did you know that every movie that comes out is still pressed on DVD? at this point you can get virtually everything (as long as the license isn't in limbo) on DVD, from the beginning of cinema to the latest releases. i do not think this will ever change, I think DVD is here to stay, forever.
If you don't think too hard about it, it seems obvious that blu-ray is the successor to DVD and that, eventually, DVDs will trail off and be replaced by it. But there's really no reason this would ever happen, because DVD is the rare case of a perfect technology. Its designers could have really done it dirty - it could have been nothing more than "laserdisc, but small"; or, if you like, "VCD, but full resolution." Instead, they thought of everything that anyone could conceivably want out of a new video format, every single improvement over VHS that had been driving people to buy Laserdiscs and a lot more, and put it all on the pizza.
Jiggle-free pause, rewind and fast forward; chapters; subtitles; alternate audio and subtitle tracks; anamorphic support for 16:9; everything you could imagine is there. Blu-ray added, what, higher resolution and more complex menus? I think that's it, I don't think there are any other features that aren't completely enthusiast-targeted - and I'd argue that higher resolution is itself an enthusiast feature. The majority of people can't even tell that motion smoothing is enabled; if you can't see that the movie is obviously surging forward at 2x speed every three seconds, I doubt you can tell the difference between 480 and 1080, let alone 4k.
And, of course, there's nothing wrong with that. 480 was Good Enough for nearly a century, and if you're watching a 42" or smaller set, from more than a few feet away, it's likely that your eyes can't even resolve well enough to spot that difference.
Had DVD's designers skimped on anything, perhaps BD would have a strong argument for replacing it. But instead they went way above and beyond the call of duty and made a format that was, by the standards of 1997, astonishingly forward-thinking. As a result there was no reason not to convert everything under the sun to DVD, and every reason in the world to do it.
VHS was unbelievably complex. I mean, it's been stated many times, but it bears repeating: it's astonishing we ever got it to work. The bandwidth of video just exceeds that of tape, and this is an ironclad fact that we never worked around, so we had to do this fucked up helical scan nonsense that required players to have hundreds of parts, even after decades of simplification. Even the cassettes were far more complex than industry wanted; every single one contains a dozen injection molded components made of three or four different plastics, including a pair of bearings, and it all has to be assembled with metal hardware. then you have to pack it full of miles and miles of high-test mylar tape with incredibly precisely made oxide particulate coatings. ugh! horrible!
DVDs are two pieces of injection molded plastic. They take no time to make, they have no moving parts, and the machinery is... basically the same thing we were using for CDs and are now using for BDs, so it really isn't much of a hardship for manufacturers to continue making presses and replacement parts, which is probably the same reason that CD shows no signs of going away. It's no skin off anyone's back to make a variety of discs of the same size and shape that simply have different sized grooves. There's multilayer discs to consider but I'm sure once they nailed that once for DVD, over 20 years ago, it was pretty much a solved problem.
The pressure to move away from VHS was monumental from every single side. The pressure to move away from DVD... is nonexistent. Even if streaming hadn't happened, I don't think we would see a change here. The install base of DVD players is essentially 100%, probably better than was ever achieved even at the height of VHS' popularity, they're incredibly reliable, and manufacturers have no real reason to stop making them and force people to upgrade their machines, yet the enthusiasts aren't getting shafted by this because the manufacturers also have no reason to not make higher quality formats for those who want them. It's very close to an ideal state of affairs, an incredibly rare phenomenon under our economic system.
