DVD

From TARDIS Index File, the free Doctor Who reference.

For DVD releases pertaining to Doctor Who, see separate article.

DVD (digital versatile disc) was a digital-based physical visual media format used on Earth in the late 20th century and early 21st century.

Billy Shipton, acting on instructions received from the Doctor decades earlier, entered into the DVD authoring business after plying his trade in video publishing. In the mid-2000s, he arranged secretly to have a specially encoded Easter egg file added to each of 17 commercially released DVDs.

The file, when located by viewers, played a one-sided video message from the Doctor recorded in 1969 intended for Sally Sparrow. The message would be first noticed by Larry Nightingale (who worked in a DVD rental shop) and other Internet forum users, before finally being seen by Sparrow herself in the midst of her encounter with the Weeping Angels. Sparrow eventually realizes that the 17 DVDs containing the Easter egg consisted of her complete collection of DVDs at that time. The Easter egg file served an additional purpose; it transformed each encoded DVD into a special control disc good for a single one-way journey in the Doctor's TARDIS. When inserted into a DVD drive mounted to the control console, the file activated the TARDIS and sent it back to 1969 to be retrieved by the Doctor. (DW: Blink)

It was not revealed exactly what a viewer of one of the 17 DVDs needed to do in order to access the Easter egg.