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Answerman - Why Are DVDs and Blu-rays Sold As Combo Packs?

My point is simply that given today's prices there seems little reason to hang on to DVD. What's the motivation to do so? To save a buck or two per disc and avoid buying a $30 player? If my budget was tight enough that a couple of bucks mattered then I don't think I'd be buying non-essentials like entertainment at all.

I don't have a problem with old formats. Heck, the majority of my anime is on laserdisc of all things. My point is that if you're making a new purchase for a title that's in print and you have the choice between BD and DVD there seems to be little reason, other than stubbornness, to choose DVD these days. I'm sure some people have special circumstances that make that choice different for them, and that's fine. But generally speaking the choice of DVD over BD seems odd. Will people be able to keep playing DVDs after the format is dead? Of course, just the same as I manage to keep playing LDs long after that format died. But why make things more difficult on yourself when you don't have to? It's one thing to be forced to use an old format for out-of-print collectables you can't get any other way, or if you already have a large extant library that you don't want to (or can't afford to) repurchase. But when you are making new purchases all that goes out the window. When you can choose between two formats which are very close in price but one has obvious advantages in terms of future-proofing as well as quality, it seems illogical not to choose that one.

@Shiflan

I agree with you that people should be moving to Blu-ray if they are able to. I just don't think that backward compatibility will disappear anytime soon. If new players can be sold as cheap as $30 the parts necessary to maintain such compatibility can't be all that expensive. I think it is more likely that a new format will replace Blu-ray before that happens.

Oh, people will hang on to using DVDs over Blu-Rays if they don't consider watching things in HD a high priority. I explained it myself: Our (as in me and the other people in this household) TV can play HD, but it's been broken for over a decade because no one in the house considers it a big enough deal to get it repaired or buy a new TV. Its SD still works fine. We're okay with that.

Everyone is a downstream consumer (or nonconsumer) in some things. I don't think anyone is an upstream consumer in everything they purchase. I am an upstream consumer in some other things. I have a $5,000 pinball machine in my garage, for instance. You likely would not be willing to spend that much on a pinball machine, but I would, and I did.

I don't even feel bad saying this. How can people still watch or hell even prefer DVDs over blu-rays? Y'all have had 13 years to switch over. HDTVs and bluray players are so cheap you can afford them on minimum wage. There really are no excuses at this point. The only excuse is if you switched to strictly digital and have forsaken hardcopies in my opinion.

There's been a movement to retro tech of late, with more and more people buying vinyl, digging out their old mixtapes. I think there might be a niche market for retro TV technology.

Yep, I understand that completely. But that was not the argument I was making. My point was that even if you don't care about HD vs. SD video quality, Blu-rays still offer another unrelated benefit of being more future-proof because they are the more modern format whose support is likely to be maintained longer. The higher resolution might not be a selling point to you, and that's totally OK, but wouldn't the longer lifetime of the format be one? Especially when the cost difference is marginal?...Given the goal is to maintain a library for future watching, would it not make more sense to purchase the format which will maintain that watchability for a longer period of time?

That is certainly possible. I have a few friends who are really into retro gaming, and in that hobby CRTs are still king, especially the Sony Trinitron studio monitors. Retro gamers will pay a great deal of money for those since they were the highest resolution CRT sets you could get, and they also have component input (RGB). Old consoles like the NES and SNES are easily modded to output component video and the result looks absolutely amazing.

I have no idea how large that market might be, but I suspect it could be significant given the size of the retro gaming market these days.

How true that is will depend on knowledge that neither you or I know, as a format will continue to stay on the market for as long as it's profitable.

If there are many others like me for whom resolution is not worth anything unless it's free, and Blu-Rays continue to be priced higher than DVDs, then that means the DVD format will be staying for the time being.

Probably not the Sony Trinitron that we have in our house. I can't exactly pinpoint its age, but looking it up, it seems to be from roughly Gerald Ford's presidency (and certainly before I was born). It has dials and a wooden frame, and I can't lift it as it's so big and heavy. I used it to play my Xbox 360 on it until the 360 broke during a power outage. The Trinitron still works. That's a rather extreme example though, but I appreciated how technology during that time was built to last, at least more so than today. (I know planned obsolescence has been a thing since at least Henry Ford's time.)

There are many reasons why people would buy CRT TVs though. I mentioned before I worked in a thrift shop--you know, the kind spoken of in the Macklemore song

For the record, retro gamers prefer CRTs due to there being zero input lag. Modern HDTV manufacturers have been getting better about this, but there is still a nonzero amount of it. Video games nowadays are built to compensate for that, but not games made for the CRT era. As many games during then relied on razor-sharp timing to proceed, the existence of input lag is a dealbreaker due to some games becoming unplayable if upscaled to HD through external hardware.