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Death of the DVD

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Hilarious. Yours for 99p.

RIP DVD?

It’s been a bad week for the shiny 120mm discs, with retailer John Lewis announcing that they are no longer going to sell the players in their stores.

As far as the UK goes, the format has only managed to drag itself to it’s 20th birthday, although tech-wizards the Japanese have been spinning the video format since 1995.

It was always going to have a troubled existence, with no-one ever really agreeing if it was a Digital Video Disc or a Digital Versatile Disc right from it’s earliest days, when it successfully killed off VHS tapes, in the same way it’s kid brother the CD bumped off audio cassettes.

Once found nestling under virtually every TV in the country, the continuing rise of streaming video on demand services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix, along with free-to-air catch-up, mean they’ve been gathering dust for a few years now.

I can vouch for that – I moved house six months ago, plugged the DVD player in... and haven’t switched in on since. Those still shrink-wrapped box sets don’t look like they’re going to get watched any time soon, unless the satellite dish falls off the roof.

And that’s DVD’s other problem – I’m so busy watching one of my hundreds of channels, or the recordings made of one whilst watching another, that the likelihood of running out of things to view seems remoter than MiniDiscs making a comeback.

The falling cost of any long-in-the-tooth format also hastens it’s own demise. When you can pick up a cheap DVD player and a film for less than the price of two of you going to the cinema, you know the end is nigh.

But don’t get your black tie out just yet – it’s likely that supermarkets, and a myriad of other stores stocking electrical goods, will still be selling players and discs for a fair while yet.

On the plus side, much like when VHS was taking it’s final gasps, now is the time to pick up some mega bargains at car boot sales, or your local charity shop. Even eBay has everything you can think of watching as folks clear out the TV cabinet... as long as you don’t mind paying twice as much for postage as you’re paying for the discs.

Which reminds me – I’ve got every episode of 2000’s comedy Green Wing somewhere... if I can remember how to turn the player on.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 26th of October 2018. The print edition ran as "OMG! It's time to say bye to DVDs", whilst the paper's website ran it as the slightly different "OMG it's time to say goodbye to DVDs". Both omitted the opening "RIP DVD?".

 Apologies for the delay in posting - I was away at the weekend, surviving a trip to relatives including a night out in London, missed trains, long bus journeys, a heavy cold and very loud Americans...

(CD A-Z: The rather splendid "Top of the Pops '85" - 3CDs of the biggies from arguably the best year for music ever. There, I said it.)
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