Some advancements became so successful, whilst others found it hard to break the market.
One of these to not find commercial success is the LaserDisc (LD), which may become a surprise to many as it was the blueprint for CDs & DVDs.
Although the disc was invented in 1958 (patented in 1961 and 1990), it was during the 80s that the LaserDisc tried to break the home entertainment market, along with the VHS & BetaMax video systems.
Who can forget the excitement of putting together the Doomday Project? Launched in 1986 by the BBC, it was ambitious project to record a snapshot of everyday life across the UK. With many schools and organisations volunteering to have their items preserved for future generations to view. The medium used to record the information was the LaserDisc, due to the size of storage and the quality of pictures, etc. More to come on the Doomsday Project in a future blog entry.
So why didn't the LaserDisc become a success it should have?
Yes we had the video cassette, but this type of media storage was very limited and the quality was not the best. The LaserDisc was, after all, formatted for Digital Audio (this was introduced in 1985) and the picture quality was far superior.
The reason for the lack of commercial success was the cost of the hardware to play the Discs and also the limited number of "video" titles available. During it's height, the number of households in America to own a LaserDisc player was roughly 2 million (about 2%), whereas in Japan (it's biggest market) 10% of the households owned a player. Although these figures look impressive, they couldn't compete with the traditional video format.
However as the cost of production lowered and further advancements came about, LaserDiscs became DVDs, which is now being replaced by the BluRay discs. Looking back it's strange to see how this technological gadget did not do better considering it brought the concept of the DVD / BluRay to the buying public.
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