Dimming the lights: On August 26, 1997, Digital Video Disc made its unofficial debut, with Warner Home Video placing 61 titles in nationwide release after a six-month trial period in test markets. Sony's flagship DVD player at the time, the DVD-s7000, cost $1,000; entry-level models reached the marketplace several months later with price-tags around half that, which still wasn't cheap. The nascent format faced several challenges not all Hollywood studios were on board with the new digital media, while video-rental chains would not clear out a portion of their VHS shelf-space for the shiny new discs. However, thanks to a passionate group of early adopters, home-video divisions at Warner and Sony, the release of movies on DVD without the traditional "rental window" applied to VHS, and retailers stocking discs at affordable prices, consumers began crossing the digital divide. Since then, DVD has changed not just the way we watch movies, but how we think about them.
It's hard to understate the impact that DVD has had on our movie-consuming culture. Just as a lot of us will someday (even today) explain to young people what the world was like before personal computers or the Internet, we have to make an effort to scan back to the mid-1990s, when the idea of feature-length movies on CD-sized discs was a holy grail of film collectors. Prior to 1997, the condition of feature films on home video was sorry indeed. VHS tapes offered poor transfers compared to today's viewing standards, while film collectors hoarded hard-to-find movies captured from rare, late-night TV screenings. At the time, Laserdisc was the cineaste's choice, although the format was expensive, unwieldy, and sometimes subject to degradation thanks to the infamous "laser rot" that plagued more than a few collections. Folks who didn't have Laserdisc players and deep pockets could purchase some movies on VHS with widescreen transfers, but they came at a premium price. And then there was videotape itself bulky, non-indexed, and liable to warp, break, and degrade, it simply was not durable enough to satisfy film collectors.
Looking back, we see there simply is no comparison between 1997 and 2007. Today, it's not only possible, but affordable for the average consumer to own an excellent personal film collection and home-theater equipment. It can even be done "on a budget," as it were. Compared to the pre-home-video era (basically, at any time before mass-market VCRs), the transformation is nothing less than astonishing, and it's worth thinking about. It was not that long ago that only the very wealthy could afford home theaters and actual prints of films for private screenings. It would require not only a large room, but a separate, muffled projection room as well, and somebody to run the projector (recall that famous scene in Sunset Boulevard, for example). You couldn't have a setup like that and, say, live in an apartment. DVD has made movies accessible to everyone, not just reclusive movie stars. This is one time when the movies may have gotten smaller, but they also got better.
The arrival of DVD was bolstered by the near-simultaneous arrival of the World Wide Web. Indeed, for a lot of folks, DVD and the Internet have been inseparable elements of a single success story. These websites, and the others who followed in their wake, did more than just offer the latest industry gossip and movie reviews. They kept the DVD industry honest by making sure that the earliest of consumers were radically informed about their purchases. In fact, thanks to DVD websites, the "blind" purchase has never been necessary. For consumers willing to research via mouse-clicks, DVD websites have offered a wealth of details about any given DVD's transfer quality and extras, often before new products reach store shelves. Combine that with the fact that websites could be published not just once a day, but updated several times per day, by multiple writers. Without that, DVD might look very different in 2007. Thanks to the Web, some titles that didn't meet the high standards that the format itself promised were re-issued with improved transfers.
Even more frequently, long-requested titles remained (and still remain) off the market for years until studios could complete a print restoration and compile enough extra features to make even the most cynical of DVD consumers excited about an upcoming release (and Titan Rise Health yes, waiting for a landmark like King Kong was worth it). Internet reviewers and talkback citizens pored over every significant title, evaluating the quality of the image and audio, comparing the work to previous Laserdisc releases, Titan Rise Health catching bad crops and missing elements, and noticing small, important details that the majority of us would miss. The vanguard of DVD websites that arrived between 1997 and 1999 made the difference, trading out time and effort for the sake of improving the format, inspiring widespread consumer confidence, and waging an information war against the now-defunct pay-to-play DIVX format by Circuit City. In fact, if you remember the "Open DVD" campaign, you've been around for a while.