Laserdisc Research Paper

The VHS format was massively popular and influential and it changed the way people watch movies. VHS's successor, the DVD, was not quite as much of a game changer, but it still had a huge impact on the home video market.

DVD came on the scene in the late 1990s, but the story actually begins in the early 1960s. In 1961, optical recording technology was patented by David Paul Gregg and James Russell. It wasn't until the 70s that progress was seen on this front and in 1978 the Laserdisc format was released. Laserdisc was the major predecessor to DVDs, but it never really gained widespread popularity, due to its numerous drawbacks. The discs were massive and you couldn't even fit a whole movie on one side of a disc. Laserdisc never challenged
By August of that year, Warner was selling DVDs across the country in most of the major retail stores such as Best Buy and Tower Records. That September, Disney announced they would be putting their films on DVD as well.

The year after that, in 1998, Europeans could finally buy DVDs. At this point, the impending dominance of DVDs was becoming clear. By that May, 1000 movies had been released on the format and by the end of the year, almost 1.5 million houses in the United States had players and DVDs were responsible for $350 million in revenue.

1998 also saw the founding of Netflix, which many know as a streaming service, but got its start mailing DVDs to people.

In 1999, DVDs finally hit stores in Australia. There was also a major milestone hit as the Titanic DVD became the first DVD to sell a million copies. Later that year The Matrix went even higher in selling 1.5 million. Furthermore, by the end of 1999 two million DVD players had been sold.

September of 1999 saw Blockbuster announce that they would start renting DVDs, which was another huge milestone. Another big moment was in October when Disney released Pinocchio as their first
Part of this was because I rarely rewatched films as I grew older, unlike in my childhood when I'd watch the same movie endlessly.

It was also because of streaming services like Netflix and the ability to easily torrent whatever I wanted, Spending $20 on a home version of a movie I may never watch again just didn't seem to make sense anymore, and by my mid-20s, I barely bought DVDs.

I was also a late adopter on Blu-Ray as I didn't get a player until I bought a Playstation 4 in 2015. I still only have one Blu-Ray, Birdman, but I hope to change that soon.

The relatively minimal difference between Blu-Ray and DVD shows the basic concept of DVD is difficult to improve upon. A Blu-Ray is basically just a DVD in HD, and it's hard to come up with potential features that might need to be added.

Having said that, I might be a bit biased as I'll always have a nostalgic soft spot for the DVD format. And every once in awhile, I'll still get some use out of those old discs. They come in pretty handy when the internet goes out and it's fun to show a friend one of your favorites they haven't