Posted by Derek Janssen on 03/21/07 21:12

RobMac wrote:

> The DVD format turned TEN yesterday....
> (10 years since the first commercial DVDs were available for purchase!)
>
> I plopped in my original "The Terminator", which was the very first DVD I
> ever bought, back in 1997, which IIRC was among the first few DVDs ever
> released.

Remember when Netflix and DVDExpress.com^1 were just struggling little
renegade one-warehouse mom-and-pop operations, trying to unite a small
far-flung band of techies in the wilderness, like those college-town
Laserdisk stores did?

And if you were one of the 200 people who had a DVD player, you thought
were clever to have finally located Netflix on the net, and rent a disk
for $3.00 for two weeks?
Meanwhile, for about two or three years after the Peace Talks, all the
other owners and PS2 gamers never even knew you COULD rent DVD's at
all--since Blockbuster hadn't heard of them yet--and thought they had to
*buy* any disk they hadn't seen in theaters and wanted to watch that
night?...
And for years, a.v.d. would be flooded with posts about "I just bought
'Twister' for $35, is it any good?" (And every game store had a
Used-DVD rack with twenty copies each of "Lethal Weapon 4" and
"Adventures of Super Dave"?)

Nowadays, we have Netflix as a national network offering HD and Blu
disks from day one, creating saturation almost immediately--
And Blockbuster *still* hasn't caught up yet. :)

Derek Janssen
ejanss@comcast.net
----
[1 - Noticing eerie historical parallels, now that "DeepDiscount.com"
has decided to drop the "DVD" from its name, and try to expand to
selling books, posters and CD's...]

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