Hard question to answer since you're comparing apples and sea urchins.
The "home theater market" is not identical to the "dvd player market". They overlap to some degree, but they're not the same thing. Home theater is older than DVD, for one thing. And a DVD player can be just a source of a video signal, a replacement for a VCR feeding a 13" television.
I would certainly expect a DVD player to be a component
included in a home theater today, but that wasn't always the case, and many a DVD player is sold every day to people who have never heard the term "home theater".
Home theater is almost defined more by
intent and apsirations than by an equipment list. A home theater is, as the name indicates, an attempt to recreate the theatrical movie-going experience at home - within the limits of one's budget and physical surroundings. Anything that gets beyond watching TV with the built-in 4" speakers in a brightly lit room is a step towards home theater. In the early days of this forum the members (whose own systems ranged from scavanged-bits-from-relatives or the junk yard to custom systems costing tens of thousands of dollars) arrived at this minimum definition of a home theater:
19" TV (or other size provided you could comfortably watch material in its original aspect ratio)
Stereo VCR
Amplifier or receiver
2 stereo speakers
That's it. That was an entry level home theater as defined on the HTF circa 1996.
Obviously as people got more and more into the hobby they'd go for more and better components, adding multi-channel sound (matrixed, analog Dolby Surround to start, Dolby Digital and DTS after adding that laserdisc player.) But while a VCR would be part of pretty much any home theater, obviously most VCRs were not being sold to the "home theater market". (The overlap between the laserdisc and home theater markets, at least in the U.S., was pretty much 100% though. Anyone who was enough of a cinephile to drop a couple of hundred bucks on a play-only, hard-to-find format like laserdisc was obviously into home theater.
)
Big screen TVs (especially rear projection) were also a big home theater item, but hardly exclusive to it. One factor in the gradual "mainstreaming" of home theater (and the eventual success of DVD in contrast to a niche format like laserdisc) was the proliferation of big screen TVs - but that was mostly driven by sports fans. So the "big screen TV" market was no more co-terminus with the "home theater market" than the VCR market - or the DVD player market today.
Regards,
Joe
