Just over ten years ago if you'd have asked someone what DVD was they'd have probably said it was something you needed to visit a specialist clinic for (a bit like Postman Pat SDS then). But DVD quickly became the viewing format of choice with it's superior picture quality and bonus features soon making video obsolete.
DVD isn't the first attempt to produce an advanced home video format: Laserdiscs had been around for donkeys years, but never really took off outside of the film enthusiast community. VCD was tried but failed quickly. DVD however is a different story.
There were some Doctor Who stories released on the Laserdisc format. A quick bit of research reveals the BBC released Revenge of the Cybermen & Brain of Morbius in the UK while Five Doctors and Day of the Daleks were released in the US. Later in the 90s Day of the Daleks, Ark in Space and Terror of the Zygons were released in the UK.
The first Doctor Who story released on DVD was in 1999 and was the special edition of The Five Doctors .... which was the first DVD I bought in 2000 when I got my first player, a Wharfedale 750 (fabulous machine, still occasionally use it today). Now there's a good 2 meter stretch of shelving in our living room groaning under the weight of Doctor Who DVDs. And thanks to The Doctor Who Restoration Team all sorts of Technomancy has been applied to the surviving Doctor Who stories from VIDFire to restore the video look to film, Reverse Standards Conversion to turn US videos back into a better looking UK format and Colour Recovery to literally pull the colour information out of black & white prints of colour stories.
Despite new high definition & storage capacity formats, DVD remains the format of choice for watching Doctor Who on.
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