Is DVD format destined to become virtually extinct like VHS has become? Best guesses as to when this might happen?
All technology is temporary.
all everything is temporary.
Blu-Ray is making a fairly lame attempt at killing DVD. The real threat to both Blu-Ray and DVD is Internet downloads, which will likely become the dominate way people obtain their movies and music in the next few years.
This discussion comes up a lot around here. DVD is going to have a much longer lifespan than VHS did, for these reasons:
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being a digital format, the discs will play as well 20 years from now as they did today, barring any physical damage to the disc itself. VHS tapes wear out over time.
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the quality is also a huge step up from what VHS was. 720x480 resolution looks good even on 1080p tvs (and helps especially if your DVD player has a decent up-converter), so 20 years from now it’s still going to be acceptable.
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likewise for audio. Unless they invent some new kind of way to listening to movies that we can’t even fathon now, 5.1 DD/DTS will ALWAYS sound great. Can’t really say the same for the mono, stereo or dolby pro logic analog tracks that VHS had.
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also much less bulky than VHS tapes (you can hold 25 DVDs in the space that one VHS takes up), so people are less likely to throw them out to clear up space
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also MUCH easier to make copies of. You can copy a 2 hour movie in 20 minutes on DVD, where it would take…2 hours on VHS.
However, one thing that is likely to occur within the next 20 years is having media kept on very large harddrives and on networks. While the actual DVDs themselves may become obsolete as media servers become more popular, the discs’ actual content will still stick around. This is already happening for me. I don’t have a physical DVD drive or player, but my computer can play Bluray files, which must be downloaded or restored from multiple DVDs.
True, Bluray will eventually become the standard, but in the same way that older. more obscure (aka less profitable) stuff never made it to DVD, or made it to DVD very late, there’s even less incentive to release an obscure title on Bluray, ESPECIALLY if there’s no high-def source to remaster it from, and ESPECIALLY ESPECIALLY if there’s already a decent DVD in print.
Sorry, I disagree.
Blu-ray is an interesting stopgap on the format front.
Blu-ray is definitely better than DVD - but (!) - let’s face it, digital content is the real future.
With like 2 clicks on my remote I can get a movie in HD on my television. Physical media is nearly dead; Blu-Ray is just the last throes.
Not that I hate Blu-Ray - I have a nice Blu-Ray player myself, and I like what it does. But I suspect it will fade within the next few years. Digital distribution is just so much easier.
My personal prediction is that digital content will come to dominate very shortly. As for physical media - my money is on hard drives or even flash storage. They already exist on DVRs. There’s not much reason for a physical disc anymore. As network speeds increase (and they always do) I think physical discs will disappear.
Another factor that DVD has going for it is that it’s closely related to its successor. If you make a DVD player, you’d have to go out of your way to make it able to also play VHS tapes (basically, build in a complete separate VCR in addition to the disc player). But if you make a Blu-Ray player, you’d have to go out of your way to make it not able to play DVDs as well: You put the disc in the same place, spin it on the same spindle, and probably read it with the same laser. So, for as long as there are Blu-Ray players around, there will also be DVD players around.
As opposed to what? Blu-Ray will die before DVD does.
I doubt this.
Bluray players are becoming less and less expensive. I don’t think bluray will entirely replace DVD’s, but I think Bluray will be the primary physical release scheme for new movies.
Of course, I’m of the opinion that streaming – like Netflix to my xbox, or DVD player, etc – is the way that most media is going to go in the future.
Back when there was a big fumbly battle between HDDVD and Blu-Ray, I might have agreed with this, but now that Blu-Ray has prevailed in that war, it’s been quite agressively promoted, along with larger and better TVs etc.
(I don’t have a Blu-Ray player, BTW, so this isn’t a Mine-Is Best argument)
Blu-Ray is already supplanting DVD - I’m starting to see lots of second hand DVDs of mainstream movies on sale in charity shops - in the same way that second hand VHS copies of mainstream movies appeared when DVD took hold of the home entertainment market.
I don’t think it will necessarily kill DVD outright - as others have said - equipping yourself for Blu-Ray doesn’t stop you playing your existing DVDs - so the backward compatibility allows the DVD format a more graceful decline than VHS enjoyed, however, once you’ve upgraded your player to Blu-Ray, it seems unlikely you’d ever buy a DVD again, if a choice exists for the content you want to watch, so the demand demographic will change - and demand will eventually dictate what is worth supplying.
When you can buy a decent Blu-ray player for $50. When there isn’t a big cost differential between Blu-ray and DVD, no one is going to bother with DVD.
I just preordered Avatar from Amazon in the Bluray-DVD combo pack for $25 and I don’t own a Blu-ray player. For $8 more than the DVD plus free shipping, I figured it was worth it. I can get a Blu-ray player for my computer for $60.
While Blu-ray will eventually overtake DVDs, it will take a long time after that for digital downloading to supplant physical media. The bandwidth required to queue up the movie/TV show for everyone would easily crash whatever servers are running this thing and grind the flow of Internet traffic to a halt.
It’s the same reason video games will NEVER transfer to a digital download-only model.
DVDs and BluRay are digital content. I think you mean downloadable or streaming media.
That’s simply not true. Server farms have unlimited computing capacity. There are also tons of tricks that can be done to optimize media download/streaming. Media popularity follows a long tail pattern. Most of the content watched is from a relatively small number of programs. Peer-to-peer download is already well established and peer-to-peer streaming is underway. Media servers can be (and are) replicated so that each one only serves a few thousand homes. It would be trivial to store 80% of the most popular content in those servers. Finally, advances like Googles gigabit network will increase the speed of network to the home by orders of magnitude.
I think the whole “pack rat” mentality of downloading stuff so that you can enjoy it at your leisure will die out. It’s already happening, with services like Spotify (to which I am not affiliated, etc.), where you listen to (almost) whatever you want, whenever you like, no downloading per se. The future is: all media ever produced, available over the internet, possibly for a modest fee. Or you can download it to your local storage device, if you are paranoid that the wide-open tap is suddenly going to close. But that’s the future, and it makes formats irrelevant.
Hmm, do you remember YouTube when it first appeared in 2005? Small, fuzzy videos… five years later near HD quality.
It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube alone used more bandwidth than the entire internet. There is no reason this will not continue - supported by things like the introductions by Cisco just last week - a 322 terabit router - 12 times faster than its nearest competitor…
(I have it on good authority that we will NEVER need more PC memory than 640KB as well…)
The smart thing with DVD is that they made the disks with the same physical dimensions as CD’s. Same with BlueRay. This fights the obsolescence factor because you can upgrade your playback equipment without trashing your media source. A good BluRay disk player can upgrade the quality of the DVD image while still being able to play your CD’s. It’s win/win.
While streaming will grab bigger and bigger shares of the market, it will be a long time before nobody has a disk player. There is a push on to expand high speed internet access but there is still a long way to go. The disk player is a long way from realizing the fate of 8-track, home movie film, cassettes and floppies.
Do you remember how fast YouTube videos used to load? Go to YouTube, there is a noticeable lag in waiting for the video to start.
Once everybody (about 50% of the population doesn’t have Internet in their home) and everything is digitially downloaded, we’re going to need a lot more bandwidth to make it work. The only reason the streaming video of today works as well as it does is because the majority of media watching is done through television broadcasts and/or physical media.
The majority of TV watching is done by content delivered over existing cable, which is capable of providing you with literally hundreds of programs at once, 24 hours a day despite the fact that your household will view less that 1/10th of 1 percent of it. As I said before, the most watched programming comes from a relatively small selection of content. That content can be proactively cached based on your viewing habits, leaving only true on-demand that needs to be broadcast live. Even if that were not true, the speed of the internet is growing faster than the size of content.
AT&T thinks the Internet will hit “full capacity” this year.
Also, if bandwidth is growing so rapidly, why are ISPs constantly toying with the idea of monthly bandwidth caps? Time Warner chickened out last year, but there had to be a reason behind their very strict cap proposal.