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In December 1978, LaserDiscs looked like the hot new thing in visual technology. So why did VHS eventually win out?

ANYONE remember LaserDiscs? On 14 December 1978, New Scientist ran a long story about this new technology entitled 鈥溾��. These early versions of compact discs were just about to hit the market and enter the battle for video supremacy.

VHS and Betamax video cassettes had launched a few years earlier, and Dutch electronics giant Philips was banking that its new technology, far superior in sound and visual quality, would blow video cassettes out of the water.

There was a big market to be won. 鈥淐olour TV is now a way of life for the affluent nations and the prospect of stacking discs of colour TV programmes alongside similar audio LPs will probably appeal to many customers,鈥� we said. And the competition was hotting up. Every electronics firm worth its salt was 鈥渉eavily committed to competitive, and generally incompatible systems鈥�, we said, noting with some prescience that 鈥渢here could be a massive, and certainly vicious, struggle ahead鈥�.

Some 30 centimetres wide, most LaserDiscs look amusingly large to modern eyes. More importantly, the discs and their players were expensive to make. Even with players priced at $600 each (some $2400 today), Philips and its US partner MCA would lose money heavily at first. That was why DiscoVision, as Philips called the system then, was to be launched only in Atlanta, Georgia, at first, to test the market. 鈥淪o far, no one, least of all Philips and MCA, knows who 鈥� if anyone 鈥� will actually hand over hard cash for a video disc player,鈥� we said.

Despite their size, LaserDiscs could hold just 1 hour of video on each side. And the rival video cassettes had one great advantage: you could record programmes on them yourself. Although LaserDiscs did take off in Japan, VHS came to dominate elsewhere, at least until the successors of LaserDiscs, DVDs, came along 鈥� themselves eventually to be superseded, of course, by that little innovation called streaming.