DVD Players, Digital Cameras Will Soon Have The Fate Of Your Old TV
When we think of obsolete technology, things like VCRs, film cameras and old box TVs quickly come to mind. But even more recently launched (and bought) items like DVD players, digital cameras and iPods have now all passed their adoption peaks. A recent research conducted by Roy Morgan Research showed that Australian households are perhaps just throwing DVD players, digital cameras and iPods away.
In 2000, 1 in 40 had a DVD player. Just four years later, over half of homes had one, and by 2008 they were in 75% of homes. And then… decline. While some households, of course, were only then buying their first DVD player, these late-adopters were outnumbered by those discarding (or recycling) them. Since the 2008 peak, over 800,000 homes got rid of (at least one) DVD player.
It was a similar story for digital cameras. From 2000 to the peak in 2009, almost 5 million households (60%) got a digital camera. By then, though, you could take a photo on a phone and display it directly to your social network. So half a million homes chucked their digital cameras away.
And because we can now carry music on our phones, household iPod ownership seems also to have peaked after a decade of yearly growth. In 2013 2.8 million homes (32%) had at least one iPod—but over the next year this declined by 117,000 to 30% of households.
But the rate we’ve discarded DVD players and digital cameras is no match for how quickly we got rid of our old box TVs when flat screens came in. In 2000, almost 6.7 million homes (94%) had an old, non-flat TV. Today, it’s only a little over a million homes (a little over 11%), and 7 million (78%) contain (at least one) flat screen TV. 3D TVs, however, have been slower to take off: since 2010, around 950,000 homes got a 3D TV (almost 11%).
So just as homes with VCRs still outnumber those with Blu-Ray Players, those with non-flat television sets still (just barely) outnumber those with 3D TVs-but the trends suggests this should finally change in 2015.