Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
Speaker 1: I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
Speaker 1: with How Stuff Works and I heart radio and I
Speaker 1: love all things tech and you know what, guys, Originally
Speaker 1: I thought this was going to be the last in
Speaker 1: an epic six part series about the history of the
Speaker 1: evolution of entertainment media and our relationship with it. But
Speaker 1: as it turns out, that was being uh optimistic. This
Speaker 1: is going to be part six of I think seven
Speaker 1: episodes now because there's just so much to say, and
Speaker 1: there's so much that goes into this and that that
Speaker 1: is reflective of our relationship with media and also the
Speaker 1: business of media. This is a really complicated, deep topic,
Speaker 1: and obviously I could have looked at launching a full podcast,
Speaker 1: not just an episode, but a full series around the
Speaker 1: technology of media and its evolution and our our relationship
Speaker 1: with it. That could have been, you know, a mini series,
Speaker 1: like a fifteen part mini series or something. But I
Speaker 1: do want to continue this and conclude it, so I'm
Speaker 1: hoping that in this episode of the next one, I'll
Speaker 1: be able to do that. We'll see how that goes.
Speaker 1: But in our last episode, I ended by talking about
Speaker 1: how DVDs rose up to take the torch from VHS,
Speaker 1: the VHS video cassette tapes, and how the DVD became
Speaker 1: the dominant form of media in the home theater space.
Speaker 1: But I ran out of time to talk about a
Speaker 1: few other interesting points about DVDs, such as why some
Speaker 1: entertainment companies were excited about the DVD format and some
Speaker 1: were reluctant to support it. Now, to understand all this,
Speaker 1: we need to think about the television industry at the
Speaker 1: time that the DVD was starting to to come about.
Speaker 1: And it's been a while since I've talked about television
Speaker 1: in this series, and in a much earlier episode, I
Speaker 1: talked about the birth of cable and also the transition
Speaker 1: that happened between black and white to color television, which
Speaker 1: was actually pretty early in the days of TV, but
Speaker 1: it took more than a decade for color TV to
Speaker 1: become kind of the norm in households across the world.
Speaker 1: But besides cable delivery, you also had the rise of
Speaker 1: satellite television, and with that customers could access more channels
Speaker 1: than what over the air broad broadcast could support in
Speaker 1: those days. So if you had rabbitier antenna or you know,
Speaker 1: an antenna up on the roof and you're using that
Speaker 1: to pull down signals to watch on TV, you had
Speaker 1: a certain number of channels at your disposal, but cable
Speaker 1: customers and satellite TV customers had access to far more channels.
Speaker 1: Some of them were premium cable channels like HBO or
Speaker 1: pay per view services, and it meant that customers had
Speaker 1: way more options than they would if they just got
Speaker 1: their their television over the air. And it also meant
Speaker 1: that some of the control for media was leaving the
Speaker 1: hands of the entertainment studios that were producing it and
Speaker 1: going more toward the companies that were distributing it, so
Speaker 1: cable companies, satellite companies, that sort of thing. So that
Speaker 1: meant that some of the studios were starting to get
Speaker 1: a little antsy, because every player in a game wants
Speaker 1: to be in the lead. You don't want to see
Speaker 1: another element in that game start to outperform you. And
Speaker 1: that was sort of the feeling that these studios were
Speaker 1: getting at the time. And meanwhile, you had another player
Speaker 1: on the field that was also causing issue. That would
Speaker 1: be blockbuster video. It had ascended to a position of
Speaker 1: dominance in the video rental market. It controlled almost half
Speaker 1: of the market share of all video rentals across the
Speaker 1: United States, and that gave Blockbuster a lot of power
Speaker 1: at the negotiating table when working with studios. Blockbusters gain
Speaker 1: meant lower profits for those studios that were actually producing
Speaker 1: the content, and the entertainment world is a cutthroat environment.
Speaker 1: The various entities are constantly maneuvering to get a better
Speaker 1: deal than the other guy has. And also during this time,
Speaker 1: we saw entertainment companies began the process of consolidation with
Speaker 1: other big, big companies like providers and building towards what
Speaker 1: we would see today with these movie and television studios
Speaker 1: being part of gigantic telecommunications companies. So you could argue
Speaker 1: that these days, these mega giants are setting all the rules.
Speaker 1: But this was still in a time where everyone was
Speaker 1: kind of maneuvering. It was sort of a game of thrones,
Speaker 1: but in the entertainment industry, not in a sword and
Speaker 1: sorcery kind of way. Anyway, back to why this matters
Speaker 1: for DVD, the studios preferred selling copies of movies to
Speaker 1: customers rather than the rental model. Because the studio has
Speaker 1: got a larger share of the sales revenue for sold
Speaker 1: movies than they would get from a rental royalty. It
Speaker 1: would take time for Blockbuster to make the switch from
Speaker 1: VHS to DVD. In fact, the lack of speed on Blockbusters.
Speaker 1: Part of this is frequently cited as one of the
Speaker 1: many reasons that company eventually went bankrupt. But I did
Speaker 1: full episodes on Blockbuster already, so I'm not gonna go
Speaker 1: back into that. Warner Brothers in particular, was really jazzed
Speaker 1: about developing the DVD technology. Meanwhile, Disney, Paramount, and Fox
Speaker 1: were less enthusiastic. There was a fear that the copy
Speaker 1: protection on DVDs wouldn't be sufficient to keep piracy at bay,
Speaker 1: so these companies really wanted stronger DRM put on two
Speaker 1: DVDs and for DVD players. Plus to use the DVD technology,
Speaker 1: the companies would have to pay a royalty fee to
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers. Because Warner Brothers was one of the entities
Speaker 1: that it was involved in the development of the DVD format.
Speaker 1: So if you wanted to put your movies on DVD,
Speaker 1: it meant that you had to pay a small, well
Speaker 1: not that small, but a licensing via Royalty v to
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers, and as it turns out, entertainment companies are
Speaker 1: rarely keen to send cash to their direct competitors. Funny
Speaker 1: thing that getting those studios on board ended up taking
Speaker 1: a lot of negotiations and deals. For example, Fox agreed
Speaker 1: to jump on board the DVD wagon when Warner Brothers
Speaker 1: president Warren liber Fab was able to negotiate for Time
Speaker 1: Warner to carry Fox News on its cable package. Time
Speaker 1: Warner had previously refused to carry Fox News because the
Speaker 1: company had been in a pretty public spat with Rupert Murdoch,
Speaker 1: the owner of Fox News, so liber Fat was able
Speaker 1: to smooth that out to get Time Warner to say,
Speaker 1: all right, we will carry Fox News on our cable
Speaker 1: subscription packages if, in turn, twentieth century Fox agrees to
Speaker 1: support the DVD standard. Now, while the first DVD players
Speaker 1: on the market cost around eight hundred dollars, that was
Speaker 1: still cheaper than the first VCRs, particularly if you take
Speaker 1: into account inflation, and that price dropped fairly quickly. In fact,
Speaker 1: the DVD player would become one of the fastest adopted
Speaker 1: consumer electronics gadgets ever. It debuted in and by two
Speaker 1: thousand three, DVD rentals were outperforming VHS rentals, but it
Speaker 1: was in sales where you really saw the big difference.
Speaker 1: Not only were studios making lots of moolah from the business,
Speaker 1: but also lead to big companies like Target and Walmart
Speaker 1: getting truly enormous by selling DVDs in their stores. Big
Speaker 1: retailers were carrying DVDs and it was a profitable business.
Speaker 1: And it was because of a change in consumer behavior
Speaker 1: ce DVDs managed to do something that vhs had largely
Speaker 1: failed to do. It made buying movies a fairly mainstream activity.
Speaker 1: There were a few people out there who had impressive
Speaker 1: libraries of movies on VHS tape, but most people were
Speaker 1: buying blank tapes and copying stuff off television. They might
Speaker 1: own one or two prerecorded movies. Often they were family films,
Speaker 1: things that were appropriate for families, in other words, but
Speaker 1: most people were just renting VHS video cassettes. They weren't
Speaker 1: going out and buying a copy. But DVDs were a
Speaker 1: different story. Average consumers were more likely to purchase a DVD,
Speaker 1: and so we see how a change in technology changed
Speaker 1: our consumption of the media. On that technology, rather than
Speaker 1: rent something so that we could watch it. We would
Speaker 1: actually go out and purchase something so we could own
Speaker 1: a copy, and DVD became a place where a film
Speaker 1: that performed poorly at the box office could thrive in
Speaker 1: the home market. Fight Club is one of the most
Speaker 1: cited examples of this particular phenomena because in the movie
Speaker 1: came out in nine it made a paltry thirty seven
Speaker 1: million dollars at the U S box office against a
Speaker 1: budget that was estimated at sixty seven million, so it
Speaker 1: was by all definitions a box office flop. But then
Speaker 1: it came out on DVD. It was stacked to the
Speaker 1: brim with special features, which helped to kind of define
Speaker 1: what special features would be for DVDs, and it flourished
Speaker 1: on in the home market. It became a best seller.
Speaker 1: There was another film that had a similar story, Office Space.
Speaker 1: It made a measly ten point eight million dollars at
Speaker 1: the box office, but it would go on to become
Speaker 1: a big success on home video, particularly after the cable
Speaker 1: channel Comedy Central aired the film in two thousand one.
Speaker 1: Now I could get into some armchair psychology to talk
Speaker 1: about the implications of renting versus owning, but Frankly, I'm
Speaker 1: not qualified as a psychologist, so I'm not gonna really
Speaker 1: do that. However, it does seem interesting to me that
Speaker 1: we saw a shift from renting a film, so we
Speaker 1: might say I never got around to seeing that movie,
Speaker 1: I want to rent it and watch it, and then
Speaker 1: we shift over to purchasing a copy of a film
Speaker 1: that we can watch whenever we want. And DVDs began
Speaker 1: to really appeal to collectors, particularly if those collectors were
Speaker 1: interested in special features that were available on many DVDs.
Speaker 1: And I'm one of those people. I certainly fell into
Speaker 1: the trap of collecting DVDs. I probably own a dozen
Speaker 1: that I've never even taken out of the shrink wrap.
Speaker 1: But it has been years since I bought a DVD,
Speaker 1: so I'd say I'm mostly over it until the next
Speaker 1: Uber Super Definitive edition of Evil Dead comes out, anyway.
Speaker 1: But like the VHS tape, the DVD craze also followed
Speaker 1: a peak and a decline. The early to mid two
Speaker 1: thousand's would mark the height of the DVD's dominance in
Speaker 1: home theater media. It was king, but by two thousand
Speaker 1: seven those numbers were starting to dip. In the United States,
Speaker 1: In other places, the sales would continue to climb a
Speaker 1: little bit longer. For example, in the United Kingdom, two
Speaker 1: thousand nine would mark the first year that would see
Speaker 1: a decline in sales. So why we're DVD sales on
Speaker 1: the decline by two thousand seven to two thousand nine. Well,
Speaker 1: one big reason for the decline was the next generation
Speaker 1: of home video media was emerging at that time. The
Speaker 1: media would be able to take advantage of another advance
Speaker 1: in technology that would affect our consumption, and that was
Speaker 1: the development of high definition television. The history of HDTV
Speaker 1: is a surprisingly long one, and it could merit a
Speaker 1: full episode on its own, but I'll give a short
Speaker 1: overview all the way back in nineteen seventy, a Japanese
Speaker 1: company called the Japan Broadcasting Corporation or n h K,
Speaker 1: began researching how to develop high resolution televisions along with
Speaker 1: the formats that those televisions would rely upon. By nine
Speaker 1: seventy seven, the Society of Ocean Picture and Television Engineers
Speaker 1: would form a committee called the Study Group on High
Speaker 1: Definition Television. That group worked on recommendations for standards, including
Speaker 1: a recommendation to shift away from the four by three
Speaker 1: aspect ratio of television at the time to the widescreen
Speaker 1: format or the sixteen by nine format. The group published
Speaker 1: their recommendations in nineteen eighty. Now work was continuing on
Speaker 1: developing the technology for HD, but progress was slow, and
Speaker 1: that wasn't just because of technological limitations, but also the
Speaker 1: need to establish agreed upon standards and regulations. So in
Speaker 1: the United States, the FCC formed an Advisory Committee on
Speaker 1: Advanced Television Service UH and they stacked it with people
Speaker 1: from the private industry to kind of talk about, argue
Speaker 1: over and and hash out the proposals for a high
Speaker 1: definition television standard. The initial versions would rely on analog
Speaker 1: technology analog signals in high definition format, but by nine
Speaker 1: the committee had largely abandoned those ideas to consider an
Speaker 1: all digital approach. Eventually, a confederation of companies proposed an
Speaker 1: all digital format for h D t V to the
Speaker 1: f c C in nineteen and after some additional tweaks,
Speaker 1: the FCC established the standard for digital TV and hd
Speaker 1: TV prodcasting at the end of nineteen ninety six in
Speaker 1: the United States. The standard definition resolution in the US
Speaker 1: ends up essentially being six forty by four a d
Speaker 1: pixels we usually refer to it just as four A D.
Speaker 1: H D is a little more confusing because you could
Speaker 1: get a h D screen that was twelve e d
Speaker 1: by seven twenty pixels in wide screen. Uh, there were
Speaker 1: some that were sold that were nine sixty by seven twenty,
Speaker 1: which you could argue as not really HD, but is
Speaker 1: better as a higher resolution than standard mission. It was
Speaker 1: also in the old four by three aspect ratio. And also,
Speaker 1: just in case you are wondering what I mean by resolution,
Speaker 1: think of your Your image that you're seeing on a
Speaker 1: television is a collection of pixels, little points of light.
Speaker 1: The more points of light you have, the smaller they
Speaker 1: each have to be to fit on the screen. Uh.
Speaker 1: The higher your resolution is, the sharper the image, the
Speaker 1: more clear the details are. So if you have a
Speaker 1: higher resolution image, it just it typically looks better up
Speaker 1: to a point. You start to reach a level of
Speaker 1: resolution that ends up being greater than what the eye
Speaker 1: can detect. And at that point it doesn't really matter
Speaker 1: if you have higher resolution because you wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to tell the difference that ranges from person to person. Personally,
Speaker 1: I find it very challenging to tell the difference between say,
Speaker 1: an eight K set and a four K set. To me,
Speaker 1: they look practically the same unless I'm really close to
Speaker 1: the screen and in some cases have a magnifying glass
Speaker 1: in my hand. Anyway, back to resolutions, So you had
Speaker 1: the seven twenty version, that's one version of HD, but
Speaker 1: you also had a nineteen twenty by ten eight HD screens,
Speaker 1: so we usually referred to that as seven twenty versus
Speaker 1: ten eight. In addition, there were other little letters that
Speaker 1: were attached to these, like P or I. P means
Speaker 1: progressive scan, I means interlaced, which made it a bit
Speaker 1: of a head scratcher for consumers. They were a little
Speaker 1: confused as to what that actually meant. But the message
Speaker 1: was that these televisions and broadcast standards would provide much
Speaker 1: higher resolution images than standard television was able to do,
Speaker 1: and the next generation home video systems would likewise be
Speaker 1: able to deliver high resolution video because a DVD has
Speaker 1: a limit to the resolution it could deliver, and that
Speaker 1: limit was seven twenty by four eight d pixels for
Speaker 1: the n t SC format or seven twenty by five
Speaker 1: seventies six for PAL, and that doesn't really qualify for
Speaker 1: HD standard. So even with a DVD with the best
Speaker 1: picture you could get. It was not the same as
Speaker 1: high definition, so the next generation of home media would
Speaker 1: change that. And before I jump into that hornet's nest,
Speaker 1: I should also mention that the FCC would eventually rule
Speaker 1: that all United States based TV signals would have to
Speaker 1: switch over to digital transmission. They made that decision in
Speaker 1: June of two thousand nine. That caused an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of confusion in the United States, largely based off ignorance.
Speaker 1: People were worried about whether or not they'd be able
Speaker 1: to get anything on their televisions once the switch happened,
Speaker 1: and despite numerous efforts to communicate what this all meant,
Speaker 1: people were really confused, and it turned out that the
Speaker 1: people who needed to worry about this represented only a
Speaker 1: small percentage of the overall population. Those were people who
Speaker 1: are getting their television broadcasts over the air, as opposed
Speaker 1: to people who are getting their broadcast through satellite or cable.
Speaker 1: If they had older analog TV sets, they would have
Speaker 1: to purchase a digital converter box and that would allow
Speaker 1: them to accept incoming digital transmissions. It would go through
Speaker 1: this converter box, which would then convert that to an
Speaker 1: analog signal and then pass that analog signal on to
Speaker 1: the television. So it's just just a converter, that's all
Speaker 1: it was. And for months there were stories about people
Speaker 1: buying converters even though they didn't really need one because
Speaker 1: they weren't getting their television over the air, or they
Speaker 1: had a newer television that didn't need it in the
Speaker 1: first place. We even did a classic Tech Stuff episode
Speaker 1: about that to explain what was going on. I've thought
Speaker 1: about doing a classic rerun of that episode just for fun,
Speaker 1: but ultimately decided not to do it because it's it's
Speaker 1: completely obsolete. It doesn't it doesn't have any bearing on
Speaker 1: anything anymore, so it really is just a footnote. No.
Speaker 1: What I really wanted to do, though, is get into
Speaker 1: a really big format war, one that was similar in
Speaker 1: some ways to the Beta Max versus VHS fight back
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies. So I'm going to talk about
Speaker 1: Blu Ray versus h D DVD, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. High definition televisions began to enter the
Speaker 1: consumer market in the early to mid two thousand's. Like
Speaker 1: most technologies, they're really freaking expensive when they first came out,
Speaker 1: so there was a limited market at the very early days.
Speaker 1: There were also there's limited content. There wasn't a whole
Speaker 1: lot you could watch on them. DVDs couldn't match the
Speaker 1: resolution of even a seven twenty P h d t
Speaker 1: V set, let alone the ten A d P and
Speaker 1: ten A d I models. There were very few channels
Speaker 1: that offered h d t V format, so it was
Speaker 1: kind of hard to sell these. However, it was clear
Speaker 1: the demand was there. People wanted to be able to
Speaker 1: see this higher resolution television at home, and eventually there
Speaker 1: were enough early adopters to allow prices to gradually fall
Speaker 1: enough so that more consumers could jump on board. And
Speaker 1: so this created the incentive to develop a high resolution
Speaker 1: optical media disc format. Now, unlike the DVD, which evolved
Speaker 1: as a standard thanks to a unified effort among numerous
Speaker 1: companies to avoid another format war, the next generation of
Speaker 1: technologies coagulated into two opposing camps. So on one side
Speaker 1: you had Sony and Pioneer, and they were showing off
Speaker 1: a prototype system that at the time was called DVR Blue.
Speaker 1: This would be around two thousand. This is what would
Speaker 1: evolve into Blu Ray. Sony had also explored an alternative
Speaker 1: called ultra density optical, but ultimately that technology would be
Speaker 1: reserved for professional use and not really make its way
Speaker 1: into the consumer video market. It did exist in parallel,
Speaker 1: but for other uses. Now on the other side, the
Speaker 1: other camp was being led by Toshiba. The company initially
Speaker 1: resisted Sony's approach because the early version of Sony's DVR
Speaker 1: Blue was expensive. Sony was proposing an optical disc reader
Speaker 1: that used a blue laser rather than the red one
Speaker 1: that DVD players used. So why do that? Why switch
Speaker 1: to blue once? Because a blue laser can detect smaller
Speaker 1: objects than a red laser can. And it's all because
Speaker 1: of the wavelength of light. So if you look at
Speaker 1: a rainbow, you can see the spectrum the roy G BIV.
Speaker 1: Those colors also denote the range of wavelengths of light
Speaker 1: and it goes from longest to shortest. Red light has
Speaker 1: a longer wavelength than blue light. The shorter wavelength lights
Speaker 1: can detect smaller pits on the surface of an optical disc,
Speaker 1: and pits are what represent information. So if your laser
Speaker 1: can detect smaller pets, that means you can pack more
Speaker 1: pits into the same amount of space of an optical
Speaker 1: disc right, you can fit more of them on there
Speaker 1: because they are tinier. So if you make the pits smaller,
Speaker 1: you fit more information on there. You can have a
Speaker 1: high resolution video stored on there. However, blue lasers are
Speaker 1: also more expensive than red ones, and Sony's initial design
Speaker 1: required a special protective case around the discs. Uh the
Speaker 1: original one, it was almost like a cartridge that carried
Speaker 1: the disc and it was meant to protect it from
Speaker 1: being handled and getting scratched up. And that also meant
Speaker 1: that it was going to cost more to produce those
Speaker 1: discs because you had to produce little case that they
Speaker 1: would come into. And Toshiba wanted to find a different way,
Speaker 1: so the company eventually would propose its own blue laser format.
Speaker 1: The DVD Forum adopted to Sheba's proposal as the successor
Speaker 1: to the DVD format and it would be called HD
Speaker 1: d v D. This was around two thousand two. So
Speaker 1: now you have the two camps that eventually became known
Speaker 1: as the Blu Ray Disc Association or b d A.
Speaker 1: That's with Sony and its team, and then you have
Speaker 1: the DVD Forum with Tashiba, and each tried to establish
Speaker 1: their technologies as the standard, and it would be a
Speaker 1: few years before either group would produce anything for consumers.
Speaker 1: So this is all happening behind closed doors at the
Speaker 1: at the time, they tried a few times to agree
Speaker 1: upon a unified standard, but ultimately one side would say, no,
Speaker 1: I don't want to do it your way, you should
Speaker 1: do it my way, and the others I would say,
Speaker 1: pound sand, I don't want to do it your way.
Speaker 1: We're gonna do it my way, and so no agreement
Speaker 1: was ever reached. They had hoped that they could avoid
Speaker 1: the kind of format war that Sony and JVC had
Speaker 1: fought in the nineteen seventies. Sony was backing Beta Max
Speaker 1: and JVC was backing VHS. Sony lost that fight. The
Speaker 1: company was not eager to go into another format war,
Speaker 1: but they were never able to come to any kind
Speaker 1: of agreement. And you can sort of understand why, because
Speaker 1: whichever group was responsible for establishing the technology that everyone
Speaker 1: was going to use could make a ton of money
Speaker 1: off of it in royalties or licensing fees. So no
Speaker 1: one was eager to give that up. No one wanted
Speaker 1: to say, find your idea is good, now, let me
Speaker 1: pay you for the privilege of being able to use
Speaker 1: your technology. Now, most of these fights happened well outside
Speaker 1: of the consciousness of the general public. H d t
Speaker 1: V was barely even a thing yet, and most people
Speaker 1: were still marveling over DVDs, so most homes didn't have
Speaker 1: an hd TV at the time. But behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: the DVD form and the Blu Ray Disc Association were
Speaker 1: making deals with entertainment studios to get exclusivity agreements for
Speaker 1: their formats. It's a lot like how video game consoles
Speaker 1: will sign an exclusive title for their individual programs, and
Speaker 1: uh game consoles would play a role in this HD
Speaker 1: DVD versus Blu Ray format war as well. The PlayStation three,
Speaker 1: Sony's video game console. Unsurprised Rising Lee would support Blu
Speaker 1: Ray It was a Blu Ray player. In fact, when
Speaker 1: the p S three came out, it would be one
Speaker 1: of the cheapest Blu Ray players available, So it really
Speaker 1: helped Blue Ray or p S three sales because people
Speaker 1: who wanted a video game console would pick it up
Speaker 1: for the video games, people who wanted a cheap Blu
Speaker 1: Ray player would pick it up and both got to
Speaker 1: enjoy all the different aspects of that device. Microsoft did
Speaker 1: not make HD DVD support native to its own console,
Speaker 1: that would be the Xbox three sixty. But the company
Speaker 1: did manufacture an HD DVD accessory drive that you could
Speaker 1: purchase and then connect to an Xbox three six console.
Speaker 1: So you couldn't put an HD DVD disk directly into
Speaker 1: an Xbox three six and have it play, but you
Speaker 1: could go out and buy the successory this peripheral, attach
Speaker 1: it to your Xbox three sixty and watch them that way. Now,
Speaker 1: on the Blue ray side, you had studios like Sony
Speaker 1: Pictures again no big surprise, Walt Disney Studios and twentieth
Speaker 1: Century Fox on board. They had signed on to that camp.
Speaker 1: Over on the h D DVD side, you had Paramount
Speaker 1: Universal Studios and Warner Brothers signing on. And the hope
Speaker 1: each side had was to get the support of entertainment
Speaker 1: studios in an effort to force the other side to
Speaker 1: give up and to say, all right, fine, we'll go
Speaker 1: with your way. But that didn't happen, and development of
Speaker 1: both technologies continued. So it's kind of like a giant
Speaker 1: game of chicken, with Tashiba driving one car for h
Speaker 1: D DVD at Sony driving the other for Blu ray,
Speaker 1: and each of them had three movie studios sitting in
Speaker 1: the back seat of their vehicles, and as the time
Speaker 1: got closer for these two technologies to actually debut on
Speaker 1: the consumer market, the studios in the back seat began
Speaker 1: to get a little nervous. As production time neared, Paramount
Speaker 1: and Warner brother there is, within days of each other,
Speaker 1: flinched a bit, and both studios announced that they would
Speaker 1: support both formats going forward. They would no longer just
Speaker 1: agree to be exclusive to h D DVD. That came
Speaker 1: as a blow to Tashiba, which can no longer hold
Speaker 1: that exclusivity as a point of leverage, and this was
Speaker 1: in two thousand five. This was a year that Tshiba
Speaker 1: was supposed to actually launch the h D DVD player,
Speaker 1: but that ended up being delayed. Production problems and other
Speaker 1: delays forced their hand and they would actually launch in
Speaker 1: April two thousand six. Even so, even with the delayed start,
Speaker 1: they had a headstart over Blu Ray. The first consumer
Speaker 1: Blu Ray player was from Samsung, which ran into some
Speaker 1: production issues of their own, and that delayed launch until
Speaker 1: June of two thousand six, and then the gloves were off.
Speaker 1: Both sides had some early issues. Some early h D
Speaker 1: DVD players weren't terribly reliable. It's a common problem with
Speaker 1: brand new tech products. That's why I frequently suggest that
Speaker 1: you wait for the second generation of a technology before
Speaker 1: you jump into it, because frequently the first generation still
Speaker 1: has a lot of bugs in it. And then on
Speaker 1: the blue ray side, some of the early film transfers
Speaker 1: were shockingly sub bar. You had this high expectation, I mean,
Speaker 1: here you're supposed to get this high definition, high resolution video,
Speaker 1: and some of those transfers were not good. It actually
Speaker 1: prompted some recalls of some of those disks. And both
Speaker 1: technologies allowed for different digital rights management strategies to help
Speaker 1: prevent piracy, but those same strategies also posed some potential
Speaker 1: problems for legitimate customers. In general, these entertainment companies really
Speaker 1: like to have super strong DRM attached to the technologies
Speaker 1: to prevent piracy, but in general consumers aren't crazy about
Speaker 1: it because often it has a negative impact on how
Speaker 1: we can access the stuff we actually buy. So the
Speaker 1: perception is it's technology that actively penalizes people who have
Speaker 1: been purchasing and supporting that technology, and it often is
Speaker 1: not a very effective way to stop piracy, but it
Speaker 1: is an effective way to irritate your customer base. Anyway,
Speaker 1: this was when DVD sales were starting to slow down. Uh,
Speaker 1: some people were jumping onto the HD bandwagon and they
Speaker 1: would back one format or another. So some people were saying,
Speaker 1: all right, well, I'm gonna get an h D DVD
Speaker 1: player and go with that, somewhere going with Blu Ray.
Speaker 1: Other folks like myself said, you know what, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: wait and see to find out which format is going
Speaker 1: to stand the test of time. I'm not too keen
Speaker 1: on either jumping on one or worse yet, investing in both.
Speaker 1: And we also spent time worrying that no format was
Speaker 1: ever going to win out and that would end up
Speaker 1: creating a split market and some films would oly be
Speaker 1: available on one format and other films would only be
Speaker 1: available on the other format. The release of the p
Speaker 1: S three and November of two thousand six was a
Speaker 1: huge help to Blu Ray gamers who love the PS
Speaker 1: platform and only got a game console, but a Blu
Speaker 1: Ray player as well. Meanwhile, Xbox fans would have to
Speaker 1: shell out extra money for the HD DVD accessory. It
Speaker 1: did not come standard with the Xbox three sixty, so
Speaker 1: that was a score for the Blu Ray camp. I
Speaker 1: say that, by the way, as an Xbox fan, I
Speaker 1: loved and still do the Xbox three sixty. I preferred
Speaker 1: it to the p S three, But if you're looking
Speaker 1: at it as far as features go, the Blu Ray
Speaker 1: player on the p S three, I think far put
Speaker 1: it ahead of Microsoft's support for h D DVD. Now,
Speaker 1: I said before that these two formats were incompatible. You
Speaker 1: could not put a Blu Ray disc into an h
Speaker 1: D DVD player and watch it. The Blue ray format
Speaker 1: could hold more data than the HD DVD discs, but
Speaker 1: there was some disagreement over whether or not that would
Speaker 1: translate to an actual, perceivable improvement and picture compared to
Speaker 1: h D DVD, and HD DVD was able to have
Speaker 1: a feature called h d I which allowed for interactive
Speaker 1: content based off the Java platform, so you could have
Speaker 1: a more rich, dynamic, interactive experience with h D DVD
Speaker 1: than you could with Blu Ray. So they each had
Speaker 1: things that set them apart from the other. And while
Speaker 1: the two formats weren't compatible, there were some companies that
Speaker 1: began to produce dual player devices that essentially had two
Speaker 1: sets of optical pathways inside them. In order to read
Speaker 1: the different formats. The first of those was from l G,
Speaker 1: but usually it also meant that you couldn't access all
Speaker 1: of the features of a true player. So, for example,
Speaker 1: with LGS dual Player, you couldn't access h D I
Speaker 1: features in an HD DVD set it didn't support them.
Speaker 1: You would need to get a dedicated h D DVD
Speaker 1: player for that. Not first, h D DVD held the
Speaker 1: largest market share for the HD media market, no big surprise.
Speaker 1: It also had a two month head start, but by
Speaker 1: the beginning of two thousand seven things had started to
Speaker 1: shift into Blue rays favor. Now one big blow that
Speaker 1: the b d A dealt The DVD Forum was in
Speaker 1: a deal with Blockbuster. Blockbuster announced it would only carry
Speaker 1: Blu ray discs for HD content in many, but not
Speaker 1: necessarily all, of its stores. The DVD Forum would strike back,
Speaker 1: and in the fall of two thousand seven, both DreamWorks
Speaker 1: and Paramount announced that moving forward, all of their releases
Speaker 1: in HD would be on the h D DVD format,
Speaker 1: not Blu ray. So Paramount had started out as part
Speaker 1: of h D DVD, then kind of hedged its beets
Speaker 1: and said we're gonna support both, And then the fall
Speaker 1: of two thousand seven, said Nope, just kidding, We're gonna
Speaker 1: totally be with the h D DVD folks. It ticked
Speaker 1: off some people movies like Transformers would exclusively move to
Speaker 1: h D DVD. I would argue that that was actually
Speaker 1: in favor of Blu ray but that's me inserting my
Speaker 1: opinion of Michael Bay's Transformers movies. The less said about
Speaker 1: the better, the gap between the two formats would narrow
Speaker 1: a bit in the market, but Sony was still in
Speaker 1: the lead at the end of two thousand seven. Just
Speaker 1: a short time before c e S two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: which happens c e S happens in early January each
Speaker 1: year it's the Consumer Electronics Show, Warner Brothers made an
Speaker 1: announcement that would in retrospect serve as the death knell
Speaker 1: for h D DVD. Warner Brothers said they were going
Speaker 1: to concentrate exclusively on making Blu ray discs from that
Speaker 1: point forward, and Toshiba, rocked by this news, canceled an
Speaker 1: h D DVD press conference at c e S, and
Speaker 1: shortly after ce S, companies like Netflix, Best Buy, and
Speaker 1: Walmart all shifted their focus to Blu ray disc rental
Speaker 1: or disc sales. Toshiba considered its options but chose to
Speaker 1: throw in the towel. They ceased productions on HD DVD
Speaker 1: players and discs, and by the end of two thousand eight,
Speaker 1: no major companies were pressing films to h D DVD,
Speaker 1: and so Blu Ray would win the format war. This
Speaker 1: war was hard on consumers, but at least it was
Speaker 1: over by the end of two thousand eight, and at
Speaker 1: that point less than half of all households in the
Speaker 1: United States had a high definition television. So while the
Speaker 1: format war had a negative impact on early adopters, a
Speaker 1: large number of consumers never even really had to worry
Speaker 1: about it because they didn't have a television they could
Speaker 1: watch high definition content on the first place. But did
Speaker 1: shake things up, and it also set the stage for
Speaker 1: the next generation of media players, the Ultra h D
Speaker 1: Blu Ray format, also known as four K. This format,
Speaker 1: which requires an Ultra HD Blu ray player because older
Speaker 1: Blu ray players are not compatible with it, can display
Speaker 1: video at a resolution of three thousand, eight hundred forty
Speaker 1: by two in sixty pixels, a much higher resolution than
Speaker 1: h D and way way higher than standard definition. That
Speaker 1: format would hit the market in two thousand sixteen. But
Speaker 1: more on that later as it plays into the shifting
Speaker 1: behaviors of consumers. Now, while Blu ray won the war,
Speaker 1: it didn't become as ubiquitous as the DVD player. In
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen of all US households with a broadband
Speaker 1: connection owned a Blu Ray player. This is according to
Speaker 1: a Fortune magazine. Meanwhile, around eight seven percent of all
Speaker 1: households owned a DVD player, So DVD was able to
Speaker 1: displace VCRs, but Blu ray didn't quite displace DVD players,
Speaker 1: and Blue Ray sales have been on the decline for
Speaker 1: several years in a row. A big reason for that
Speaker 1: falls to the Internet and digital files. So now I'm
Speaker 1: going to switch gears and talk about the digital revolution
Speaker 1: and how that changed the way we access entertainment. And
Speaker 1: it's another complicated story, and it's one that requires me
Speaker 1: to go back to talking about audio for a little bit.
Speaker 1: So back in the late nineteen eighties, a German company
Speaker 1: called frown Hoffer Gazelle Shaft funded research into audio compression technology.
Speaker 1: According to Karl Heinz Brandenburg, who would play a pivotal
Speaker 1: role in the development of the MP three compression format,
Speaker 1: it all started with a discussion about how to transmit
Speaker 1: music over digital phone lines, which happened all the way
Speaker 1: back in nine two. The idea was theoretically possible, but
Speaker 1: the technology was not yet up to the task, and
Speaker 1: that remained the case until nine six. What happened next,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you right after we take this quick break. So,
Speaker 1: beginning in nineteen eighty six, Brandenburg and his colleagues were
Speaker 1: hard at work on creating a psychoacoustic approach to audio compression.
Speaker 1: And by that I mean they were trying to think
Speaker 1: about the actual physical process of hearing sounds. Now, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned in the previous episode about c d S,
Speaker 1: the range of human hearing is limited. Sounds with a
Speaker 1: pitch below twenty hurts or higher than twenty killer hurts
Speaker 1: are imperceptible to the vast majority of human beings. But
Speaker 1: there are other limitations to our hearing as well. So
Speaker 1: for example, if you have a very quiet sound following
Speaker 1: right behind a very loud sound, we tend to not
Speaker 1: hear the quiet one. So if you're trying to come
Speaker 1: up with a way to encode audio in a digital format,
Speaker 1: and you're trying to save as much space as you can,
Speaker 1: you might do what Brandenburg and his fellow researchers decided
Speaker 1: to do. You exclude any information that wouldn't be perceptible
Speaker 1: in the first place, because if you can't hear it,
Speaker 1: it doesn't need to be there. This is what makes
Speaker 1: the MP three a lossy format. It means that some
Speaker 1: of the information in the original recording gets discarded through
Speaker 1: the compression process, so the rest file does not contain
Speaker 1: all the information of the original file. In nineteen eight,
Speaker 1: the International Organization for Standardization requested the formation of a
Speaker 1: group to oversee standards in audio recording. In response, the
Speaker 1: Moving Picture Experts Group or IMPEG formed. The chief goal
Speaker 1: of this group was to standardize a way to record
Speaker 1: video to CD ROM discs, and audio compression was part
Speaker 1: of that approach. It was had its own subgroup in
Speaker 1: the department. Different groups worked on individual solutions to this,
Speaker 1: with one group coming out on top. That group designed
Speaker 1: a mode that was called Layer three, which we see
Speaker 1: represented in the file extension of MP three. And it
Speaker 1: took a long time to get the compression model right
Speaker 1: in order to preserve fidelity and also reduce the file
Speaker 1: size to the point where it was practical. Uh the
Speaker 1: MP three technology would be unveiled in ninete two as
Speaker 1: a potential audio encoding technology. The MP three file extension
Speaker 1: wouldn't come along until and while the original concept was
Speaker 1: to use the technology to transmit songs over I, S,
Speaker 1: d N lines, it would be the Internet where the
Speaker 1: MP three would really take off. Now, I gotta point
Speaker 1: out the MP three is not the only audio file
Speaker 1: format out there. Far from it. There are tons of
Speaker 1: audio files and audio file formats, I should say, out there.
Speaker 1: It's not even the only audio compression technology. There are
Speaker 1: other lossy forms of audio compression, and they're also loss less,
Speaker 1: meaning the compressed audio file contains all of the information
Speaker 1: of the original file. However, MP three became the dominant
Speaker 1: one on the Internet, and it lead to gadgets like
Speaker 1: the MP three player, which is kind of a misnomer
Speaker 1: because MP three players frequently could play lots of different
Speaker 1: audio file formats, but we tended to call them MP
Speaker 1: three players. The first portable MP three players be end
Speaker 1: to hit the market around Apple would then introduce the
Speaker 1: iPod in two thousand one, and I find it really
Speaker 1: fascinating that MP three sort of became shorthand for audio files,
Speaker 1: even if the person using the term MP three was
Speaker 1: actually referring to other file formats and compression strategies. And
Speaker 1: then not long after that, you had the introduction of
Speaker 1: the iPod, and the term iPod sort of became shorthand
Speaker 1: for digital audio file players or m P three players.
Speaker 1: People would refer to it as an iPod, even if
Speaker 1: it wasn't an Apple iPod. Heck, the reason we call
Speaker 1: shows like mine podcasts is because of the iPod. Even
Speaker 1: though most people aren't listening on dedicated iPods anymore, the
Speaker 1: name stuck even as the technology would play itself out
Speaker 1: tour fade a bit from prominence. Now, when the MP
Speaker 1: three debuted, it was filling a real need in the
Speaker 1: market because people wanted a way to share music. But
Speaker 1: a raw music file is pretty big. It was way
Speaker 1: too large to transfer easily, especially back in those days.
Speaker 1: I dug up an article from c net back in
Speaker 1: nine at quoted an analyst named Robert Katzev who said
Speaker 1: that the sweet spot for a hard drive size on
Speaker 1: a PC in was four gigabytes. Okay, so my smartphone
Speaker 1: has a hard drive space of a hundred twenty eight
Speaker 1: gigabytes on my phone back in a sweet spot for
Speaker 1: hard drive was four. An uncompressed raw audio file tends
Speaker 1: to run at about thirty four megabytes per minute if
Speaker 1: you have a bit depth of twenty four bits and
Speaker 1: a sample rate of ninety six killer hurts for stereo audio.
Speaker 1: Obviously that that amount of space is dependent upon the
Speaker 1: bit depth and the sample rate. If you played with those,
Speaker 1: you could change how much space it takes. But if
Speaker 1: you were using those uh uh standards as your your
Speaker 1: recording or your encoding method, if you had a three
Speaker 1: a minute song, it would take up about a hundred
Speaker 1: four megabytes of space. And so you have an album
Speaker 1: worth of songs, you've got at least a gigabyte worth
Speaker 1: of data there. It doesn't take long before you've used
Speaker 1: up that four gigs of storage space. Now, the data size,
Speaker 1: again depends on sample rate and bit depth. So if
Speaker 1: you started cheat with that a little bit, if you
Speaker 1: made the sample rate lower, you decrease the bit depth,
Speaker 1: you could fit more stuff onto a hard drive. But
Speaker 1: the more you do that, the more you toy with
Speaker 1: compromising the audio quality of the actual recording itself. So
Speaker 1: something you have to keep in mind when you're playing
Speaker 1: with these sort of things. Also, Internet speeds back in
Speaker 1: the early two thousand's were not super fast. Most people
Speaker 1: were relying on dial up internet, so they're actually using
Speaker 1: a dial up modem, they're not using um, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of a cable modem or anything like that. And
Speaker 1: in the United States, less than twenty percent of households
Speaker 1: had a home broadband subscription as late as two thousand five,
Speaker 1: So it was necessary to have a compression format that
Speaker 1: would allow people to store songs to a drive and
Speaker 1: also to transfer them over the Internet without eating up
Speaker 1: all their data plan or or taking hours to transmit.
Speaker 1: B MP three and similar compression formats were solutions to
Speaker 1: that problem, but those formats also opened up the floodgates
Speaker 1: for piracy in an unprecedented way. Now, as we've seen
Speaker 1: in this series, the history of the evolution of media
Speaker 1: is one in which the industry tends to freak out
Speaker 1: about the possibility of unlawful copies flooding the market every
Speaker 1: time there's a new form of media that that arises.
Speaker 1: And most of the time that fear was kind of
Speaker 1: hard to justify because, yeah, sure, in theory you could
Speaker 1: make copies of VHS tapes. In fact, not theory, you
Speaker 1: could practically do that. If you had two VCRs, or
Speaker 1: a VCR that had to cassette readers on it, or
Speaker 1: you had some professional duplication equipment, you could do that.
Speaker 1: You could also transfer albums onto cassette if you wanted to.
Speaker 1: You could burn c d s if you wanted to.
Speaker 1: But these processes were typically time consuming and they required
Speaker 1: an investment because you needed to transfer the content to
Speaker 1: a physical medium. You had to go buy blank discs,
Speaker 1: or blank video cassettes or blank audio cassettes. Digital files
Speaker 1: removed a lot of those barriers. Duplicating a digital file
Speaker 1: and storing it on drive as easy. You can do
Speaker 1: it as many times as you like. You'll never wear
Speaker 1: out the original file. You can distribute the file to
Speaker 1: a wide audience, or that was far more common. You
Speaker 1: can make a digital file available for other people to
Speaker 1: copy and download from a central source. There's already software
Speaker 1: out there that would let you rip audio tracks off
Speaker 1: a CD in a computer. You put a CD in
Speaker 1: your computer, you ripped the music off of it. You've
Speaker 1: got them in digital files. You could then just compress
Speaker 1: them if you wanted to run through a compression program.
Speaker 1: You could upload the files to a server, or you
Speaker 1: could join up heer to peer network and suddenly you
Speaker 1: are bypassing the entertainment companies entirely. And boy how d
Speaker 1: the companies hated that. They hated it a lot, and
Speaker 1: there was enormous pressure from record labels, on law enforcement
Speaker 1: and elected officials to do something about it. This was
Speaker 1: when we started seeing some pretty dramatic claims about what
Speaker 1: digital piracy was doing to businesses like the music industry,
Speaker 1: and this also applies to the software industry and a
Speaker 1: little bit later to film and television as well. I'd
Speaker 1: say a lot of those claims were at best not
Speaker 1: supported by evidence. I might even argue that some of
Speaker 1: them were essentially made up. But let's break it down.
Speaker 1: Music piracy was a thing, whether it was off of
Speaker 1: servers or more frequently through peer to peer services like
Speaker 1: kaza or Napster. People were sharing music files and other
Speaker 1: types of files as well, without paying for them. Peer
Speaker 1: to peer technology is a valid way to transfer files
Speaker 1: from computer to computer, and it's meant to make those
Speaker 1: processes fast by sidestepping the need for the traditional server
Speaker 1: client model. Quick explanation. With that traditional model, you have
Speaker 1: a central server, it's got files on it, and the
Speaker 1: computers that are connecting to it are clients requesting copies
Speaker 1: of that file. If a lot of clients are all
Speaker 1: contacting the same survey can get bogged down. Peer to peer,
Speaker 1: all the computers on the network are peers of each
Speaker 1: other and they can share files between them. The more
Speaker 1: computers that have a specific file on them, the faster
Speaker 1: those transfers tend to go. So there's nothing illegal about
Speaker 1: peer to peer networks on their on the basis of
Speaker 1: it like that, that's a completely legitimate way to distribute files. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's illegal if you are sharing files that you do
Speaker 1: not have the right to distribute, like music files that
Speaker 1: you didn't record yourself. Now, the music industry argued that
Speaker 1: this was costing them lots and lots and lots of money. Critics,
Speaker 1: including the Government Accountability Office, would counter that, saying there's
Speaker 1: probably an impact to the revenue of the industry because
Speaker 1: of piracy, but it is impossible to determine because you
Speaker 1: cannot say for certain that someone who download did something
Speaker 1: illegally would have purchased a legal copy if they didn't
Speaker 1: have the opportunity to get it illegally. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: if I download a copy of the Wolverine origin. That's
Speaker 1: a great one because a lot of people did that. Um,
Speaker 1: then you you can't tell me, oh, if you hadn't
Speaker 1: downloaded that copy, you would have gone out and bought one.
Speaker 1: Maybe I wouldn't have bought it at all. Either way,
Speaker 1: the companies aren't getting my money. They're either not getting
Speaker 1: it because I didn't even bother watching it, or they
Speaker 1: didn't get it because I stole it. But the point
Speaker 1: being that you cannot easily translate piracy to lost revenue
Speaker 1: doesn't make piracy right. By the way, this is not
Speaker 1: a justification for piracy. It's merely to say you cannot
Speaker 1: make the argument that someone pirating digital files uh directly
Speaker 1: translates to lost revenue. Now, the entertainment industries saw the
Speaker 1: threat of technology like the Internet long before services like
Speaker 1: Napster werepping up, and they lobbied hard to get updated
Speaker 1: copyright protection laws in place to take into account the
Speaker 1: power of the Internet. And in the United States, this
Speaker 1: took on the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Speaker 1: or d m c A, which was signed into law
Speaker 1: in n The rules of the d m c A
Speaker 1: would allow companies to go after people and entities that
Speaker 1: were violating intellectual property law, while also allowing for the
Speaker 1: concept of safe harbor, meaning the Internet service providers wouldn't
Speaker 1: be held responsible for the actions that their customers were
Speaker 1: taking while using their services. But there were also requirements
Speaker 1: in there for the I s p s to follow.
Speaker 1: They had to follow these rules in order to to
Speaker 1: warrant safe harbor. That included taking steps to act on
Speaker 1: the notification that a customer was using his or her
Speaker 1: connection to share files illegally. Now, in our next episode,
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk more about how digital files changed
Speaker 1: the entertainment industry and how piracy and downloading gradually gave
Speaker 1: way to a different business model, that of streaming. That'll
Speaker 1: finally bring us up to our current situation, which I
Speaker 1: think I've promised four times at this point in this
Speaker 1: series because I kept getting bogged down with all these
Speaker 1: cool details. But again, it shows how this nature of technology,
Speaker 1: business and consumer behavior has changed dramatically over relatively short time.
Speaker 1: I mean, the history of recorded media is not that long,
Speaker 1: and yet we've seen some really dramatic shifts in consumer
Speaker 1: behavior in that time. Within my own lifetime, I've seen
Speaker 1: it changed dramatically. So we're gonna talk more about that
Speaker 1: in the next episode. If you guys have suggestions for
Speaker 1: future episodes of tech Stuff, send me a message. The
Speaker 1: email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or if you want to check out our website, that's
Speaker 1: tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of
Speaker 1: all of our previous episodes there. You also find links
Speaker 1: to our social media accounts, so you can follow us
Speaker 1: on Facebook or Twitter and reach out to us there.
Speaker 1: And you can find a link to our online store,
Speaker 1: where every purchase you make goes to help the show
Speaker 1: and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.