LaserDisc

~ the obituary ~

laserdisc never reached turkey. when i was a child in the late eighties looking at the rental shop on our street, the shelves had vhs and bootleg vhs. nothing else. i learned about laserdisc much later, in college conversations about anime fans who had imported japanese editions of evangelion at art-object prices. it was a japanese living-room object that lived briefly in american and hong kong rental shops and skipped the rest of the world.

mca shipped the format in atlanta on december 11, 1978 under the name discovision. the disc was 300 millimeters across, the size of a vinyl record, and held about an hour of analog video per side. you flipped it. philips co-developed the early hardware and pioneer took over by 1980, putting its name on most of the players that would actually be sold. the picture was nearly twice the resolution of vhs, the audio went up to discrete digital surround on later releases, and the price was always wrong for the mass market.

in the united states the format never cleared two percent of households. about two million players were sold across thirty years. in japan the number was closer to ten percent of households by 1999, and in hong kong laserdisc was the dominant rental video format through the 1990s. when dvd arrived in 1996 the format had a few years left as a videophile and karaoke product before pioneer wound down the last factory order in july 2009.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the original 1978 launch was a botched joint venture between mca and ibm called discovision associates. the players broke a lot and the disc-pressing yields were terrible. by 1981 the studio relationships had fallen apart. pioneer bought into the venture and fixed the manufacturing. by the mid-1980s the format had been rebranded laserdisc and quietly turned into a niche premium product. by the mid-nineties laserdisc had become the format you bought a ridley scott criterion edition on, complete with director commentary years before dvd would invent the same feature.

~ what carried over ~

dvd inherited the laserdisc playbook wholesale. chapter selection and director commentaries started on laserdisc, with multi-angle scenes and alternate audio tracks layered on a few years later. the special edition cuts that filled dvd shelves in the late nineties were a laserdisc convention first. when dvd shipped in 1996 at one quarter of the disc size and roughly the same picture quality, the videophile market migrated overnight. the technical lineage runs from laserdisc through every optical successor that followed.

~ the funny part ~

the last meaningful laserdisc release was a karaoke title in japan in 2007. the format that had set the entire dvd standard for special editions ended its life as a karaoke delivery system in tokyo bars. pioneer's final player came off the line in july 2009, by which point youtube had been around for four years and the question of what physical media was even for had stopped being interesting. laserdisc lasted three full decades and lost every fight it picked outside japan, which is a more dignified obituary than most formats get.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »