CD Video

~ the obituary ~

They painted it gold so you would not mistake it for the thing it mostly was. A CD Video disc is the same 12 cm as any compact disc and about four fifths of what is on it is ordinary CD audio, playable in any player in the house. The gold was there to say that the remaining fifth was something else, and you needed a different machine for it.

That remaining fifth was analog LaserDisc video with a digital soundtrack, sitting on the outer part of the disc, and there was room for about five minutes of it. Six if you were generous. New Scientist in 1988 described that length as ideal for pop music, which is the sound of a magazine being polite about a constraint. The format could hold one music video and twenty minutes of songs, and Philips built a whole launch around that.

It never got a Rainbow Book, the color-coded specification series that defines every other member of the CD family. The reason is a small piece of industry rudeness: Philips demonstrated the format to the music business before consulting the other companies who had a stake in the compact disc, and those companies did not like the idea of putting region-incompatible analog video inside their clean digital format. So CD Video went out as an IEC standard instead and stayed slightly outside the family it was named after.

In 1987 I was three years old and nobody I later knew owned a LaserDisc player. What CD Video was selling arrived here by a completely different route: music video came through the air, off a satellite dish and later off a channel in the cable package, free once the equipment was paid for. Nobody was going to buy five minutes of it on a gold disc that needed a second machine.

~ the case file ~

~ what was on the gold part ~

Hold one up to the light and you can see the seam. The inner band and the outer band refract differently because they are two different encodings pressed onto one piece of plastic, digital audio in the middle and analog video around the edge. It is the most honest thing about the format: a compromise you can see with your eyes.

The Pioneer CLD-1010 from 1987 was among the first players that could read both halves. The problem was not that such machines did not exist, it was what they cost. The people who wanted a pop video on a disc were teenagers, and teenagers were not buying LaserDisc players. Philips also put the name on 20 cm and 30 cm LaserDiscs and colored those gold as well. Those held no CD-compatible audio at all and were simply LaserDiscs with a new sticker.

~ the name that got reused ~

The European angle explains most of the strategy. Philips had been trying to sell LaserVision in Europe since the late seventies and had moved somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand players on the entire continent, which is a rounding error. CD Video was a relaunch: drop the failed name, borrow the successful one, put the logo on everything. The rebranded discs carried digital sound, which meant they did not play on the analog-only European machines those few thousand owners already had.

By August 1990 the trade press was using the word failed in passing, as settled fact, while introducing a Japanese format called Video Single Disc that was meant to cost half as much. Philips stopped defending the analog approach and moved to MPEG-1 compression, which turned into Video CD in 1993. Same company, nearly the same name, and nothing compatible between them. The second one sold in enormous numbers across Asia and is the reason most people who hear CD Video think of the wrong thing.

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