Considering there's a little thing called a recession happening right now, it's no surprise that DVD sales are down. Variety reports that despite Blu-ray sales doubling in the first quarter of 2009 compared to the same period last year, it's not enough to compensate for the decline in DVD sales. Blu-ray is still a relatively small part of the market, and home-video revenue overall has dropped.

Now before you start panicking, keep in mind that attendance at movie theaters is way up in 2009. People aren't forsaking movies altogether; they just aren't buying them. Surely the recession is a contributing factor to consumer reluctance, but I wonder if there are other reasons, too. I wonder if people are thinking, "Why should I blow twenty bucks on a DVD when I'm being told constantly that Blu-ray is about to make DVDs obsolete?"

If you remember your history, DVD players first came on the market in the United States in 1997, bought first by the "early adopters" (the suckers who love paying hundreds of dollars in order to have something first, rather than waiting for the price to come down), and gradually by regular people. It was in 2000 that DVD really started to take off, quickly eating up the home-video market and replacing VHS. But Wal-Mart, a bellwether of average American spending habits, didn't stop carrying VHS tapes altogether until 2006.

Why is that relevant? Because it means the typical American consumer had only been using DVDs for a little while -- a decade at the very most, and usually more like five or six years -- before Blu-ray came around. We just replaced our videos with DVDs, and now you want us to switch to something else?? Combine that with a lousy economy and it's no wonder people are hesitant to spend money.

I can speak from personal experience here. I am wary of switching to Blu-ray. The players are still too expensive, and so are the discs. Maybe I'll make the transition when the prices come down -- but then again, what if the next big technology is right around the corner, waiting to make Blu-ray obsolete, too? The amount of time between leaps forward keeps decreasing. VCRs became prevalent in the early to mid 1980s; DVD exploded about 15-18 years later; Blu-ray showed up just seven or eight years after that. At the rate we're going, Blu-ray's replacement will be arriving, like, tomorrow.

And what might Blu-ray's replacement be? Nothing -- as in, no discs at all, but purely digital content. The music industry has already done this, with sales of actual CDs way down and digital downloads, through iTunes and other outlets, way up. Netflix allows subscribers to watch thousands of movies and TV shows instantly, either on their computers or, with the help of third-party devices like Roku, on their TVs. Amazon offers a wide selection of video-on-demand, too, where customers can either rent or buy digital downloads of movies. (Roku owners, of which I am one, can watch Amazon stuff on their TVs, too.) All the cable and satellite companies offer video-on-demand, both rentals and sales.

So far, all you can get are the movies themselves, without the bonus features like director's commentaries and deleted scenes. But once that supplementary material is available, why will anyone need to buy the actual discs? It's much more efficient to store it all on a hard drive -- or, better yet, to store it on someone else's hard drive (at Netflix or Amazon headquarters, for example) and simply have access to it whenever you want. It seems inevitable that that's where we'll wind up eventually. The only question is whether we'll keep buying DVDs and Blu-rays in the meantime.

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Eric D. Snider (website) would ideally just have a movie theater in his house.

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