Media Wonk

The CD at 25 - August 17, 2007

Friday marked the 25th anniversay of the first pressing of an audio CD, purportedly ABBA's The Visitors, about which probably the less said the better.

Twenty-five years is a good long run for an audio format, especially in this day and age. And indeed most of the write-ups had a mildly elegiac tone: After 25 years and more than 200 billion discs, the CD is gradually (or not so gradually) being supplanted by pure digital formats such as MP3, AAC and WMA.

But even as the CD fades into the 8-track bin at the flea market, it's footprints will still be visible throughout the consumer electronics and home entertainment businesses.

The CD was developed in the early 1980s by Sony and NV Philips and the first players arrived in the U.S. in late 1983. After some initial sniffing about its "cold sound" by audiophiles its small-size, durability and crackle-free audio quality won over the masses. The CD went on to be a hugely successful format, driven not only by new releases but by a vast LP-replacement business as well. Sony and Philips collected a nickel for every CD sold.

A decade later, when people started talking about putting movies on a 5cm optical disc, Sony and Philips saw an opportunity to keep the nickels rolling in for another generation of formats. They came up with a format that preserved the physical specifications of the CD, on which their nickel stream depended, but could store video. They called it a Multimedia CD, or MMCD.

Before they could commercialize it, however, they discovered that Toshiba and Time Warner were working on their own optical video disc design, based on a new physical spec. As the two sides rushed to complete the engineering, it became clear that the Toshiba/Time Warner system had a distinct advantage in storage capacity.

MMCD discs were capable of storing only 3.5GB of data, whereas the Toshiba/Time Warner entry weighed it at 5GB. The added capacity made it more suitable for full-length Hollywood movies given the compression formats available at the time (MPEG 2).

To make an immensely long and fascinating story short and dull, a pitched lobbying battle ensued as each side looked to line up support in Hollywood and among hardware makers. In the end, it became clear that Sony and Philips were going to lose, so they cut a deal to get some of their video technology incorporated into a "compromise" standard for what became the DVD format we know today.

The DVD went on to become one of the most successful consumer electronics formats in history, challenging even the CD. While Sony and Philips sold DVD players, and Sony's Columba Pictures division (now Sony Pictures) sold plenty of DVD movies, the nickle train had stopped. The DVD was based on the disc structure developed by Toshiba and Time Warner. And in optical disc-based entertainment formats, the physical spec is the bedrock IP on which the rest of the royalty stack is built.

Determined to recapture the dominant IP position they had in CDs, Sony and Philips, and soon joined by Matsushita, almost immediately set out to develop the next-generation format, one that would be based on a disc structure of their own design. A high-definition video format.

They called their invention Blu-ray Disc, in honor of the blue-violet laser used to read the data (CDs and DVDs use longer wavelength red lasers), and it was based on a radical new disc structure.

Once again, however, they discovered that Toshiba and Time Warner were working on their own design for a high-definition DVD, based on the same physical structure as standard DVDs (again, I'm compressing a HUGE amount of fascinating history into a few lines). Once again, the old adversaries threw themselves into trying to line up support from Hollywood and the other CE manufacturers.

This time, however, there would be no compromise. Having missed out on the nickel train from the DVD format, the Blu-ray developers were not about to give in on the physical format.

Backers of Toshiba’s HD DVD format, for their part, saw no reason to adopt Blu-ray’s radically new disc structure when the old DVD spec was working so well.

Attempts to negotiate a deal to head off the same format war so narrowly avoided last time were for naught. Both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD went to market. The rest is uninspiring history.

Happy Birthday, CD.
 

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