What year did the DVD become available to public?

The DVD (Digital Video Disc) became available to the public in 1996, when consumer DVD players and DVD-Video discs were released in Japan. However, it took several years for the DVD format to become widely adopted worldwide, as there was competition from other formats such as Video CD (VCD) and Super Video CD (SVCD). By 2000, DVD had become the dominant optical disc format for consumer video, and it continued to be popular until it was largely supplanted by Blu-ray Disc (BD) in the late 2000s.