Where old DVD formats go to die

What happens to all the old stuff?

Discarded computers, cell phones and televisions are often stripped for parts, reconditioned and resold or melted down in some end-of-life electronics processing plant.

Other artifacts of the ceaseless churning of media do not enjoy such adaptability.

They are, in fact, piteously irreducible.

We speak of unloved media formats such as VHS and cassette tapes; video games for discontinued consoles; and, increasingly these days, CDs.

Just this year, another format went the way of the eight-track: the HD DVD.

Mercifully, there is an afterlife for these electronic critters.

In the early 1990s, Ryan Kugler, president of a Burbank, Calif.-based company called Digital Video & Audio (DVA), jumped on a market opportunity to wring the last vestiges of profitability out of dead or dying formats.

Mr. Kugler’s home-entertainment closeout company buys surplus inventory from Hollywood studios and other media sources and sells them to all manner of interested parties across the country: dollar-discount retailers, flea markets, truck stops, zoos, museums, gift shops.

If you happen by the discount bin at Wal-Mart or a gas-station market, there’s a better-than-average chance it originated from one of DVA’s two giant warehouses outside Tampa, Fla. (The company temporarily rents storage space in other regions, as needed.)

Staggeringly, the company moves up to 22 million units a year, including movies, CDs, cassettes, books and toys.

Mr. Kugler says DVA already has sold a few million HD DVDs, the Toshiba-backed high-definition DVD format that was vanquished once and for all by Sony’s rival Blu-ray.

“It’s a fun business,” he says.

DVA, a family-run operation that generates about $25 million in annual revenue, began in 1989 as a used-video distributor. “Back then,” Mr. Kugler says, “video stores were opening up left and right.”

In 1994, he says the company received “an interesting call about a very large amount of new VHS Hanna-Barbera videos.” He bought the whole batch and resold it to Target.

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