The Inevitable Demise of the DVD

Netflix's third quarter earnings came in yesterday, along with annoucements that its business was shifting focus to its online streaming service and away from its original DVD-by-mail service. This is just the latest sign that the prevalence of physical media may be coming to an end. While I think it's doubtful that all media we consume will be in digital form, and I certainly prefer having something physical to put on the shelf when purchasing films and televisions shows, I have to say I'm not sorry to see the age of the DVD go. I hate DVDs.

It's hard to imagine it now, with DVDs so prevalent, but the transition from the VHS tape to the DVD as the dominant media format was a slow one. DVDs were introduced in the US in 1997, but it wasn't until 2003 that rentals and sales began outpacing VHS tapes, and many content providers were wary that the new format wasn't going to catch on. I remember Disney being a notable holdout, waiting until 2000 to start releasing its back catalogue of animated films on DVD. At that point, the superficially similar laserdisc format had been around since the 70s and was never popular except with the hardcore technology geeks. The benefits of the DVD seem to be obvious in hindsight: vastly greater storage capability in a more compact form, slower degradation, and better resistance to repeated playing. All those fancy extras like director commentaries, multiple language tracks, and turning on and off subtitles became possible. Also, you never, ever need to rewind a DVD when you're finished watching a movie. But I still hate them.

DVDs, along with CDs and all their variants are far, far more user unfriendly than just about every other media format ever made for mass consumption. From the beginning, using DVDs and CDs was an annoyance. It was a struggle to get jewel cases open. It was a struggle to get the discs off the plastic hubs holding them in place in the cases. If you didn't hold the discs by their edges and avoid rough handling, they would end up smudged or scratched, affecting their playability. If you didn't put them back just right, the discs would slip and end up scratched. It's no wonder people were reluctant to switch. Say what you will about VHS, but I could stack the cassettes on top of each other, drop them on the floor, and bang them against the VCR without worry. And no matter how badly the picture quality degraded, or became clouded with static, at least they were still playable. I still borrow movies from the public library all the time, but when I borrow DVDs I've taken to checking them for scratches before taking them home.

I don't want to go back to the VHS days, but I still use a VCR to record shows I want to timeshift, and sometimes I find it a relief to see shelves of the old clamshell boxes along the back wall of the library. VHS tapes may be dinosaurs, but they never inspired the kind of frustration and rage that DVDs have managed to provoke from me over the years. I've literally spent hours trying to coax scratched rental discs to advance a few more frames after they freeze at a critical juncture in a movie or TV show. I've lost major scenes in films like "Waitress," and had to forego the endings of Hitchcock's "Lifeboat" and Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters." I know all the tricks for fixing scratches, but none of them work 100% of the time. Too often, I've had to listen to the endless click-whir, click-whirr of my player or laptop trying to read the damaged sections of a disc, before finally giving up and going to Youtube to find out how my movie ended. These aren't just the library discs, mind you, but ones I've occasionally gotten from Blockbuster and Netflix too.

Streaming services may have their hiccups, and they don't have all the wonderful extras that come with DVDs yet, but there's no comparison when it comes to usability. I don't have to worry about whether a film is going to stop halfway through, or if its picture is going to erupt into cascades of green and magenta pixels, no matter how many people have used the same file before me. I don't have to handle a digital file gingerly - I don't have to handle it at all. Many people like making digital backup copies of their DVDs, and I have to wonder why you'd bother keeping the DVDs around after ripping them, especially now that it's gotten so much easier to watch internet content on regular old TV screens. I still like having physical media, and would gladly buy movies in flashdrive form if they were made available, but I can't wait for the discs to go.

One day in the future, I look forward to replacing all my DVDs, and taking the obsolete discs out to the park to play Frisbees with. Or shoot skeet with. Or use as a coaster set. Or maybe I'll just send them off to the library, to gather dust and keep the old VHS collection company.