DVD turns 30

[JackHandy]

curl-6 said:

JackHandy said:

I don't think of them as really being a thing until around the year 2000. In 1996, none of the video stores had them to rent, and they weren't for sale anywhere in my neck of the woods and wouldn't be for years. But man, what a short-lived piece of media. Things launch, and in less than ten years, they're getting replaced. VHS went for two decades before that happened (Laser Discs never caught on). I still love them, and have all the ones I original purchased.

I mean 30 years and counting isn't that short-lived; it may have only gotten 10 years before Blu Ray arrived, but DVD continued long after that, it's still going today 20 years after its "replacement".

VHS came out in the late 70's and lasted until the early 00's as the dominant format. DVDs lasted from the early 00's to... the middle 00s? Late 00's? By 2006, Blu-Ray was here. By 2007, Netflix's streaming service had arrived. A few short years after that, it had surpassed both DVD and Blu-Ray as the de-facto way to consume movies.

It really is kind of ridiculous when you think about how short a run DVD had. It deserved better. And to this day, some releases still look better than their UHD versions. The extended TLOTR Trilogy is one of them. Better lighting, better color grading. And the boxes those came in were amazing.