Martin O'Donnell pointed out a Reuters article published last week that declared the home video cassette recorder dead. The article cites several reasons for the pronouncement:

• Dixons, one of the UK's biggest electronics dealers, has announced that it will stop selling VCRs after selling them for 26 years,
• British police report that VCRs are often not taken in robberies, and
• 450 million households worldwide will have at least one DVD player by 2008, according to industry estimates.

There are plenty of indications that the VCR is on its way out in the United States as well. Stop by your local Blockbuster and you'll find that there are fewer VHS tapes available every day.

I want to take the VCR off my home theater component stack, but then I wouldn't have a way to archive a program that I've recorded on my TiVo. Maybe it's time to upgrade to a TiVo with a built-in DVD burner, like the HUMAX DRT800 DVD Recorder / TiVo Series2 DVR Combo. This would allow me to burn a copy of a program that one of my relatives missed, like last night's episode of Overhaulin' with Lance Armstrong, and loan it to them. Currently, this is the biggest use of the VCR that's connected to our home theater.