The news was abuzz was the story that Dixons is no longer going to be selling VCRs once its current stock has run out. This strikes me as a very suspicious move on their part, and I’m not sure what to make of it.
A couple of things spring to mind.
1) The margin on VCRs has come down enormously, with them going for as little as thirty quid if you shop around. They therefore probably don’t make as much money given the space they take up as other products.
2) Dixons themselves have refocused and are now seemingly focusing on selling smaller products like digital cameras, mp3 players and the like. They do sell televisions, but I’m guessing that these make up a smallish proportion of sales since Dixons tend to be town centre stores, whilst larger purchases are more likely to made from out of town stores with car parks.
The reality is that the video is not yet dead, because we don’t have a medium to replace it. Sky+ is doing well, but it and other hard disk recorders are their infancy at the moment. And if you do have a Sky+ and want to keep something, what do you record it onto?
Recordable DVD is seemingly the recordable medium of the future for keeping programmes. But at the moment it too is at an early stage, with competing technologies, and hit or miss products. The “ultimate” combo of hard disk combined with DVD recorder is still a pricey premium option. Cheap and cheerful they are not, even if £150 is now the lowest point of entry for these products.
But of course with millions upon millions of legacy tapes still out there, people are going to need VCRs for some time to come. Similarly, it doesn’t take much hunting to find cassette players and recorders – in Dixons for example.
The real reason for the Dixons announcement is likely to be a marketing reason trying to show, in the run up to Christmas, that Dixons is at the forefront of all things technological.