How did formats die in the past?

[clyon]

This is a question for people (customers) that have been thought other format 'wars' or formats that died out. Tring to see if there is any parallels of dead fromats of the past & now.

VHS vs Beta & LaserDisc

For those around at the time:

Was there any signs that the format was going to die before it died? Like for Beta vs VHF was there a slow reduction of titles to rent & VHS slowly took over or did it mostly happen over night?
How did you find out that VHF won? (firesales, newpaper/news, tapes taken off the rake over night, ect....)


LaserDisc, as a customer what do you think was the 'down fall', advertising, players, timing, quality, lack of diffrent manufacturers, content?



Hope you get what I am tring to say & get too....

[GregBlu5]

Originally Posted by clyon

This is a question for people (customers) that have been thought other format 'wars' or formats that died out. Tring to see if there is any parallels of dead fromat of the past & now.

LaserDisc, as a customer what do you think was the 'down fall', advertising, players, timing, quality, lack of diffrent manufacturers, content?

Hope you get what I am tring to say & get too....

Since I was heavily into laserdisc technology for at least a decade and a half, four significant events were quite noticable that made it clear the end was nigh:

1) Tower Records (when there used to be a Tower Records retail outlet): They had a laserdisc section that was quite robust for much of the mid-90's on. However, with the advent of DVD, you saw that laserdisc section begin to shrink, noticably, over a very few months' time. (Of course, so did the VHS section of their stores, too, as DVDs expanded rapidly with more and more titles coming out that required shelf space.)

2) In Denver, there was a laserdisc exclusive store: Laserland. It had been doing quite well, but then it suddenly closed and moved to a *much* smaller location; and then it vanished altogether. All within a year or so.

3) Columbia House had a laserdisc club that I had spent heavily in over much of the 90's. They simply slowed and stopped their catalogues, along with Tower and Laserland, because Pioneer must have seen the writing on the wall and new movie titles simply ceased to be produced. (I'm trying to recall the final laserdisc titles I bought before the whole thing entirely collapsed, but I can't remember at the moment). I do recall that it was the DVD combo of the 70's films, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, which had never been on laserdisc, that caused me to finally invest in a DVD player and begin to buy DVDs, and join Columbia House's DVD club as an alternative when the Laserdisc club stopped. Had to have been the later 90's.

4) Pioneer even produced laserdisc/DVD combo players near the end. But that likely didn't much slow the downward spiral.

-Greg

[Trebar]

I was kinda late on the laserdisc scene ('90) but I always assumed that it was marketed to the audio/videophile in the 80's. It was never priced to compete against the VCR and since it could not record, it really wasn't an apples to apples comparison anyway. The movies were primarily in letterbox format and that didn't seem to appeal to the average 20" TV customer either.

The only place it had any market share was in Japan and it still has a loyal following even after DVD and Blu-Ray were introduced.

In the U.S. it typically was only advertised in male demographic magazines touting the superior quality...I remember a few in Playboy in fact. It was just never priced to sell nor was there any attempt to mass market it to the general public. Also having to flip the disks manualy for the first 8 years the format was released was not a big selling point either

[SNAP]

As a huge colletor(512) of LDs(still)I can tell you why it died. First, it never became a mainstream format. In the 20 yeras it was around only 1 million players were sold. It was a format for videophiles only. A lot of the public didnt like the size of the discs, the letterboxing, lack of recording capabilities...ect.
Once DVD players came on board that was the end of Laserdisc.
To show you the difference 1 million LD players in 20 years. To date about 90 million DVD players sold.

[bluperch]

Heh ... I still come across a lot people who don't "get" letterbox. They still think nothing is wrong with pan-n-scan.

[stockstar1138]

can somebody explain the difference between letterbox and pan-n-scan. i hardly remember dvd a and sacd.

[tron3]

Originally Posted by stockstar1138

can somebody explain the difference between letterbox and pan-n-scan. i hardly remember dvd a and sacd.

Letterbox gives you those black bars top and bottom of the screen to preserve the aspect ratio of the image. It was mostly for 4:3 TV, but you can still see it on 16:9 HDTV.

Pan-n-scan is akin to full screen, where the screen image is pre-panned to shoot the section of the screen which best preserves the scene. Unlike what the name implies, you don't have control over it. At least, not what I have seen.

[Porscheman]

we all remember DIVX... that was Circuit City's single shot at developing a new format. That just died out of my opinion, stupididty. A format that was pushed by a retailer....ugh..

what killed Beta? Was it the studios? I thought it was the players?

[SNAP]

Letterboxing is when the WHOLE movie is shown. That's why you have black bars at teh top & bottom of the screen if the movie is larger thatn the aspect ratio of your tv. Pan & scan is when the movie is blown up to fit your screen and the movie is change and the camera electronically pans across the screen to get the whole image in. For example in a letterbox movie if 2 people are on opposite ends of the screen you'll see them both. In pan&scan, because the move is blown up, the camera pans across the screen to show them both.....but you'll never see them in the shot at the same time.

Originally Posted by stockstar1138

can somebody explain the difference between letterbox and pan-n-scan. i hardly remember dvd a and sacd.

[SNAP]

Correct........control is not an option & the pan & scan is done after the movie has been made.

Originally Posted by tron3

Letterbox gives you those black bars top and bottom of the screen to preserve the aspect ratio of the image. It was mostly for 4:3 TV, but you can still see it on 16:9 HDTV.

Pan-n-scan is akin to full screen, where the screen image is pre-panned to shoot the section of the screen which best preserves the scene. Unlike what the name implies, you don't have control over it. At least, not what I have seen.

[Bluray4Me]

Originally Posted by Porscheman

we all remember DIVX... that was Circuit City's single shot at developing a new format. That just died out of my opinion, stupididty. A format that was pushed by a retailer....ugh..

Divx was hilariously bad. I used to go into my local Circuit City and pull up www.divxsucks.com on their WebTV's.

[Phatjedi]

I still have about 15 or 16 LD's and a working Pioneer player. DVD killed it pretty much, but at the time, the picture and sound was in my opinion superior to VHS and some dvd at the time. Also I think what killed it was you could not put an entire movie on the disk. In other words you had to flip the disk (my playerd plays both sides, but with a good 20 - 30 second pause). Most movies needed at least 2 separate disk or more for a movie.
Not a good thing.



I still watch them every now and then.

[bdLuvr]

Originally Posted by Bluray4Me

Divx was hilariously bad. I used to go into my local Circuit City and pull up www.divxsucks.com on their WebTV's.

Funny thing about divx is that if I have to hear another reference to p@rn as the technology that drives formats (such as BD and HD-DVD), just remind the naysayers that divx is the widely used format to distro such media :P

[GregBlu5]

This is where the DUD camp really needs to worry. Regarding any product, shelf space and availability are significant. And that space is majorly impacted by sales. Any retail outlet, or catalogue, or rental location is going to stock what sells or rents--ie. what moves.

When Blockbuster kicked out HD. When Target stores and others begin to devote more shelf space to Blu than red. When more titles that people want come out in Blu than in Red. The end is nigh. (Even if it takes many months or a few years.)

We may already be seeing the beginning of the end for Red.

Now, as others have pointed out, Hi Def disks still need to take on, and defeat, SD disks, over time, once this first war is over. And, fortunately, regardless of how well built equipment is, eventually players/recorders break down and require replacement. Blu can be positioned to be those replacement devices because they are downwardly compatible and can make regular DVDs look better.

As I think many of us believe, the downward spiral of Red has already begun. We just feel that it ought to hurry up because we're feeling this whole experience every day. But as the months pass, and the more significant signs appear all around us (Universal possibly scoping out Blu manufacturing facilities, Warner talking exclusivity even when they temporarily recant, Tosh selling their devices on the uber-cheap), it may all make perfect sense to all of us by very early next year.

As I said in my earlier post, I could see laserdisc technology dying before my very eyes. I'd bought those precious discs from about the early 80's on, and I could see it all folding up and disappearing in just a few months' time.

-Greg

[tron3]

Originally Posted by clyon

This is a question for people (customers) that have been thought other format 'wars' or formats that died out. Tring to see if there is any parallels of dead fromats of the past & now.

VHS vs Beta & LaserDisc
...

VHS simply had everyone, except Sony, making a player. A big selling point was the ability to record at slower speeds and extend the record time up to 6 hours on T-120 tape. Better prices, wide scale adoption due to choice, and viola - VHS reigned supreme for decades. I am shocked it took so long to unseat it.

This blu-ray vs HD DVD war is different. I don't know who else makes HD DVD players besides Toshiba, but this war is being fought on a studio level.
Consumer adoption alone won't win this war. For the same reason you can't get America to agree on charged political issues.

Some demand quality, and the nay sayers say that 30gb is enough. Heck, sometimes 50 GB is barely enough. The idea is for America to stop doing what we been catering to for the past 20 to 30 years. STOP LISTENING TO PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE! We need to do what is right for the good of the country. Who cares what the idiots say, they can't be taken serious with half the rhetoric they spout. This is America, not PBS.

I fully expected Warner to stay neutral, but if Paramount and Universal follow suit, we can probably expect all of those studios to burn movies for the lowest common denominator, and convert it to bd.

Thank God for Disney and PS3. They are corner stones of blu-ray.

[Kirsty_Mc]

From what I recall Betamax was supported by Sony, Sanyo, Toshiba & NEC... all the rest supported VHS bar Phillipps (and I think Grundig) with their Video 2000 system.

Video 2000 bowed out early, as similar to the Compact Cassette and the Laservision it was a flipping format and had little support from the film companies and the electronics industry. After its demise Phillipps went VHS.

As far as Betamax was concerned, I believe NEC were first to switch to VHS, followed shortly by Toshiba. Sanyo stuck by Betamax for years, but eventually switched to VHS leaving only Sony, who finally abandoned the format for domestic use. They did however launch miniaturised Betamax in the form of Video 8, followed by Hi-8 which were very popular for Camcorders, however their video decks did not take off. Digital 8 followed, but was not a great success as DV stole the limelight.

As regards the VHS vs Betamax fight, then we were in a completely different age as video rental was the main business as opposed to sales with Laservision and DVD. I suppose that rental chains did not want to stock 2 different formats and VHS was the chosen format.

Technically Betamax was the superior format compared to VHS. Better picture quality, tape handling, functionality etc... However the recording capacity was slightly lower as it used a much more compact cassette. Betamax was I believe also designed to incorporate an early form of analogue copyright protection (much earlier than Macrovision), but this did not sway the studios to support Betamax and the technology was not fully incorporated into the machines.

VHS machines were cheaper to produce than Betamax. If you opened the flap on a Betamax and looked inside you were looking at a real professional piece of equipment. If you then did the same to a VHS deck it was quite a shock... cheap and nasty!!! VHS was also cheaper to produce as the patents were not policed with the same vigour as Sony policed the patents for Betamax. However when Betamax was defeated, these VHS patents were retrospectively policed vigorously.

These are my recollections of the battle back in the '80s. I had Betamax, lovely machines, always ahead of VHS... Better picture, better sound, first with stereo, first with HiFi sound, first with high bandwidth recording (Super Beta).

The worrying thing is that superior formats seem to lose . I hope Toshiba get truly hammered!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mattym]

betamax and minidisc didnt do well as public formats, but variations of both managed to become industry standard in the recording and television industry. Minidisc was still being used by BBC radio very recently and a flavour of betamax was used in TV too, so although as a public format they didnt gain mass adoption, as professional gear they both did.

[Spankey]

Laserdisc died because of one thing. DVD.

DVD offered a superior picture to LD, but it did fail in regards to audio where LD had DVD beat.

I think HD-DVD sees history repeating itself. Not enough people care about audio so lossless is no big deal to them. As long as they can offer a superior picture to DVD, at a cheap price, they feel they will win.

[bluperch]

Here's one person's take on why VHS won that earlier war: http://www.hometoys.com/article.php4?displayid=99.

Not mentioned in this article is what some believe was the reason: VHS produced longer-running tapes before Betamax did. I guess the original tapes were only an hour long. VHS was first-to-market with 2-hour and 4-hour tapes. It didn't make any difference to the public that you got better quality from Betamax because they felt the VHS picture was "good enough."

And that's why manufacturers better start bringing down BD player prices. The vast majority ain't going to care about lossless audio or 1080i versus 1080p. They want inexpensive players and movies. The video and audio will be "good enough" for them.

[EricJ]

Originally Posted by clyon

This is a question for people (customers) that have been thought other format 'wars' or formats that died out. Tring to see if there is any parallels of dead fromats of the past & now.

VHS vs Beta & LaserDisc

For those around at the time:
Was there any signs that the format was going to die before it died?

Wellll, sonny <wheeze!> sit up on Grampa's knee, and I'll tell you--
Oof, be careful of my Gettysburg sword!

Like for Beta vs VHF was there a slow reduction of titles to rent & VHS slowly took over or did it mostly happen over night?
How did you find out that VHF won? (firesales, newpaper/news, tapes taken off the rake over night, ect....)

"VHF" was winning long before people could even buy tapes (eg. new-release "Collector's edition" Raiders for $44.95)--
It was a slow reduction of titles, as Beta had promoted the idea of taping everything yourself in your own living room...But the maverick independent idea of selling presold movies, so you didn't have to, had already outstripped Beta's capacity for holding more than an hour of SP recording.

==Cause of death:
Misestimation of product purpose, lack of software saturation, inability to adapt to customer interest.

LaserDisc, as a customer what do you think was the 'down fall', advertising, players, timing, quality, lack of diffrent manufacturers, content?

I used to go seek out laserdisk rental stores on birthdays and special occasions, just because the players were so "neat"--
First, you had to find one--I knew of exactly three rental stores in a literally fifty-mile radius.
Mostly in snooty back college-sections of town, where the coffee and bookshops were, and where you could find the small niche of collectors who had bought a format you couldn't tape with, because it looked and sounded so great on an expensive home theater setup.
Later on, Siskel & Ebert (who were both rich and theater-geek enough to own one) defended laser-PQ and Criterion commentaries on their show, which, like most people in the 80's, was where I first realized, "Ohhh, that's the big deal about it! "

Problem is, this was before the '97-'99 days when the Internet could join together far-flung new DVD owners in the wilderness...
And if you were tech-geek enough, you could probably find some rare sought-after title released as a region-free (well, they all were, back then) NTSC Japanese import*, but you still had to live within said radius of a dedicated laserdisk boutique to special-order it. And there had to be enough sales and owners for those boutiques to stay in business, even in the bookshop-cafe sections of town.

(* - Give credit, however, that if there had been no imported Japanese laserdisk fans, there would be no anime industry in the US today. That was how fans first smuggled it in.)

==Cause of death:
Niche product marketed before its time, little to no mainstream customer awareness or availability.

(Want me to do DiVX, or is legend pretty clear on that one?)