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Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

It has been a decade since I owned a computer with a dvd drive and similarly long since I had to use a dvd at all, and I'm much more of a techie than the average person.

The simple fact is that most people by now don't even have the means to play dvds.

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You say you're more of a techie than the average person, so it follows that you have no use for a DVD drive. What about the millions of other people that have had a perfectly fine DVD player in their homes for several years?

It isn't just DVD players. I've never purchased a standalone player, it came built in on my Playstation. It's only in the most modern generation of consoles that you have a choice to buy a disc drive-less version.

The counter point to that is that DVDs look terrible on modern 60" TVs. You don't have to be a techie to have one of those. Even my 93 year old grandmother has one.

Movies and TV shows before 2008 weren't commercially available in resolution above DVD quality, unless special efforts were made to upscale and re-release them.

"Upscale" is the wrong word here. The film is scanned at a higher resolution. If it was shot on tape then yes it has to be upscaled but almost no films were shot on tape.

By more of a techie, I mean to say that I am capable of buying an external reader and dealing with many more hurdles if needed to get something done (eg to read a dvd). So not having a built-in drive would've been less of a hurdle for me, if I had needed to read a dvd.

I have never been a TV console gamer (always been a handheld person), so I concede that point.

I don't think the Netflix DVD customer base is on the go all that much. If anything I would guess they are the segment most likely to still have a cable TV subscription, and do all their media watching at home on a TV.

Being a "techie" is irrelevant. It is straightforward to get a disc player if someone wants it. You clearly don't want it. But if someone does, the lack of tech knowledge is barely a barrier. I would guess people that are less tech savvy are more likely to still use discs to be honest.

I was pointing to being a 'techie' because in my experience, with non-techies, it isn't that obvious to just buy a reader/player.

My parents for instance were surprised to learn that the reader didn't need to be built into the laptop and could be a separate usb thing. They just figured that they'd need to pay for a service to get the discs converted to files on a flash drive similar to how they had previously done for taped videos rather than thinking that they can just buy a reader.

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