other VCR and a DVD recorder. Then there are DVR/DVD Recorder combos, which seem like a good deal.
I don't have a clear-cut winner. I'd rather not buy the low-end of whatever I choose, there always seems to be quality issues with low-end electronics. But I don't want to drop a bundle on something that doesn't fit my need either.
Maybe I'll just go buy another VCR.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The price not being worth it is a relative issue. I'm a firm believer that most Apple laptops and the iPod are terribly overpriced. However, that's just an opinion. I also dislike most of your average museum art... which many people would spend vast fortunes obtaining.
My point being: People assign their own personal values to things. The guy who spend $20k building a home-theater in his house isn't going to see a $600 Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player as a great expense. Hell, there's a great chance he spent close to that on a super-high-end DVD player [though probably closer to $400]. If you've got a $400 TV with a $400 stereo and $400 speakers... I'd agree that either format is a complete waste...
I can attest for a good friend of mine [who spends considerably more on home entertainment], when you've dished out $3500 or so for Pre-Amps/Amps and such, $4000 for speakers, $6500 for a 1080p projector and however much that beautiful screen and other required accessories cost... what's $600 for a PS3 [or other 1080p device]?
On a personal note. I have both a Blu-Ray player [PS3] and a 1080p DVD player [HTPC w/ NVIDIA card that does magic to the signal], both going into a 1080p LCD TV.... On a poorly converted DVD title (5th Element) there's not much difference, and you'll feel like you were gyped and it's all a scam. The sound is significantly better, but who's going to give a shit when you don't get to see all the brilliant video detail. However, once you see the difference between an properly encoded Blu-Ray (Black Hawk Down or Ice Age 2), it would be rather dificult to go back.
If a distributor of software capable of circumventing doesn't tell anyone that he or she is distributing software capable of circumventing, then to whom is the software distributed?
I was too young to vote when the 105th Congress was elected. Given that both the DMCA and the Bono Act cleared both houses of the 105th Congress by voice vote (which constitutionally requires more than 80 percent assent), it appears that both the Republican Party and Democratic Party are in favor of increasing the scope and duration of exclusive rights under copyright. No other party in the United States has more than 5 percent of the popular vote. I tell everyone I know that third parties exist, but the Republicrats still win. So what's the next step?
Leave?Anti-circumvention law is federal; I can't escape it by moving to another state. Anti-circumvention law is mandated by treaties throughout the developed world; I can't escape it by moving it to another developed country. Even if I could, what country would take me?
Get together with others, buy Luxemburg and set up a country with proper laws?Given a country's GDP, how do I find out what the purchase price is? For instance, what's the price to buy a country whose estimated GDP last year was $34.18 billion? And how does the new government back out of the EU Copyright Directive?
To answer my own question, I ended up buying a Pye DVD Recorder (PY90DG) at Circuit City. Actually, I went in, and they wouldn't price match on their own website, which was $10 cheaper than in-store. But they let me use one of their net-capable PCs to order it online and then do an in-store pickup. Gotta say, so far I love it. It got awesome reviews, and is dirt cheap. So far I have transferred 3 tapes, and it has worked flawlessly. I am loving it!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.