Why don't TVs have disc drives in them? (1 Viewer)

I'm surprised TVs don't have disc drives in them that can read DVD and/or Blu-Ray. It seems like a massive convenience, and if they made them swappable you could just upgrade when the technology changes. They have USB ports and WiFi, why not disc drives?

They did used to have TVs with built-in disc drives (DVD, and Blu-ray), though the screens weren't very big and they went by the name "laptops".

But since disc-based media is on the decline, these "laptops" often don't even have disc drives in them anymore (I was recently converted from a desktop PC computer at work to a snazzy new MacBook laptop and it has no disc drive whatsoever).

Standalone DVD and Blu-ray players (which solves the modularity part of your equation) have come down in price to the point that they are a nearly disposable component of the home theater system (much more so than the display - which most consumers replace only once every 5 years or more).

As you indicated, most large flat screen displays now support WiFi and thus are able to stream much of the same content that would otherwise be available on disc - albeit with some loss in quality - particularly in the audio formats supported by streaming services - but many people these days seem to value convenience over quality anyway.

Even before disc-based media became popular, they used to add "video cassette" drives to some TVs, but these TVs were also notorious for being low quality, generally on the smaller end of the size spectrum and had a reputation for unreliability to the point where if the cassette drive failed, repair often cost more than replacement (a trend which sadly still exists today with most Consumer Electronics).

All kidding aside, technology changes too fast to justify adding something like a disc drive to a display. In addition, displays are really only good for one thing - displaying video content. If you try and make a TV do much more than that, everything becomes compromised.

Really, the biggest reason for using disc-based media these days is to ensure that the quality (both audio and video) is top-notch.

The typical consumer's preference for convenience (and low cost) over quality has been demonstrated time and time again (Plasma losing out to LCD being the most recent example).

Anyone that values quality over convenience would (should) prefer a standalone player over a slimmed-down model that is shoehorned into a display.

Just my two cents, YMMV.

Jason Charlton said:

They did used to have TVs with built-in disc drives (DVD, and Blu-ray), though the screens weren't very big and they went by the name "laptops".

But since disc-based media is on the decline, these "laptops" often don't even have disc drives in them anymore (I was recently converted from a desktop PC computer at work to a snazzy new MacBook laptop and it has no disc drive whatsoever).

Click to expand...

We did have personal DVD players (with no TV's or computers in them), which fell by the wayside after...we stopped using DVD's on the go when everything went streaming.

I remember when we used to have small kids-room TV's with VCR slots in them--The VCR's were never as good as the top of the line models, and were just the minimum that you could cram in under a TV, but whenever they broke (and they would), they tended to stay broke, because, unlike a plug-in VCR, there was no way of replacing the player without fixing the whole darn thing.
Think that was true of some early built-in DVD/TV's, but don't think they stayed around long enough to notice.

They do have TVs with DVDs built in. I got one for my daughter before she went to college a few years back. I just did a search on Amazon for "tv with dvd" and a whole bunch popped up.