I seldom take pleasure in reading the obituaries, but Variety’s obituary on the death of the VHS videotape format brought a smile to my face and joy to my heart.  Here’s an excerpt:

After a long illness, the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes in the United States. The format was 30 years old.

No services are planned.

The format had been expected to survive until January, but high-def formats and next-generation vidgame consoles hastened its final decline.

“It’s pretty much over,” concurred Buena Vista Home Entertainment general manager North America Lori MacPherson on Tuesday.

VHS is survived by a child, DVD, and by Tivo, VOD and DirecTV. It was preceded in death by Betamax, Divx, mini-discs and laserdiscs.

 Apparently the big retailers and video stores have pretty much decided to eliminate the shelf-space they’ve devoted to VHS — making room, no doubt, for the coming wave of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs, not to mention a dizzying inventory of new DVD releases (which this week included such durable classics as “My Little Pony: The Movie” and the sixth season of the “Golden Girls”).

In corporate and institutional video, where we and our clients mostly live (during the week, anyway), maybe this will signal the end of the clunky old “video cart” with a tired VHS deck and a poorly-tuned monitor that get wheeled in to a meeting everytime someone wants to view a video program.  These actually still exist in some number, witness the fact that a corporate client recently asked for 20 copies of their program in VHS to cover these applications.

In the corporate market, though, a combination of the DVD format, near-universal adoption of DVD readers inside PC’s, and especially broadband video have conspired to virtually wipe out demand for VHS.  And finally corporate America is waking up to a new dawn of how video can be distributed and watched — by employees and customers alike.