Otago Daily Times, Nov 24, 2004

Vision of the future ends video player’s run

London: It changed the lifestyles of a generation but after a lingering death, the last rites have been sounded for the revolutionary VHS home video format.

All over the world, Video Home System — which let people record and watch television programmes when they wanted rather than at the whim of broadcasters — is in headlong retreat as the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) takes over.

Accepting the inevitable, Britain’s biggest high street electronics retailer, Dixon’s, has announced it is taking VHS video players off its shelves for good.

“We are now entering the digital age and the new DVD technology available represents a step-change in picture quality and convenience,” said marketing director John Mewett.

Dixon’s is not alone. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, offers only a handful of stand-alone VHS recorders on its website.

“VHS was pretty revolutionary,” VHS player collector Andy Hain said. “The fact that people take them for granted so much today shows just how important they were.”

For more than 25 years, VHS dominated the world home entertainment market after seeing off a challenge from Sony’s Betamax in the early 1980s.

By the 1990s, a VHS recorder was a common feature in most at least, house burglars do not even bother to take VHS players because new ones now cost so little that no-one wants a second-hand model.

When DVDs first came along in the mid-1990s, sales were initially very slow but now sales of DVD players outstrip those of VHS players by a factor of 40 to one globally. Leading high street film rental company Blockbuster reports that more than 80% of its rentals are DVDs.

Far from undermining the film industry, DVD sales can make the difference between homes as prices fell and technology improved, although the art of actually programming a recorder remained a mystery to many.

To add insult to injury, police grudgingly admit that in Britain loss and profit.

Internationally, the market for DVDs, at present estimated at some $US15 billion ($NZ21.37 billion) a year, is expanding exponentially and the industry expects that some 450 million households will have a DVD player by 2008.

But the explosion of DVD technology has brought with it a surge in piracy — discs may offer better-quality viewing but they are far more quickly copied than tapes and easier to carry.

The demise of VHS vindicates the foresight of Andy Hain, who has been collecting VHS players for 11 years and has set up his own museum of video recorders. — Reuters