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."

So much for the critics

[AZScotsman]

Wasn't it just a couple months ago that everybody was worried that the DVD format "wouldn't be very popular"....?

I will "upgrade" when...

[pla]

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.

Bad comparison, perhaps?

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

backwards compatibility

[gad_zuki!]

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.

It's not just the player

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Blue Ray this, HD-DVD that...

[RiotXIX]

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.

I am pretty sure

[dizzy8578]

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.

$150 hd-dvd player

[jmichaelg]

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 [anandtech.com] 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.

$20 DVD player

[GregoryD]

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.

Re:Not too surprising

[drinkypoo]

Not only are you apparently smoking crack WRT the issue of recording on DVD overall, but there are actually several consumer-level camcorders that record video directly to a mini DVD. In other words, the total steps to get DVD content from the camcorder to a normal DVD player is to record some video, yank out the disc, and slap it into the player. Nice try though. Are you a troll, or are you just living under a rock? You apparently have internet access yet are completely uninformed, that's pretty amazing.

Re:Will it really?

[mrcaseyj]

I just realized the other day that this Bluray vs HD-DVD competition isn't a bad thing for consumers. It's actually a great thing. With the Beta/VHS competition consumers suffered because there was no cheap way to make a player that could play both formats. But the Bluray and HD-DVD discs are physically identical in shape (I think) and could probably both be easily read by a single player. What this means is that there will be real competition and therefore lower prices. As soon as one format starts to show signs of loosing the competition, it will be licensed to be incorporated into combo players and your movie collection will still be usable. The only problems I can see are that if all the movie studios don't support both formats then your selection of movies may be limited until you get a combo player or buy one of both, and that if you choose the wrong format you may have to buy a combo player to replace the first player you bought. But those costs are probably very small compared to the savings resulting from the competition.

Re:Will it really?

[Have Blue]

Neither format is going to win. They're both going to be killed by electronic distribution.

Magnetic vs. Optical

[acro-god]

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.

Re:DRM success

[NoMaster]

And note that this is all despite heavy DRM on nearly every commercial DVD disc and player ever made.

As I mentioned earlier, in other parts of the world DVD ownership outstripped VCR ownership a while ago. The reason why it's taken longer in the US may actually be due to the "heavy DRM" you mention (well, the region coding anyway) - in the rest of the world region free players from the name-brand manufacturers are the norm, whilst I gather they're not quite as common in the US (and mostly Chinese/Taiwanese cheapies). In fact, where I am it's practically impossible to buy a player that isn't region-free from the factory (or at least comes with a photocopied sheet containing the unlock code provided by the manufacturer).

(Yes, I realise I'm ignoring the CSS part of the DRM. That's because for most people it's a non-issue - CSS doesn't stop them from buying discs or players from overseas, taking them with them when they move, etc. In fact, in that respect you get more trouble from voltage and standards issues with players and TVs than you do with CSS. And, in the end, it turned out to be trivial to break - a single player key got out into the wild, and *poof*!)

As for the UOPs - dunno 'bout in the US, but both my cheap Philips and my sister's considerably more expensive Pioneer players bypass most UOPs at the press of a button. In fact, as I've discovered from discs I've made, the only prohibitions they can't beat aren't actual UOPs, but tricky programming. For instance, there's a neat trick you can do where you unset the "back" link at start of play, and don't set the "next" link until right near the end - the fwd/rwd/skip buttons don't work because, as far as the player is aware, there's nothing to skip to!

Somebody willing to pay the Guardians Of The Mouse might have a look and see if they do something similar...