The "DVD" acronym originally stood for "Digital Versatile Disc." The first DVD to ship more than 1 million units was "Titanic." And when Disney released "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" on DVD in October of 2001, it sold 1 million copies. In one day.
These are just a few of the fun facts Southern California journalist Thomas K. Arnold unearthed for the two-part series on the 25th anniversary of the DVD that he wrote for the March and April editions of Media Play News, a publication devoted to the home-entertainment industry.
But the most stunning thing about the series is not the reminder that when Netflix founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph offered to sell the company to Blockbuster for $50 million, Blockbuster turned them down. It is the fact that in this age of endless streaming entertainment, the DVD is still around and still worth celebrating.
