In the mid 1970s, videotape was a rising star, and the business model that became home video was growing into the runaway business model it would become. At this time, vinyl discs were the norm for audio, with cassette tape a more convienent "on the go" format. Several companies began to work on a "video disk" format, to be an alternative to, or replacement for, video tape.
Why ?
The invention of video tape was one of the truly rare strokes of genius the technical world has seen. The ability to record video on a magnetic tape was a difficult problem solved by Ampex Corporation in 1951. In 1976, the Betamax and VHS formats started their famous war for the home videotape format king. However, video tape, along with cassette tapes, had a fundamental disadvantage vs. disc based formats. A disc can be manufactured by a press or injection mold. A tape must be recorded from one side to another on reels. Although high speed recording processes for tape have been developed, there were simply to many advantages to the basic process for manufacturing. A disc can be pressed out in seconds. It can be manufactured on standard equipment used for other plastic items. The quality and repeatability of disc manufacture is much better than tape.
In the 1970s, several companies were looking to produce such a "video disc". It would be much cheaper than video tape, higher in quality, and would not be recordable, only playable. This last would not seem to be an advantage, but to Hollywood, which wanted to produce movies for the public, it seemed perfect. In fact, the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, was gearing up a virtual war against video tape, with the idea that it encouraged copying as much as distribution of movies. In short, it was hoped that the videodisc would start the same kind of revolution that vinyl discs had for audio, when records became a runaway success in the early 1900's.
There were several proposals for a video disc format, even one that used a "needle" and "grove" system as did audio records. However, a farsighted company called MCA was working on a technological space shot: a polycarbonate 12" disk that read via laser beam. The technology hurdles were massive for the time. The disc would have to be turned out to unprecedented accuracy, and then coated with aluminum on one side to make it reflect the laser beam light.
In fact, it was very difficult technology to master, and MCA ran into money and technology problems before it was over. In the end, the video disc did come about, but by the time it did, VHS was firmly entrenched as the home video format of choice. Although videodiscs did offer better quality playback, it never established the critical mass of players and titles required. The inability to record certainly did not help the format. In the end, the videodisc never had more than a small videophile market.
The video disc might seem to have fathered the modern DVD, but technology does not work in a straight line. Instead, it took a dramatic, and fateful left turn. While working on the video disc, MCA entered into joint agreements with Phillips Electronics of the Netherlands, one of the largest electronics companies in Europe, and the world. Phillips was working on a much smaller problem than trying to put movies on a plastic disc. Phillips used the technology to place a standard audio record on a 5 inch disc. Although the 5 inch audio disc was a much less aggressive target than a 12 inch video disc, the "Compact Disc" had one huge advantage over its predecessor: it was completely digital.
The result was a ground wave that has never really stopped. MCA got the largely unsuccessful laserdisc, and gave away the "useless" rights to other, less interesting uses for the technology. Phillips had a runaway hit with CDs, and started a groundwave of technology that still continues today.
In the 1980s, CDs killed off the vinyl disc, brought cassette tapes to the brink of destruction, and started a whole new direction as a computer media. In the early 1990s, CD technology had advanced quite a bit, and a whole new technology, digital video compression, was available to create the next "ultimate" product, the fully digital video disc. It turns out Hollywood, and electronics manufacturers, had never really forgot the idea of a cheaply manufacturable disc for video use. Why would the idea fly now, when VHS had stunted the growth of laserdisc before it ? The new "DVD"s would be all digital, with much better quality than VHS. They would be small, in fact, the same size as the immensely popular CDs. Finally, they would support viewing of "widescreen" formats, which had helped the popularity of laserdiscs as well.
DVDs did not, in fact, have a smooth start. Several different approaches existed to getting the amount of information required onto the disc:
In typical electronics industry fashion, the different parties threatened to create separate, and competing, disc formats. However, Hollywood, whose films, after all, would be needed for any DVD format, demanded that the DVD makers get together and agree on a single standard. The result was the "DVD Forum". Their mission was simple. Make a single DVD format, no 'if's, 'and's or 'but's.
What the DVD forum did was very predictable. They incorporated all three methods into the "winning" format. To be more precise, they adopted the finer feature DVDs as the main DVD data solution, with double sides and layers as further manufacturing options. This made sense at that time, since double sided discs and layered discs were not, at that time, practical to manufacture.
Besides simply avoiding a format war, the "grand alliance" of DVD formats solved several growth problems in DVDs. At 6 gigabytes, a single layer, single side DVD was a massive improvement on the 650 megabyte capacity of a standard CD. However, it was not quite enough to encode longer movies unless they were cut down or reduced in quality. In addition, the DVD itself created a new demand for "extras", such as documentaries on the making of the film.
In the late 1990's, High Definition Television finally made its debut. HDTV did not have a smooth road. The original Japanese HDTV system was analog, and hogged so much bandwidth that its demise was inevitable. The USA standard for digital TV, including HDTV, was lambasted as a "bastard standard" with patent giveaways to the participants and severe reception problems. However, like color TV did in the 1960s, HDTV keeps growing at a steady, and seemingly unstoppable pace, abet with a frustrating lack of an exponential curve.
By the year 2002, it was obvious that the unstoppable improvements in CD/DVD technology would produce yet another, dramatically higher capacity storage disc. It was equally obvious that the first, best use of such a disc would be to establish an HDTV movie distribution format. The big improvement that enabled the next generation of DVD was the blue laser diode.
In fact, blue LEDs have been a thorn in the electronics industries' side since the invention of the LED (Light Emitting Diode). Of the primary colors, red, green and blue, blue had proved impossible to manufacture. The reason why is the same reason it is so useful. Blue is at the high end, the high frequency end, of the visible spectrum, and getting LEDs to "vibrate" at such high frequencies was not an easy task. The advent of the blue LED changed everything for the electronics industry. Suddenly, by combining red, green and blue LEDs, they could produce white light, and perhaps be a candidate for the replacement of other lighting methods with the ultra efficient light of an LED. In addition, the achievement of all of the primaries meant that any color could be produced. Now huge, outdoor full color LED displays could be produced.
The high frequency of the blue laser LED meant that much higher capacity could be placed on a "super" version of the DVD. In fact, whereas a DVD stores 6 gigabtes at maximum on a single layer, blue laser DVDs can store 23 gigabytes on the same single layer. This is, by no coincidence, enough to store a full high definition movie. It is small wonder that the name of the format is virtually certain, even if its technological details are not: HD-DVD.
As happened with the original DVD format, several disagreements exist on what the HD-DVD format should look like:
Just as before, all the parties are threatening to go their separate ways. So is this a repeat of the start of DVDs ? Well, there are a lot of things different this time around:
Although the idea that Hollywood might step forward, once again and demand a single compatible format for high definition movies is possible, they may be in no hurry to introduce a HD-DVD format. DVDs are making tons of money, and a later HD-DVD format might simply cause people to buy the same movie over again. In addition, this is the MPAA's chance to get copy protection for any HD-DVD format right, instead of repeating the fiasco of having the protection broken quickly and trivially, as it was done for DVD.
There is one reason to be very optimistic about the future of HD-DVD. If Hollywood gets the copy protection for HD-DVD right, there will be a lot of incentive to move quickly to replace DVDs with technically superior HD-DVDs to reduce pirating of DVDs. This would be the "win-win" situation for consumers and Hollywood.
Links
http://www.hddvd.org/hddvd/difformatsblueray.php
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15792
http://www.dvdforum.com/forum.shtml