Goodbye VHS

[andrewducker]

DVD accounts for 87 percent of all home-video sales and 64 percent of all rentals, the trade publication reported, with DVD sales up 42 percent and VHS sales down 50 percent in the fourth quarter versus the comparable period in 2002.

Of course, you still need VHS for your own taping. Those of you unlucky to be without Tivo/Sky+ that is...

Comments

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

what home taping?

I need a tape machine only until people stop releasing obscure biking and sailing vids on tape only. Once I figure out how to use the DVD editign software, the process can be accelerated too.

No, I really don't watch much telly - anything decent makes it to DVD (unless the owners are incredibly dim....)

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Sky+/TiVo wouldn't be good enough for me, I'd still need something like a DVD burner as well.

When I tape stuff, it's almost never just to watch it once and tape over it, it goes onto tape and (if I'm lucky) I'll get a chance to watch it later, but mostly I don't ... and I've been recording an average of two tapes a week for the last 15 years ... and yes, if you work that out, that's around fifteen hundred tapes ... and yes, I still have them all. The bookshelf next to this PC is roughly 2.4 metres tall, two video tapes deep and 38 video tapes wide and has nine shelves ... and some of the shelves have boxes of video tapes which allow those shelves to hold 90 tapes, so the unit holds about 700 videos. The rest are in storage crates in the loft, in storage boxes in the dining room or in my mum's dining room back in Hackney (only about 200-300 or so). Oh, and many of these tapes are recorded in long play and most are E240s.

I have nearly all the Have I Got News For You, up until last year. A large number of Whose Line Is It Anyway? Just about all of the Fast Show. Most of Chelmsford 1-2-3. A few episodes of the Goodies. A lot of older episodes of Tomorrow's World. And, well, basically a lot of comedy, science and quite a few Top of the Pops.

And sadly the tapes are going to be fading, printing through and sticking in their cases as most of them haven't been played more than once since they were recorded. But the sheer scale of going through and pulling out the stuff I want is just *too* frightening!

Some people keep books they've read, even if the likelihood of ever reading a particular individual book again is vanishingly small ... I have something like 5,000 paperbacks but I've barely re-read anything in the last few years, since I don't have time to read all the new acquisitions.

Ditto CDs, I have at least 20 CDs that I bought that I've never listened to, and several hundred more that I've played less than ten times. That's out of about 1200 "albums".

I need more time and more energy in my life, and so probably shouldn't be spending vast amounts of it on here!!

[andrewducker]

Can I ask _why_ you keep this vast storehouse?

I've cleaned out my video/book collection twice in the last few years, knocking it down to just the few hundred of each I can't live without.

I don't have time to read/watch everything new I want to, let alone 15 years of Have I Got News for You...