40 years of the CD - and it’s not dead yet

“Will Smith, Willennium?!”, scoffs Ricky Gervais’s misanthropic widower Tony Johnson in the latest series of After Life, as he’s trawling through his somewhat retentive brother-in-law’s in-car CD collection. “Yes,” Matt replies, “as in the Millennium.” “Yeah,” Tony retorts, “about the last time someone bought a CD.” 

Well, actually, not, according to new figures from the UK record labels’ association, the BPI, which revealed that after a 17-year decline, CD sales have picked up again. I should point out that this reverse was the result of blockbuster albums last year by Adele, Ed Sheeran and ABBA and, presumably, shifting in vast quantities from supermarket checkouts (take an educated guess as to who bought them). But as someone who still buys physical media, and has largely eschewed streaming, I do take a somewhat Luddite pleasure in knowing that CDs - in the format’s 40th year - are still selling. I like to think that it’s the result of the same sense of tactility that keeps me hanging on to physical music formats, more so than any considerations of sonic fidelity. It’s this thinking that CDs, like vinyl records and even cassettes, appeal to a combination of the newly middle-aged, the baby boomers and younger hipsters who’ve bought into the kitsch appeal of the older formats. 

The CD was an evolution of the clunky LaserDisc format that appeared at the end of the 1970s. Philips, one of the companies involved in its development then joined forces with Sony to develop an audio-only optical disc, which appeared in the summer of 1982. The first CD player went on the market that October, with the promise of a format offering “perfect sound forever”. For my part, I was a relatively late convert: I was still a teenager in 1982 with little awareness of this new hi-fi Eldorado. On top of that, the first player  was well outside my economic scope, given that my meagre paper round wages were mostly spent on vinyl and cassettes at Our Price. 

“The first player cost $1,000 – a lot of money in 1982,” Philips research scientist Jacques Heemskerk told The Guardian a few years ago. “We developed the discs and the players at the same time, then licensed the technology to other companies to make their own. Once we convinced Panasonic, all the others followed.” The price of players would soon start to come down. Philips and Sony invested heavily in marketing the CD. “We needed to do a lot of advertising and knew pop music would be the largest market, but we couldn't start with anything extreme, like punk,” explained Heemskerk. “So we made a deal with Dire Straits to promote it: their music was all put on CD, and they appeared in posters and advertisements. When Brothers In Arms became the first million-selling Compact Disc, we knew we’d underestimated how quickly it would become the dominant format. The vinyl album was so established, and in the US it seemed unthinkable that the cassette would disappear. But after that, things changed very, very quickly. Despite this, it would be a full 13 years before I took the plunge and bought my first CD, the result of taking a PR job at Philips, having access at last to a player. But even by 1995, when I came to work for the company, there were new challengers on the horizon, including Philips' own ill-fated Digital Compact Cassette format, and Sony’s MiniDisc.

27 years on, my CD collection continues to grow, as does my vinyl library, with the decision as to which format seemingly arbitrary. Before I moved in with my wife-to-be, I chose CDs to listen to in the car on the drive between South-East and South-West London, and vinyl for the at-home experience. Since moving in, a month before lockdown, I’ve worked almost exclusively from home, with a CD-only system in the living room where I work, and the turntable elsewhere, making the purchase decision even more random and based on choosing the format to match the ‘mood’ of how I want to consume the music - i.e. partially on in the background, or fully muso-style with no distraction. Yes, I’m a nerd. But even experts can’t make up their minds which is best. “When CDs first came in, I was decorating my house,” recalled Philips’ Heemskerk. “So I decided to get rid of all my vinyl albums, and get my old Rolling Stones and Beatles records on CD. It still hurts. Even though I worked on the CD, and it’s technically the best, I’m not sure people will have the same warm, emotional feeling towards them as I did with the vinyl album, with the beautiful 12in artwork.”

Of course the Compact Disc, being just that, does have its significant ergonomic advantage over vinyl, but the audiophile view is that vinyl is better. There’s a degree of fetishism to that, but as my teenage step-daughters will attest, having asked for and receiving only vinyl for Christmas, records will always be cooler than CDs, which are not and have never been cool to them. 

For a product born of the 1980s, the decade of somewhat sterile modernity, a music format that was as perfect as digital technology could enable seemed appropriate. It was also simple to use and totally portable, which led to the commoditisation of CD drives appearing in any electrical appliance that could fit one. It also contributed partly to the obesity crisis, because once inserted in the player, a CD would, unlike a record, not require getting up out of the chair to turn over, and could even be manipulated using a remote control.

I’ve actually lost count of the number of CDs I’ve accumulated since my first foray into the format, 27 years ago. Much of this is the result of rampant consumerism on my part, as the acquisition of a CD player coincided with my first visits to the United States when, in the days of two dollars to the pound (yeah, cheers Brexit…) I’d start any holiday or business trip to the US with a trolley dash around the nearest branch of Tower Records. I once took a 12-hour round trip from Mammoth Lakes in California to Fresno - via Yosemite National Park - just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers CD, before returning to Mammoth via a giant loop around the bottom of the Sierra Nevada mountains and then back up north on the near-mythical Highway 395. 

On another occasion, I went to visit a former executive of Sky TV at her new palatial office in The Helmsley Building in New York after another trolley dash around a nearby branch of Tower. Before we could properly catch up, her waste bin was full of cellophane wrappings, stripped from new purchases in the hope of not drawing attention at customs in London. That, in itself, highlighted one of the most annoying things about the CD - the so-called ‘jewel case’ (itself the subject of a lucrative and vigorously defended patent owned by Philips), which was a pain to open, with the spindle thingy in the middle often losing teeth. Buying in the US was even more trepidatious thanks to a near-impregnable wrap that required a surgical scalpel to get open, thanks to a pull tab that NEVER worked.

I can’t even remember what my first CD was: I know it wasn’t Brothers In Arms, which became most associated with the format’s acceptance in the mainstream thanks to Philips’ marketing tie-up with Dire Straits (the CD’s earliest appeal seemed to veer towards classical music enthusiasts). My collection grew to around 1200 CDs at one point, infused by hundreds of cover-mount discs from monthly music magazines. In 2010 I decided to downsize, taking a good half of that library to a specialist ripping service in Arnhem (I was living in the Netherlands at the time) to have it industrially transferred to a hard drive, covering the cost by selling the discs to a record shop in Amsterdam for a euro each. A decent deal. What was left were the albums I couldn’t bear to part with, albums like all true music obsessives I’ve probably owned on different format over the years, and have been sucked into the marketing hype of remastered special editions. This duality has been perpetuated most expensively by the purchase of the posthumous Bowie box sets as CD packages, in addition to the odd fetish vinyl acquisition.

The CD isn’t, however, perfect. It is just a little bit…uh…dull. Industry experts I worked with would refer to it as a “carrier”, which is about as anodyne a description as you could come up with. No wonder the CD always used to lose out in the NME’s regular ‘Vinyl, CD or MP3?’ questionnaire. But what it lacks in cool it makes up for in convenience. When I first started buying CDs, the game changer was the ability to take what seemed like hundreds of albums on holiday in one of those clear-sleeve cases. But then the iPod came along. And Napster, and with it the seismic shift from physical media ownership to digitisation. Some will say that this was a linear development: just as the digital CD was meant to kill off analogue formats, the ripping of CDs to playback on iPods and then phones opened the door to the removal of physical media altogether, in the process denuding the record industry and artists of the wheelbarrows of cash they’d earned for decades.

I accept that streaming is cheaper. It also allows an album to be auditioned before making a longer-term commitment. And what better convenience than storing all your music in the cloud, freeing up shelving for…whatever. I, however, will still maintain, delusional perhaps, that there is nothing quite like a physical music library. When we first bunkered at home for lockdown we became used to Zoom calls with colleagues and friends carefully framed in front of well-stuffed bookshelves to make them look erudite and well read. Interviewees for TV news bulletins appeared to compete with each other to see who had the most exotic book collection. But a record library - different matter. And when you think about it, you can cram more CDs into one than vinyl. At risk of sounding intrinsically shallow, I’ll take that. Long live the CD.

Mixed signals: buying records on your high street

Barely a fortnight after Sainsbury’s announced that it will stop selling CDs and DVDs in the face of streaming services dominating media consumption, and just a few days after the second Record Store Day ‘drop’ for 2021, dear old HMV has celebrated its 100th birthday by announcing that it is planning to 10 new shops this year.

While this is hardly a raging endorsement of physical media continuing to enjoy rude health, it at least is a positive sign that the oft-predicted death of such formats is being kept at arm’s length. Sainsbury’s said that its decision was the result of consumers increasingly getting their music and films online, although conversely it added that it would continue to sell vinyl records in some stores, a reflection of vinyl’s hipster appeal amongst everyone from teenagers to the middle-aged getting back into the format and succumbing to impulse buying while out doing the weekly grocery shop.

Notably, Sainsbury’s supermarket competitors are continuing to sell CDs and DVDs, so the decision isn’t necessarily the shock headlines might suggest. There is no denying that CDs, DVDs and even Blu-ray Discs are in long-term decline: I’ve blogged before about the minor conflict this has placed me in, having worked for Philips on the consumer electronics industry’s launches of DVD and Blu-ray Disc, the company having co-developed the CD with Sony in the decade before, starting the rise of the 12cm ‘optical’ disc as a multi-faceted carrier of digital entertainment and media content.

But, progress is progress. The irony of all this is that the CD and its various offspring were meant to kill off the vinyl record, and yet that format has enjoyed a resurgence, with UK salesreaching 4.8 million in 2020. Indeed, the BPI says that LP sales will eclipse CDs this year for the first time since the late 1980s. “Demand [for CDs] has been following a long-term trend as consumers increasingly transition to streaming,” a BPI spokesperson told the BBC. “Resilient demand is likely to continue for many years, enhanced by special editions and other collectible releases. If some retailers now see the format as less of a priority, this will create a further opportunity for others, such as independent shops and specialist chains such as HMV, to cater to the continuing demand.”

While I rarely buy a Blu-ray edition of a film or a box set these days (I now share a house with my family and don’t have the space for masses of media as I had in my single days, so online services make a lot of sense) I do still buy music, with a combination of vinyl, CDs and digital copies, depending on my mood, collectability (e.g. special editions) and even whether I’m purchasing an album on spec, as opposed to a must-have I might want to have on display. I wouldn’t be the only one who sees vinyl collecting as much as an Instagram fetish as about music appreciation. I am also of the High Fidelity mentality, one of those middle-aged men who still derive pleasure from rifling through racks in musty independent shops staffed by ever-so-slightly intimidating cooler-than-you types. It’s an age-old tradition and long may it continue.

There is, though, still a place for the HMVs of this world. When the chain went into administration in December 2018, threatening anyone with entertainment media on their Christmas lists, it cast a pall over the future of buying and owning records. One of HMV’s attractions, from a mass consumer point of view, was that it made ‘supermarket’ shopping for entertainment easy, with multi-buy bundles (e.g. “2 for £10” offers) a cunning ploy to part cash for more than you might have entered a shop in search of. My CD collection is certainly the beneficiary of deals like that (along with regular holiday raids to American chains like the now defunct Tower Records and Amoeba, particularly during the days of more favourable dollar-pound exchange rates).

News that HMV will open 10 new outlets this year is a glimmer of hope on a couple of counts: firstly, COVID-19 has hit the ‘non-essential’ retailing sector hard thanks to high street lockdowns over the last year and a half. This has been accompanied the double- or even triple-whammy of media sales shifting to core online retailers like Amazon for home delivery convenience, along with the continuing growth of streaming services. Doug Putman, the Canadian entrepreneur who bought out the HMV brand from administration in 2019, and has since reopened 107 sites, has warned that the future of on-premises retailing in the UK is still not guaranteed.

Doug Putman
Picture: Joe Fiorino/Canadian Broadcasting Company

Putman says the government needs to urgently fix business rates, which are based on property rates but are notoriously slow to adjust to market levels, resulting in retailers and other high street businesses continuing to pay very high costs in the face of rising competition from online services with a lower cost base. “If the government doesn’t fix the rates, high streets are going to see a lot more vacancies,” says Putman. “Business rates just don’t make much sense. You can pay zero rent and not make a profit on a store as rates are too high.” 

As seen recently by announcements by Gap and other fashion retailers, in-store shopping is facing an existential crisis, and the pandemic hasn’t helped, even accelerating its demise. It is sad, says Putman. “Outside of the illness, when you look at people’s lives, a big part of that is walking outside and going to the high street and doing some shopping. When you see bookstores and coffee shops, and HMVs, closed and everything online it is not as much fun as it used to be. Hopefully people have seen this world where everything is Amazon and it is not all that great.”

Steven Wilson launches his album To The Bone at the HMV store in Oxford Street

One of HMV’s priorities will be to restore its flagship to London’s Oxford Street. The retailer opened its first HMV shop in 1921 when, as the Gramophone Company (which became EMI in 1931), it took over an old clothing shop at no 363. The shop was closed as part of the administration process at the end of 2018, but Putman has said he would like to find a new location in Central London. The prospects of that, however, amid continuing schism in both domestic and foreign tourism to London, might make it unlikely in the short term, given that the cost of commercial property in the city is driving retailers out, rather than drawing them in.

The other challenge for HMV will be market dynamics. While Sainsbury’s might be getting out of CD and DVD sales in the face of slowing turnover for the formats, others, like Tesco and Asda will continue to take “market share” by undercutting traditional music retailers - be it HMV or the independents. Industry writer Graham Jones has noted that supermarkets stick to a narrow choice of CDs from popular chart acts like Ed Sheeran, rather than back catalogues and more eclectic fare. Indeed, in 2008 Jones discovered an independent record shop buying bulk copies of the latest Coldplay CD from Morrisons, rather than wholesale from the record company because the supermarket offered them for less.

Speak to more hardcore music consumers, as opposed to impulse shoppers, and the love of physical media continues to drive behaviour. One of the pillars of CD and vinyl buying to begin with, over streaming, is the belief that it’s always available, a point that does suggest continuing Luddite sentiment that the Internet can go down, or that titles can disappear due to licensing windows ending. This conveniently ignores the fact that lugging 12-inch records and even CDs around isn’t so convenient if you don’t have anything to play them on. But there’s no denying the emotional bond that people - yes, like me - have to the physical format. “I can't imagine a world where media is not in your hands and not yours,” one seasoned consumer recently told the BBC in response to the Sainsbury’s news.

There are, then, two issues at work when it comes to HMV expanding, a little further, as it tries like so many other bricks-and-mortar retailers to remain afloat on the high street. Firstly, there is the inexorable rise of online shopping - regardless of the pandemic - which is a convenience that is now just an established fact. And secondly, in HMV’s case, there is the cultural shift away from physical ownership as the shift continues to digital.

“People obviously love going out shopping,” Doug Putman told the BBC this week. “They like touching and feeling and that’s something that online is not going to replace. He remains sure that the high street, despite increasingly gloomy predictions, will not become one long parade of charity shops and coffee chains, as so many have become. “I’m still very optimistic on the [HMV] business and business as a whole on the high street,” Putnam added. “I still think the high street is just something so special.” He has a point, but it’s one that flies in the face of convention, and that high streets have become centres of the service economy rather than the destinations of discovery they once were. I do know that if HMV were to open up round the corner from me I’d probably be forever in it, but I suspect that I - and perhaps my vinyl-loving teenage step-daughter - would be the exception.

The silencing of his master's voice

© HMV/James McCauley

What Ho!, viewers. It's been a while since I've blogged, but it's the Christmas holidays and, in a welcome break from work (coupled with food-induced imobility), I'm back in front of a steaming keyboard. What has coaxed me out of a lengthy absence from the blogosphere has been the troubling news today of HMV's second collapse in the space of six years, barely three days after gift cards (or "record tokens", in old money) would have been received by teenagers eager to get out and spend their newly acquired wealth on music, video games, DVDs (or, for the more resolution-sophisticated, a Blu-ray Disc) or any other of the home entertainment-related items HMV is still, evidently, selling via its bricks-and-mortar retail outfits. Except that they wouldn't have been. 

The HMV Group Plc, to give the chain its proper name, has become the first casualty of Christmas 2018 after poor sales and 'footfall' (i.e. the number of us walking through its doors) in the run up to the big day. Should the 97-year-old company disappear completely, it will not only wipe out 2,025 jobs but also it's status as the last remaining high street chain selling physical music and video products, unless you count Sainsbury's knocking out Ed Sheeran CDs and Davina McCall DVDs as a legitimate part of the media purchasing culture.

No one, frankly, should be surprised, as sad as this news is. HMV came close to collapse almost exactly six years ago, as the move towards online streaming led to sales diving by more than 10% and HMV calling in administrators. The company was eventually taken over be restructuring specialists Hilco who closed half the group's stores leaving 125 open, including the flagship shop on London's Oxford Street. The restructuring appeared, at least for a couple of years, to work, and in 2015 HMV even overtook Amazon as the UK's biggest phyisca-format music retailer (though that number also included HMV's online sales). Before that milestone, Hilco executive chairman Paul McGowan told The Telegraph in 2014 that the HMV business was now "very profitable" and did not have a single loss-making store left in the UK. Four years ago things did seem to be looking up: quarterly sales were improving by almost 10% and sales of albums over-the-counter were up by 12 per cent. 

The problem with this picture - and you'll understand me typing this through gritted teeth - is that while there have been improvements in the sale of vinyl records (and hats off to HMV for making vinyl gondolas the centrepieces of its stores), these have been somewhat niche sales by comparison to the relentless rise of online streaming services. Why go out and browse for new music or a DVD when it's there on your phone, iPad or PC at the click of a button? The culture I have enjoyed since my teens of curating music ownership and, later, my video library when VHS came along, has been eroded by the convenience of not having to get off the sofa to go and buy it.

I know there's not much point resisting this, Kanute-like. The inexorable growth of Netflix, Amazon Prime (even at the expense of Amazon's own retail operations), iTunes and all the rest has done for the home media library. Up to a point, of course. I can see the point of no longer buying DVDs and Blu-ray Discs: when you can rent (or 'own' them) in high, 4K quality without them taking up space in your living room shelving, it's a no-brainer. And it's not even an argument to say that there are films and box sets that you do watch again and again, because unless you are the most compulsive-obsessive about The Godfather or The Sopranos, you're not going to sit through either every day of the week.

Music, however, is different. Yes, I can listen to a Beatles playlist on Spotify (as I did, perfectly happily while wrapping my Christmas presents last week) via my iPad, but that is not the same experience. Perverse - and somewhat fetishistic - as it may be, as long as I still get a thrill from buying something new from my local record shop, getting it home, unsleeving it and either putting it on the turntable or in the CD player, I will continue to be that middle-aged bloke who readily parts company with a stupid amount of hard-earned for a 'super deluxe edition' of rare and previously unreleased Tom Petty songs. Thus, I'm quite proud to be keeping my local independent record shop, Casbah Records in Greenwich, in turnover. And, before anyone asks, I'll only order something from Amazon if Graham, Casbah's always helpful co-owner, is unlikely or unable to get it in.

At the time Hilco was claiming that HMV was on the up again, Paul McGowan said that it had strategically focused on offering something that other retailers couldn't, like in-store live performances. That, however, might only have a limited appeal, especially in generating impulse purchases. McGowan was, obviously, correct when he said that clearly Amazon or Tesco couldn't and wouldn't compete with that. But here, however, is where independents do the fan experience better. Banquet Records in Kingston-upon-Thames, annexed its main retail space to create a dedicated performance room, and has also become involved in local promotional gigs by heavyweight acts like The 1975. In a high student catchment area like Kingston, that makes eminent sense and hard to imagine HMV matching.

In 2013 retail analyst Mark Saunders told The Guardian that HMV's business model had "simply become increasingly irrelevant and unsustainable". Then music and film downloads accounted for 73.4% of media purchases. Today that ratio is higher still as Netflix, Apple, Spotify and even YouTube have eaten further into what used to be regarded as "home entertainment", but is now available digitally across everything from mobile platforms to big-screen TVs as, simply, an app. Of course, evolving consumption habits isn't the only set of nails being hammered into HMV's coffin. The British high street is currently a turbulent place to be. Hilco's McGowan said, in a statement, that "Even an exceptionally well-run and much-loved business such as HMV cannot withstand the tsunami of challenges facing UK retailers over the last 12 months on top of such a dramatic change in consumer behaviour in the entertainment market," with the chain's collapse coming on top of retailers like Poundworld, Maplin and Toys R Us entering administration, with others like Superdry, Carpetright and Card Factory issuing ominous profit warnings.

HMV's travails, however, go beyond simply being another victim of high street pressures, even if high rents and low consumer confidence have had their impact. The simple fact is that people are now going no further than an app, a mouse click or a remote control button to acquire home entertainment, even if the industry body, the Entertainment Retailers Association maintains that physical music, video and games products still represent a £2 billion market, with the likes of Sheeran and films like The Greatest Showman contributing.

The question for me is, realistically, how long this market will remain. There is a generation of teenagers which, for the most part, doesn't actually own any music or video. And they're not even paying subscription services, either: YouTube does, it would appear, constitute a large proportion of entertainment consumption for digital-native teenagers and twentysomethings. Seeing my girlfriend's 17-year-old-daughter enjoy listening to music on vinyl is one of life's genuine pleasures, but even I know that she and her friends are following a latent fashion. I, for one, will continue to buy albums, but even I've stopped buying DVDs altogether. Mind you, I very rarely have the attention span these days longer than watching a Mock The Week repeat on Dave, so perhaps I'm losing the ability to do anything more than point a remote control at a set-top box. Maybe, even, I'm the cause of HMV's collapse? I hope not. Sad as it is to see a venerable and historic name go into administration for a second time, reluctantly I've got to accept that it's just the way it is, even if with the  chain's demise disappears the emotional enjoyment of endless Saturday afternoons browsing for new music that I couldn't wait to get home, unpack and play. Forget the arguments about sound and picture quality, it's that fetishistic, tactile experience that will die when the physical media experience finally pops its clogs. Today's news about HMV doesn't half feel like that is accelerating.

Deserting island discs

It used to be that you knew you were getting older when policemen appeared to be getting younger. Now it is technology which might still seem new but has aged incredibly quickly. Over my career in tech PR I've seen technologies rise, arc and disappear in what seems like the blink of an eye: as part of the Philips PR machine in the '90s and Noughties, I was involved in launching several consumer electronics formats, including the DVD, the recordable CD, the recordable DVD, the Digital Compact Cassette, Digital VHS, CD-i and, latterly, Blu-ray Disc. Most, it has to be said, have either been superseded or didn’t survive infancy, even though their patents - lucrative in some cases - have been absorbed into the revenue streams of the companies who created them.

Today, Philips no longer invests in consumer electronics, preferring to be a healthtech concern, presumably because the margins on capital equipment like CT scanners for hospitals far outstrip the meagre profits to be made on a TV (for such a major purchase, you'd be amazed how little the manufacturer makes on it...), although brand licensing has ensured the Philips name has remained in the home entertainment space. The reality, however, is that, 11 years after Apple introduced the iPhone, the smartphone has largely replaced TVs, video players and hifi systems amongst young consumers. Look at Apple’s marketing of its latest iPhone, even making a virtue of bigger screens and better speakers purely to appeal to those who prefer to watch movies on something barely bigger than an old fashioned cheque book.

Given that streaming via platforms like Netflix, Amazon and iTunes, plus broadcasters’ on-demand and catch-up services, has become as commonplace today as terrestrial TV and Blockbuster video rentals were 30 years ago, it’s not surprising to, this week, see news from the John Lewis department store chain that it is drawing the curtain down on the DVD player, having seen a 40% drop in player sales over the last year. While this isn’t necessarily a vital-signs indication of the health of DVD itself, the revelation - contained in the 2018 John Lewis & Partners Retail Report - is a sign that one piece of technology beneath the living room television is in decline. What this doesn’t say is that sales of Blu-ray Disc players - the ultra-high definition disc format that was developed (by a consortium of technology companies including ‘usual suspects’ like Philips and Sony) largely to succeed DVD - are still relatively healthy, even if, like most ‘high-volume electronics’ devices, price erosion has brought down the cost of a Blu-ray player from around £1000 in 2002 to as low as £70 for a basic box today.

DVD does now date back to what is a lifetime in technology: when I started working for Philips at the beginning of 1995 there was already, in the finest traditions of the consumer electronics industry, a battle raging between competing technologies to be considered the 'standard' for a CD-sized disc that could store entire films in one go. In the blue corner was Philips and Sony with its Multimedia Compact Disc (MMCD) format. In the red corner, a collection of tech companies like Toshiba, Matsushita, Hitachi, JVC, Pioneer and Thomson who, along with their Hollywood buddy Time Warner (i.e. Warner Bros) were backing Super Density Disc (SD). While industry observers and trade media hacks lofted their eyes skywards at the prospect of another Betamax-v-VHS battle, a round of the sort of shuttle diplomacy normally applied to preventing actual wars brought peace to the world of digital video and, at a press conference at the IFA trade fair in Berlin in August 1995, declared their eternal love for each other. DVD was born.

The news that John Lewis is now, 23 years on, dropping DVD players from its shelves is no more than a reflection of its own stocking strategy, says Gill Hind of Enders Analysis, who points out that it's as much about the retailer's desire to keep its shelves full of the latest innovations which carry higher sticker prices and better margins. Beyond the headlines, the DVD itself, on the other hand, soldiers on, just.

"I think the bigger surprise is just how resilient the format continues to be," says leading home entertainment journalist Steve May. "Sales data from the British Association for Screen Entertainment, covering the first six months of 2018, reveals that DVD accounted for 64.7 per cent of video sales. Digital formats trailed at 22.4 per cent, with Blu-ray Disc following behind with 12.9 per cent. Streaming services "may be picking up subscribers at a rate of knots" says Steve, but those who want the best in picture and sound quality are sticking with the physical format of Blu-ray Disc. And the innovation cycle in Blu-ray goes on: “Blu-ray players replaced dedicated DVD players in terms of value some time ago," he adds, "just as the latest Ultra High Definition Blu-ray Disc players are now ousting regular Blu-ray decks.”

While the higher-end quality of Blu-ray remains popular with videophiles, DVD is hanging on, probably due to the combination of convenience, good picture quality (when we demonstrated DVD versus VHS it was the difference between a clean and dirty window) and, above all, dirt-cheap prices. No surprise, then, that one in two DVDs are sold as point-of-sale impulse buys at supermarkets, while 10% of DVDs get snapped up at supposedly 'non-traditional' retailers, such as garden centres and petrol stations, according to the British Association for Screen Entertainment. While streaming has clearly become the dominant vehicle for watching movies at home (accounting for more than four-fifths of the £2.7 billion UK video market last year) Steve May maintains that “there is plenty of life still in physical media”. For example, Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk sold 640,000 copies on DVD and Blu-ray combined, while last year’s most popular film release - Disney's Beauty And The Beast - sold 1.5 million copies across both 'physical' and 'digital' formats.

Standalone DVD players may be going out of fashion but “backwards compatibility” in the Blu-ray hardware standard has meant that Blu-ray players can still play all those hundreds of DVDs currently piling up in living room cupboards probably only a few feet from the TV. Which means that disc libraries will remain for some time yet. The question is, what these ageing, dust-gathering DVDs will look like. Many in my own library were bought at the time when they were first-generation transfers. Home video companies have been very canny in re-releasing titles as formats have been updated (I actually own four different copies of Heat and have lost track of the versions of The Godfather in my collection...). At the same time, TV sets themselves have evolved. A year after the DVD was born, Philips introduced the very first flat TV, a 42-inch gas plasma number costing 30,000 deutschemarks, roughly £13,000 in today's money. Now, you can buy a 43-inch LCD TV for less than £370. It's not an entirely accurate comparison, however. That first flat TV was, frankly, rubbish from a picture quality point of view, but that didn't stop Philips selling every single one they made, often to achingly-cool advertising agencies (and one particular radio DJ...) wanting to be the first to own a TV set you could hang on the wall like a painting.

Television and video formats have often leapfrogged each other, much like Trigger's broom in Only Fools And Horses (17 new heads and 14 new handles in 20 years...), but today there is a narrowing of technologies. With broadcasters and streaming services offering premium content like football and film channels with 4K quality and, at some point in the not-too distant future, 8K resolution, it's arguable that the optical disc that has lingered on since the CD (or, even earlier, LaserDisc) will be discarded to museums. I'll admit, as I spend an increasing amount of time on planes, having a library of downloaded movies on my iPad, with its Retina screen and Bluetooth headphones, is a convenient way of catching up with films and TV box sets. But nothing can beat the experience of watching at home on a big screen TV (70-inch is now the new normal, according to John Lewis, compared to only 36-inch in 2010), and with Blu-ray continuing to set the standard, the spirit of the DVD lives on through its successor. And you still have to get out of your seat to put it in the player, but then that was always part of the fun, wasn't it?