Do you remember CD Video? Not to be confused with a Video CD which is a
format that came out in the 1990s. No CD Video came out in 1988 and is on
distinctive gold colored discs. Now to explain what this format is I've got a
promotional video for it from 1988 which I'm going to play you in a moment. I
should say though I've shortened this down a little bit there's a full version
of it available at the link in the video description text box and it has terrible
quality sound. I'll explain why that's the case in a moment but first
let's have a look at it.
Hello cuddly Ken here now you're probably
standing there wondering what this is well let me tell you it's the new CD Video
machine from Philips, yes pictures have at last arrived in a world of
digital sound.
This is it a CD machine that also plays pictures. All you need is a telly
and a hi-fi to get great pictures and CD sound in your home and you already know
how fabulous these are. Gone are the days of naff and fuzzy records, this machine
plays these CDs the same as any other CD player. But now CDs come in gold too.
What's the difference you may ask, well get one of these and all of a sudden
this happens. CD video is CD with pictures these gold five inch discs play a
video like this one but also have 20 minutes of sound only, and as if all that
wasn't exciting enough there are two new discs. This 8 inch disc plays 45 minutes
of full video and this 12 inch disc plays for 2 hours so anything's possible
on CD Video, music, TV programs, cartoons and movies. On 8 inch there are video
compilations from the world's top artists from Cameo to Curiosity
and Dire Straits to Deep Purple in fact all of this is available before Christmas.
Now you can see the music
Right so it just so happens I've got an example of all three sizes of CD Video
here and we'll have a look at these and as I go through them I'll explain why
the sound quality on that last clip was so poor. So this one is the same size as
a standard compact disc, on this particular one I've got three digital
audio tracks and one video which is a video of one of those tracks. So the idea
is you pick this up in a store and you get the music and you get the video to
go with it. Now you can see a noticeable join on here between the CD section in
the middle and the video section towards the outer edge. So if we put that into a
compact disc player it will read the CD section first because of course CDs read
from the inside to the outside, so it reads it as a three track CD and if you
press play just plays track one, the same as any normal compact disc. But if I put the
same disc in a device capable of playing CD Videos it skips past those three
digital audio tracks, go straight to track four and play that as a video.
Now if we move across to the 8-inch disc we can see that this one just contains
videos there are no isolated audio tracks although the audio that goes
along with these tracks is digital as well. Let's have a look inside at the
disc and we'll see on the sleeve there's a bit of information about the CD Video
system. It says CD Video represents the latest
development in the compact disc system, uniting the extraordinary sound of the
compact disc with the highest possible video quality, the CD video discs
remarkable performances is the result of laser optical scanning used for both the audio
and the video information stored on the disc.
Now whilst there's something very attractive about the gold color of these discs it isn't
something that's necessary for them to perform their function, I think it's
really just there to distinguish them from previous discs especially when it
comes to that smaller one so you don't mix it up with a standard compact disc.
But let's pop this one in the machine now and have a quick look at it.
Now moving on to the largest size discs this 12-inch one it's a little bit
unusual they decided to put these contents on this size of discs because
they only take up 41 minutes which would have fitted on that 8 inch disc but
perhaps they wanted everything all on one side of the disc so there wasn't a
break in the middle and as you can see when we have a look at this disc
everything is recorded on the other side. You should also notice that towards the
edge of the disc there's a darker area it's kind of cloudy, it looks dirty, well
it isn't dirt it's something that's known as disc rot and that's when the
layers of a disc starts to separate the sandwich of layers and of course that
then creates problems for the laser to read the disc. Let's just put this in
the Machine and see how that's affected the video playback performance.
Rock and Roll is a way of life that's erm you can't think of it as just a music form
if you live it you live it. You wake up in the morning you're brushing your teeth with it. you go to bed with it next to your pillow at
night so it's so that explains why that first clip that I played you was
suffering from such poor quality sound because the disc was suffering from disc
rots it seems like the digital soundtrack is the first thing to go. The
video while suffering from dropouts doesn't seem to suffer quite as badly.
But looking at this disc compared to the INXS disc this one looks like it's the
worst of the lot so let's put this one in the machine and see how it fares.
Yes on this one the digital audio soundtrack has completely gone, so no
matter how loud Levar Burton shouts into that megaphone
no-one is going to be able to hear him. Right now let's go back and have a look at
CD video in a bit more detail. Where it came from,
why it came out and why it disappeared so quickly. So you'll notice this
promotional disc is from 1988, that was the launch of the product in the UK and
you'll have also noticed earlier on I was playing back these CD video discs in
a Laserdisc player so what's the connection?
Well Philips along with MCA launched laserdisc in 1978. Laserdisc was an
analog format it confuses some people when they see it being on a disc and
being silver they think it's like a compact disc but no everything on it was
analog it was analog video, analog stereo audio, albeit read by a laser. Now of
course that disc then led to the development of the compact disc in the
1980s. Now compact disc is of course digital, so once they've figured out how
to make digital audio on a silver disc read by a laser
they then fold that technology back into laserdisc again and the first laserdisc
player that could play a digital audio track alongside the video was launched
in 1984 in Japan that was the Pioneer CLD 9000, and despite its not
inconsiderable price it was an immediate sales success for Pioneer. In Japan just
after launch it was selling 10,000 units per month. Meanwhile over in Europe
Philips weren't having any success at all they'd launched laserdiscs there in
1978 and had the European market to themselves but they really weren't
able to sell any machines. They just couldn't get anyone interested in the
format. Now I say anyone of course they had sold
some but the sales were pitiful. In this article from 1987 Philips estimated that
there were only between 12,000 and 15,000 Laservision players, as they called them,
in Europe. That's 15,000 sold in almost 10 years of the format being on the
market in all of Europe and over in Japan they were selling 10,000 of one
model per month back in 1984. But Philips had hatched a plan, with Laserdiscs now
capable of playing a digital audio soundtrack why not just start all over
again? Drop the Laservision name that hardly anyone was aware of, rebrand the
whole thing CD video and then you could piggyback on the success of compact disc
which had taken the market by storm. And that's exactly what they announced
we're going to do at lavish launch parties for this new format in March
1987 and after they'd launched their initial range of home devices they
planned on releasing portables with built-in screen so people could watch CD
Videos on the go. However a year later, March 1988, the product still wasn't
out. Phillips had encountered a number of problems. They'd had to switch the
production of the players from Belgium to Japan and also they were having
difficulties getting the players to read the discs properly because the
difference in weights between the different sizes of discs. Compact discs
runs at a different speed as well to a Laserdisc, so the whole thing was more
complicated than they anticipated and it must have been more than a bit
embarrassing for Philips who announced the format to find that Pioneer had been
able to develop their player that was capable of playing all three sizes of
discs without any problems, although it did this by having two different motors
in the machine which made it quite expensive. Philips wanted to keep their
machine down below £499. But Philips eventually managed to overcome
their technical difficulties and they launched the CD video product onto the
UK market on the 3rd of October 1988. Now as well as the Combi players which were
capable of playing all three sizes of discs, Philips also released smaller
players approximately the same size as a standard compact disc player, which could
only play the smallest size disc, the one the same size as a 12 centimeter CD.
I remember being slightly tempted by these when I saw them in the stores because
they didn't cost an awful lot more than buying a compact disc player, which was
still quite expensive at the time. But I remember what it was that put me off and
it was the medium-size discs. The fact that that machine wouldn't be able to
play them and there were quite a few titles on those that I was interested in
at the time. The large ones weren't too much of interest because they
just too expensive, but if I bought a machine that could only play the small
ones then I would have felt like I was missing out. So Philips in a way shot
themselves in the foot by offering too much choice. Now as well as all these
music titles they did release a range of movies on the CD Video format, on the
largest size disc which of course made them quite expensive but really these
are just Laserdiscs colored gold and with a digital audio soundtrack. Up until
this point in the UK though all the laserdisc players had only be able to
play analog soundtrack so if you wanted to play one of these back with the audio
intact you'd have to play it on one of the new
CD Video machines. Now the first time I ever saw Laserdiscs for sale in a store
wasn't when they were called Laserdiscs or even Laservision or Discovision or
VLP as Philips called it in the early days, no it was during the late nineteen
eighties relaunch as CD Video it will have been 1989 when I saw a display in
my local HMV they got a whole area to these at all the different sizes were
lined up with a big marquee and promotional literature being given out
it was quite impressive. To anyone walking in looking at it, it
looked like the latest and greatest thing. We'd gone from CD and we were now
moving to CD Video. But I was aware that Laserdisc had been around for many years
before then because I followed the technology news so I'd seen Laserdisc
when it was launched in the late 1970s on the BBC TV show Tomorrow's World, I
was aware of Laserdisc be used inside arcade games like Dragon's Lair for example and
in the BBC Doomsday projects as the storage format for the data to be read
off by the BBC Master computers. So to me when I saw these on the shelves I
thought, well that's just Laserdisc again. But it doesn't mention anywhere on the
packaging of this that it has anything to do with Laserdiscs or Laservision. But
despite this attempt to relaunch the product as new it didn't have any more
success in the market than Laserdiscs or Laservision had had before it. The CD
Video name disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared. It's quite easy to
see why it wasn't a success it doesn't take a genius.
Most of the discs weren't these larger ones they were the smaller
ones with pop music on with a few tracks and a video or maybe just a few
videos on there. Well the market for pop music videos tends to be younger people
and who doesn't tend to have £499 to spend on a player?
Well that's younger people as well and the discs weren't cheap. So it's obvious
the whole thing was never going to be a success it's just too expensive for the
market that it's aimed at.
Now in my opinion the whole former of CD video is
a bit of a kludge what I mean by that is that this is CD video these standard 12
centimeter CDs with video on them. The other things that came along with it
and were rebranded CD video had already existed in the market of course the
larger size discs, well those are just Laserdiscs or Laservision discs with a
digital audio soundtrack. Players for Digital Audio soundtrack Laserdiscs had
existed since 1984 so that was nothing new. You might think that the medium
sized discs were something that had just been introduced along with this format,
but no again those had been out for a number of years I've got a disc here
Madonna's Like A Virgin, this is from 1984 this is from Japan. In fact a bit of
an interesting thing about this disc, you'll notice the Laserdisc turtle on
this side, which means flip it over and play the other side. Well the other side
of course you can't play that because it's actually just white plastic that's
a bit like doing a picture disc I suppose but with Laserdisc, two layers
sandwich together. It's the other side that plays because of course Laserdiscs
play from the underneath But back to the CD video and this really is the essence
of the format, this standard 12 centimeter CD size one. The others
just got caught up in the rebranding but really those are Laserdiscs or LaserVision discs.
This is a CD that can play video and as we mentioned before we've got the CD section on the inside the video section on the outside.
But that video just like in the case of Laserdiscs is Composite Analog Video. In this
case it's PAL, it does have a digital soundtrack accompanying it, but the video
itself is analog. So this explains why the disc is split into two and in
particular why the analog video has to be on the outer section because that's
the only part the disk that spins fast enough to be
able to reproduce video. So the physical limitations of the disk ended up
creating the end product because you've only got room for about six minutes
worth of video, well it's not much you can put in there other than a pop music
promo and then you've got that space in the middle that you can't really do much
with other than perhaps stick some digital audio in there. Let's call it 'CD Video'.
Now this rather slapdash approach to creating a new format annoyed the
Japanese manufacturers because up until this point CD had been an agreed
standard but the problem with the Philips format was that you could only
play the PAL discs in the PAL territories and the NTSC discs in the
NTSC territories. What was once a worldwide format is now being segregated.
They didn't like that at all, but perhaps it didn't matter because technology
moved pretty quickly in the eighties. Just a year after the launch of CD video
in the UK in 1989 there's this article talking about the upcoming digital video
formats. Philips apparently had been working on CDI for five years by this
point, so of course that predates CD Video coming out, and they were only able
to get it to play crude video in a corner of the screen.
However due to a breakthrough that occurred in digital video compression in
1987 you were now able to get 72 minutes worth of fullscreen moving video on a
single compact disc. So naturally Philips as well as other
manufacturers around the world started to concentrate their attentions on this
new digital video. Which ultimately resulted in the new format video CD that
Philips released in the early 1990s. Where you could hold a full movie on two compact discs,
and that explains why Philips lost interest in the CD Video format in the
late 1980s, they were concentrating their attentions on bringing out the new
digital format just a few years later. They'd tried to sell Laservision since
the late 1970s without any success this CD Video rebranding hadn't really
done anything to help it, and within just a couple of years the CD Video name
disappeared from the market.
Now while that might be the end of CD Video it
certainly wasn't the end of Laserdisc. Laserdisc was the name that Pioneer had
given to the format that Philips called Laservision. As we saw earlier on
they were doing fine over in Japan, they weren't doing too bad in the US and
they'd been there since the very early days as well, but they'd now become
effectively the worldwide distributor for laserdisc players and they hit it at
just the right point when the collector's market kicked in for
widescreen special editions with directors commentaries and of course one
of the big things that appealed to the collectors at the time was those digital
soundtracks that have been added on in the mid-1980s so you could argue that
Philips had dropped out at exactly the wrong point but I think it's quite
possible that CD Video would never have been this success that laserdisc was albeit
ever so briefly in the mid 1990s. So there you go that was a look at CD Video
A format that is often and not unsurprisingly confused with Video CD.
It doesn't help that Philips launched both of them and they reuse the logo from CD Video
on VCD, just swapping two of the words around. Now VCD didn't really have
much success when it was launched in the west in the early 1990s. You're probably
aware it's a digital format, it uses MPEG 1 encoding and it splits a film usually
across two CDs. But because it was cheap to reproduce those CDs it did meet with
a lot of success in the Asian market. Right up until recently you could still
buy new films on VCDs. So it had a run of over 25 years now I've just looked
online and I can't see any brand new releases on the format the most recent
one came out in November 2017 so maybe it's dead or maybe it's just having a
rest and pining for the fjords.
But anyway that's it for the moment.
As always, thanks for watching
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