Death of a Format

A fellow member of a film board I belong to drew my attention to the announced death, last week, of the laserdisc format, something which may not surprise anybody out there, unless it's the shock that the format wasn't already declared dead. Yet despite Wikipedia's opening sentence on the subject reading "The laserdisc is an obsolete home video disc format," it wasn't until last week when the Japanese company pioneer officially announced it would discontinue its final three laserdisc player models.

A few weeks ago, I came across a large section of used laserdiscs for sale in an area record store, which got me to thinking once again on the laserdisc format. My father worked for an electronics company and stayed ahead of the curve with home entertainment, which resulted in our owning a sound home video camcorder years before it became popular with families. We also, at one memorable point in the mid to late 80s, owned three different home video formats at once - a laserdisc player, a Beta machine, and a VHS machine. Our family was truly a marketer's wet dream.

The laserdisc was what first introduced me to the wonders of watching movies at home, and I can still remember the thrill I felt when a store employee at the local electronics store, called Van Vreede's, set up a laserdisc display of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to demonstrate the power of the technology. We purchased a player and began renting laserdiscs. They were huge. They had to be flipped over constantly (early versions could only hold 30 minutes of video per side, which resulted in 2 or even 3 discs sets being the norm). And even after we moved to Beta and VHS, we kept our disc player for rentals - even a child my age could tell that laserdiscs offered quality miles beyond the fuzzy tape of Beta or, Lord knows, the truly horrid VHS.

In fact, it was the advent and marketing of laserdiscs that helped popularize and revolutionize the notion of a home video market. While Beta and VHS were extremely limited in visual quality and the restricted format of tape itself, laserdiscs offered multiple options for features beyond the feature itself. In fact, it was the Criterion Collection's 1984 laserdisc release of Citizen Kane which introduced the entire concept of a "Special Edition" for home video releases. Their second release, King Kong, featured an audio commentary track alongside the main feature. These new features would become standard operating procedure for the home video industry, and few if any DVDs these days are released without some form of supplemental material (the day I saw David Spade's comedy Joe Dirt was being released on DVD with multiple commentaries was the day I realized everything at some point goes too far). And while DVD swallowed the laserdisc market well over a decade ago, there are plenty of film aficionados who prize their players and laserdiscs for the excellent editions of classic and contemporary films released in the now-obsolete format.

Laserdisc ultimately lost the format war with Beta/VHS (and Beta lost the war with VHS). In both cases, the superior product lost. There's always something faintly absurd about format wars, anyway - the recently-ceded battle between Blu-ray and HD shows how easily entire marketing divisions can be scrapped based upon hints of consumer preference (in Blu-ray's case, it was something as simple as PlayStation 3's incorporation of Blu-ray that destroyed HD). But I'm saddened by the fact that laserdisc players will no longer be released. After all, vinyl was declared dead long ago, yet the audience for records and sales of vinyl continue to grow. I hardly think laserdiscs would ever have seen a resurgence in popularity, but their impact on history has been huge.

For those interested in a nice tour of other obsolete home video formats and an accompanying history, check out this website, Total Rewind, complete with an interactive map and guide to the murky world of vintage VCRs.