Failed Physical Media Formats

Podcast Transcript

For over a century, companies have tried to invent the next great way to listen to music or watch movies.

Some became household standards that were the foundation of multi-billion-dollar industries. Others became expensive mistakes, technological dead ends, or punchlines in the history of consumer electronics.

Some were so inconsequential that most people never even realized that they existed.

Learn more about failed media formats and the battles behind them on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

It is shocking how many different formats companies have developed for listening to music and watching videos.

Most of the successful formats you know of, as well as a few of the unsuccessful ones. Yet there was a staggering number of formats developed that ultimately went nowhere.

Some of them were just technologies ahead of their time, some were too expensive, and others just weren’t very good.

In fact, there are so many that I couldn’t possibly cover them all. So, for the purpose of this episode, I’m only going to cover media formats for music and video, not computer data storage.

Also, the term “failed” is a bit ambiguous, so I’m not covering anything that was the dominant media format for any period. This means that vinyl records, reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray will not be included.

So with that, let’s get started with one you probably never heard of, the first consumer video recording system, Cartrivision.

Cartrivision was an early home videocassette system introduced in 1972, before VHS and Betamax. It was built into large console televisions and allowed users to record TV programs, while also offering prerecorded feature films for rental, making it one of the first consumer movie-rental formats. Adjusted for inflation, the system cost around $10,000.

Its rental tapes had a primitive copy-protection system: they could be played but not rewound at home, so they had to be returned after viewing. The system was expensive, bulky, and short-lived, and it disappeared after about a year as sales failed to take off.

Oddly enough, in 2013, the lost Game 5 of the 1973 NBA Championship game was found on a Cartrivision tape. Recovering it was so difficult that a documentary was made about it.

Another media format that achieved some limited popularity in the 1970s was the 8-track tape.

The 8-track tape came to be because it solved a very specific problem: how to bring recorded music into the car.

There had been attempts to create in-car record players and tape systems, but they were awkward, fragile, or unreliable. The breakthrough came from the endless-loop tape cartridge.

Instead of threading tape between reels like a reel-to-reel machine, the tape was packed inside a plastic cartridge and played continuously. You could shove it into a dashboard player, hear music instantly, and not worry about flipping sides.

The format was refined by Bill Lear, the same Lear behind Learjet, who worked with earlier cartridge designs and helped standardize the 8-track system in the mid-1960s. Its big commercial break came when Ford began offering 8-track players in cars.

I hesitated putting 8-track tapes on this list because they were actually quite popular for a while. I distinctly remember people buying and using them when I was really young.

But the format had built-in weaknesses. Because the tape was an endless loop, it was prone to stretching, tangling, and wearing out. You could not easily rewind. Fast-forwarding was possible on some players, but imprecise.

Songs sometimes had to be split awkwardly between tracks, meaning a song might fade out, the machine would click, and then the song would fade back in.

It was soon replaced by the cassette tape, which quickly improved in quality. The cassette tape was smaller, more durable, and became insanely popular with the release of the Sony Walkman.

I’ll briefly give a mention to the Sony Betamax tape, but only briefly because I previously did an entire episode on the competition between VHS and Betamax.

I’ll just mention that the standard story about Betamax being a superior format wasn’t quite true. VHS won because it offered something consumers valued more: recording length.

During the time when both VHS and Betamax were vying for market supremacy, RCA introduced its own video format, which was an expensive, total disaster: RCA’s SelectaVision.

SelectaVision was one of the most expensive and embarrassing failures in the history of consumer electronics. The name was used for a few RCA video projects, but it is best remembered for the CED, or Capacitance Electronic Disc, system.

It was a home video format that stored movies on grooved vinyl-like discs, which were read by a stylus rather than by a laser. The discs came sealed in large plastic caddies, so the user never handled the discs directly. You inserted the caddy into the player, the machine pulled the disc out, and the empty caddy came back out.

The basic idea was to create a cheaper alternative to videotape. In the 1970s, VCRs were still expensive, and RCA believed there would be a large market for a lower-cost device that could play prerecorded movies at home.

However, the system suffered from a fatal timing problem. RCA spent well over a decade developing it, and by the time SelectaVision finally reached the market in 1981, VHS and Betamax had already established themselves.

Unlike a VCR, SelectaVision could not record television programs, which was one of the biggest reasons people bought home video machines in the first place.

The most amazing thing about SelectaVision was that it worked. There are some videos on YouTube that show it in action, and the quality is better than you’d think for something that was playing video from a vinyl disc.

RCA discontinued SelectaVision in 1984, only three years after launch. The company reportedly lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the project. In hindsight, it is a classic example of a company solving yesterday’s problem.

RCA had built a clever way to play movies at home, but it arrived after consumers had already decided they wanted to record, time-shift, rent, and eventually own movies on videotape.

Another video disc technology that never made it big was LaserDisc.

LaserDisc was one of the most fascinating almost-successes in home video history. First introduced commercially in the late 1970s by MCA, Phillips, and Pioneer, it was an optical disc format that stored video on large, 12-inch discs roughly the size of vinyl records.

Unlike VHS or Betamax, which used magnetic tape, LaserDisc was read with a laser, making it a forerunner of later optical formats such as DVD and Blu-ray. It should be noted that despite using a laser, it was analog, not digital.

Its great strength was quality. LaserDisc offered better picture and sound than VHS, and it became especially popular with serious film fans, collectors, and home theater enthusiasts.

It was also the format that helped introduce many features that later became standard on DVDs, including widescreen editions, director’s commentaries, bonus features, alternate audio tracks, and high-quality special editions. For people who cared about movies as movies, LaserDisc was far ahead of videotape.

There were also digital formats that failed as well. One of the best-known failed formats was Digital Audio Tape, or DAT.

Digital Audio Tape was introduced by Sony in the late 1980s as a high-quality digital successor to analog cassette tape. It used small cassette-like cartridges, but unlike ordinary cassettes, it recorded sound digitally. The audio quality was excellent, often at or above CD quality, and the tapes were compact, durable, and capable of making very clean recordings.

Technically, DAT was impressive. It used a rotating-head system similar to a video recorder, allowing it to store a large amount of digital information on a narrow strip of tape.

Because of this, DAT became popular in professional settings, especially in recording studios, radio, film production, and live concert recording. For musicians and engineers, it was a convenient way to make digital master recordings before hard-drive recording became common.

Its problem was the consumer market. The music industry was deeply worried that DAT would allow people to make perfect digital copies of CDs, so there were political and legal fights over copy protection.

This delayed adoption led to restrictions such as the Serial Copy Management System, which limited digital copying. At the same time, DAT machines were expensive, and most ordinary listeners had little reason to replace CDs or cassettes with another tape-based format.

Yet another failed Sony format was the MiniDisc.

MiniDisc was Sony’s early-1990s attempt to replace both cassette tapes and the CD. It used a small magneto-optical disc housed in a protective plastic cartridge, making it much tougher and more portable than a CD.

Users could record, erase, rearrange tracks, title songs, and make clean digital copies within the limits of Sony’s copy-protection rules. In many ways, it was what people had always wanted cassettes to be: small, durable, recordable, and easy to edit.

The format had real strengths. It was popular with journalists, musicians, students, and audio hobbyists because portable MiniDisc recorders were excellent for field recording.

In Japan, it became a major consumer format, especially for portable music. Sony later improved the system with better compression, longer recording modes, and eventually Hi-MD, which increased storage capacity and allowed use as a disc for computer data.

But MiniDisc struggled in the wider global market because it arrived at an awkward time. CDs were already cheap and dominant, recordable CDs became common, and then MP3 players made the whole idea of carrying physical music discs feel outdated.

Sony also hurt the format with the same mistake it made with digital audio tape: it built in excessively restrictive software and copy controls, making it less convenient than simply dragging MP3 files onto a player.

MiniDisc was not a bad format. It was a clever, durable, near-success that got trapped between the CD era and the iPod era.

There were also several failed attempts at digital audio formats that were of higher quality than regular CDs.

DVD-Audio was a high-resolution audio format introduced in the year 2000 as a possible successor to the compact disc. It used DVD discs to store music at much higher quality than standard CDs, often with surround sound mixes as well as stereo tracks. For audiophiles, it offered impressive sound and more storage capacity than a CD.

Whereas CDs used 16-bit samples at a 44.1 kilohertz sample rate, DVD-Audio could use 24-bit samples at a rate as high as 192 kilohertz.

I actually own several DVD-Audio discs that I purchased back then. There is a definite improvement in audio quality, but it is very subtle, and you need the right equipment to really hear it. I recently put one in my Blu-ray player, and it played fine.

However, DVD-Audio was released at the same time as a high-quality audio format, Super Audio Compact Disc, or SACD.

SACD was created by Philips and Sony, the companies that developed the Compact Disc standard.

SACD took a wholly new approach. Instead of 16 or 24-bit samples, SACD used a one-bit sample. Each 1 represented up of the sound wave, and each 0 represented down. However, it did this one-bit sampling at a rate of over 2.8 megahertz.

SACD also offered a multilayer disc with a regular CD layer and a SACD layer.

The problem with both of these high end audio formats is that they both appeared in the marketplace right when MP3s and Napster were peaking in popularity. This turned out to be the replacement for CDs, not a higher quality disc.

There is an odd twist to the story however. SACD never became a mainstream replacement for the CD, but it did not completely disappear. It survived as a niche audiophile and classical music format, where sound quality mattered more than portability or convenience.

A reasonable estimate is that the market now sees roughly 500 to 700 new SACD titles per year worldwide. A large number of these are classical titles, primarily sold in Japan. They also don’t have very large print runs, so they can be hard to find and are often sold at a premium.

Some say that every physical media format is now obsolete, as everything is available online via streaming.

However, that is not totally true. There has been an uptick in physical media sales over the last few years as people have realized that music and movies are not always available on streaming services.

There are even limited numbers of new 8-track and reel-to-reel tapes that are still being released, mainly to hobbyists.

There might never be a new physical media format. Current sales are too small to justify investments in new formats, and the old formats are good enough.