DVDs in More Homes Than VCRs

The rapid consumer acceptance of the DVD format has been pretty astonishing, and Nielsen Media Research's Third Quarter Home Technology Report provides another benchmark on the medium's rise to consumer-electronics glory. According to their survey, 81.2% of all U.S. households have DVD players, while 79.2% have VCRs -- marking the first time that DVD ownership has surpassed VCR ownership. (Just to make this clear, the survey measures how many households have at least one DVD player, versus how many have at least one VCR. If you made it a per-unit comparison I'm sure the gap would widen -- especially if you factored in DVD-ROM drives and PlayStation 2s.)

If anything, this reinforces my belief that high-definition DVDs will take a while to catch on, format war notwithstanding. It's a simple matter of value proposition. When the DVD format came along, it offered clear benefits over videotape (physical durability, random access, lack of signal degradation over time, easily manageable and recognizable form factor, compatibility with older optical media) and easily worked within an existing AV setup. High-definition discs pretty much offer more of the same, and the big differences require new purchases to be perceptible. The DVD was a perfect combination of factors; I wonder if we'll see anything like that in the consumer electronics business again any time soon.