DVD Demystified

The World Before DVD
33
MCA/Universal and Disney studios sued Sony in 1976 in an attempt to
prevent home copying with VCRs. Eight years later, the courts upheld consumer
recording rights by declaring Sony the winner. Studios are fighting
the same battle today with DVD but have switched to trying to change the
technology and the law.
In 1978, Philips and Pioneer introduced videodiscs, which actually had
been demonstrated in rudimentary form in 1928 by John Logie Baird. The
technology had improved in 50 years, replacing wax discs with polymer
discs and delivering an exceptional analog color picture by using a laser to
read information from the disc. The technology got a big boost from General
Motors, which bought 11,000 players in 1979 to use for demonstrating cars.
Videodisc systems became available to the home market in 1979 when
MCA joined the laserdisc camp with its DiscoVision brand. A second
videodisc technology, called capacitance electronic disc (CED), introduced
just over 2 years later by RCA, used a diamond stylus that came in direct
contact with the disc—as with a vinyl record. CED went by the brand name
SelectaVision and was more successful initially, but eventually failed
because of its technical flaws. CED was abandoned in 1984 after less than
750,000 units were sold, leaving laserdisc to overcome the resulting stigma.
JVC and Matsushita developed a similar technology called video high density
or video home disc (VHD), which used a grooveless disc read by a floating
stylus. VHD limped along for years in Japan and was marketed briefly
by Thorn EMI in Great Britain, but it never achieved significant success.
For years, laserdisc was the Mark Twain of video technology, with many
exaggerated reports of its demise as customers and the media confused it
with the defunct CED. Adding to the confusion was the addition of digital
audio to laserdisc, which in countries using the PAL television system
required the relaunch of a new, incompatible version. Laserdisc persevered,
but because of its lack of recording, high price of discs and players, and
inability to show a movie without breaks (a laserdisc cannot hold more than
1 hour per side), it was never more than a niche success catering to
videophiles and penetrating less than 2 percent of the consumer market in
most countries. Laserdisc systems did achieve modest success in education
and training, especially after Pioneer’s bar-code system became a popular
standard in 1987 and enabled printed material to be correlated to randomaccess
visuals. In some Asian countries, laserdisc achieved as much as 50
percent penetration almost entirely because of its karaoke features.
Despite the exceptional picture quality of both laserdisc and CED, they
were quickly overwhelmed by the eruption of VHS VCRs in the late 1970s,
which started out at twice the price of laserdisc players but quickly dropped
below them. The first video rental store in the United States opened in