1996’s DVD Issues Foreshadowed HD Discs

Our good friends over at Twice revisit the launch of the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) format — and the roadmap to our current format war ™.

…The world was bracing for the arrival of a new high-density optical video disc format called Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), depending on which member of the two originally opposing format camps you were talking to. Surprise, surprise — these camps included the Super Density (SD) Disc camp spearheaded by Toshiba, Warner Brothers, Thomson and others, and the Multi Media CD (MMC) camp, championed by Sony, Philips and others.
Not too coincidentally, many of those same parties have taken similar sides in the brewing HD DVD (Toshiba, NEC and originally Warner Brothers) and Blu-ray Disc (Sony, Philips, Panasonic and others) format war.

Unlike events transpiring today, the members of the two camps listened to the pressures of Hollywood Studios, combined their systems into one now highly successful DVD format, and staged the industry’s first “bloodless format war,” as then Warner Home Video president, Warren Lieberfarb, called it.

Toshiba, which along with Warner Brothers led the SD camp, was one of the first manufacturers to announce a pair of DVD players at the 1996 Winter Consumer Electronics Show. The company maintained throughout most of the year that it would sell its SD-1006 ($599 suggested retail) and SD-3006 ($699) players around Labor Day, but eventually announced an early 1997 launch, due to a long drawn out process of adopting a copy protection standard through the multi-industry Copy Protection Technical Working Group.

Ironically, Toshiba had announced plans to market its first HD DVD players in 2005, only to push those plans back to 2006 after unsettled content protection issues disrupted software production schedules.

Source: Twice