DVDs have chewed up the video - but it won't be so long before the DVDs also face extinction, reports Shane Hegarty.
The video, it appears, is facing extinction. It was messy, poor quality, awkward and unpredictable; but it's lasted almost 30 years. Now, retailer Dixons is phasing out the video recorder, and will sell its last one at Christmas.
In video libraries around the country, the tapes are being pushed to the back of the shop by the victorious DVDs. Some day, your video recorder will finally run out of life - probably halfway through taping the last episode of your favourite series - and all that will be left behind are your fading tapes of Live Aid, Italia '90 and a documentary about dolphins that you really will watch some day.
In the killing of the video, the prime suspect, of course, is the DVD. It has been around for less than a decade, but the last two years have seen a spectacular acceleration in sales of the players and in the phasing out of videotape.
Yet, just as it might be taking the plaudits, the DVD is itself under threat of obsolescence. There is an old joke in the computer business, which says that by the time you buy the computer, bring it home, unpack it and set it up, it will already have been replaced by a better, faster model. The same joke might be applied to home entertainment, only your bank manager mightn't find it so funny.
Meanwhile, there may be no need for fiddly boxes under the telly at all.
Already, Sky+ pauses live television, records at the press of one button and will remember to record an entire series for you. We are not too far from the day when the television alone will be able to do the job of the video recorder, DVD player and Sky Box combined.
For the moment, the DVD is the favoured format for watching movies, although the Irish way of renting DVDs is lagging behind that of the US and the UK, where a postal system has developed and the old-fashioned video library is losing ground. For a flat monthly fee, subscribers can rent a certain number of DVDs at a time, for as long as they want rather than only a single night. When they have finished with one, they send it back to the retailer, who then sends them something else from their list of most-requested films. An Irish company, Screen Click, is now doing this here, but the larger chains of Chartbuster and Xtravision have yet to introduce the system.
Meanwhile, the battle for the succession in the DVD world is heating up. Blu-ray and High Definition DVD are the recordable disc formats vying for supremacy, and their struggle is being compared to that between VHS and Betamax in the 1980s. If you bought a Betamax player, then a VHS, and now a DVD player, you probably don't want to be told that you may have to upgrade again soon .
However, video/DVD rental outlets may be under threat, from technology which means people don't have to even walk to the postbox to pick up a movie. The future may lie down the phone line. Until recently, the conventional wisdom held that because it still takes so long to download movies, even on a broadband line, the DVD was safe. But technology is likely to catch up with the CD sooner or later. Already the music industry has struggled to accept the change in buying patterns as people increasingly download music from the Internet rather than buy it off the shelf - and the movie business is likely to face a similar crisis.
Sky+, and America's TiVo, are examples of the way television is adapting by allowing viewers to pause live television if the phone rings or record directly on to their televisions and keep programmes for as long as they like without losing quality. Mark Deering, director of Sky Ireland, jokes that the company doesn't like to use the verb "tape" but that it sells Sky+ "as video that even adults can operate". Already, there are 4,000,000 subscribers in the UK and Ireland.
At the moment Sky+ requires a separate box, but while Sky has no plans as yet, it would seem likely that the system will eventually be incorporated directly into television sets.
Meanwhile, rather than rent a DVD, viewers should eventually be able to pick a movie from a list on their screens and watch it at the click of a button.
For the moment, Laser, a Dublin-based film rental chain, which has steadily phased out videotapes this year, believes the DVD has a certain lure.
"What's been most notable is the large burst in those buying films," said a spokesman this week. "It's now packaged towards owning it, and people now want to have their own libraries. There is an almost obsessive thing about collecting, the fetish of the object itself."
Anyway, it's unlikely that technology will make DVD obsolete for another 10 years or so. Now is the time to mourn the imminent passing of the video. Would the last person to use the video recorder please rewind the tape.