2010 Gadget Census — The IET

Kris Sangani:

Video cassette recorders were still common ten years ago. However, in the early part of the noughties they were phased out and replaced by DVD players. Major retailers such as Dixons stopped selling them in 2004. However, now the DVD player market is now expected to decline rapidly as consumers are expected to upgrade to HD-capable Blu-ray players or may be even ditch optical technology completely and just rely on the time shifting capabilities of the their DVRs which are often incorporated into the set-top boxes provide by their cable or satellite provider.

That's confusing things a bit. VCRs were for both recording content off broadcast TV and playing bought content such as movies. DVRs only deal with recording broadcast TV and DVD and Blu-ray players only really deal with playing back bought content. Read-write DVDs didn’t really catch on since DVRs incorporated built in hard disks.