LaserDisc proved movies could be collected like records—it just needed better marketing
I have always been fascinated by LaserDisc technology. Long before I saw videos played from a disc, and shortly after hearing my first album on CD, I had the opportunity to watch movies on LD.
It was on a home theater system owned by my father’s friend, hooked up to a rear-projection TV and a powerful set of stereo speakers that made the floor rumble. Consider that our family TV was a 20-inch model with a mono speaker, and you can imagine why that impressed me. But LaserDisc never really caught on and we went straight from VHS tapes to DVDs.
LaserDisc was part of a different format war than VHS
But it was his strength
One of my favorite YouTubers, Technology Connections, made a great video about the failure of LaserDisc almost a decade ago.
In it, he notes that LaserDisc suffered from bad timing and an audience that wasn’t quite ready for what it was offering. People didn’t really understand the concept of watching movies in theaters at home. It wasn’t necessarily that LaserDisc was very expensive. He notes that VHS was more expensive than LaserDisc at launch.
What mattered was that LaserDisc still strived to be the video equivalent of buying a vinyl record. That’s how we sold it to people. VHS, on the other hand, solved the problem of capturing TV shows for watching later. The idea of buying pre-recorded movies on VHS that you can’t save came later, after technology’s proverbial foot was stuck firmly in the door.
So, from the beginning, and honestly until today, LaserDisc has been a format that appealed to a niche group of movie fans, even if its creators had preferred it to become a mainstream hit.
There was already an integrated “collector culture”
All the gifts hidden up his sleeves
From the beginning, movies on LaserDisc were aimed at people who loved movies and were looking for a way to collect them. Until then, the only real option was to buy a home projector and shoot movies on film at an incredible cost. If you think building a home theater is expensive today, in the 1960s and 1970s you’d have to be a veritable millionaire for that kind of luxury.
LaserDiscs were the beginning of the Criterion Collection films; Long before DVDs, you had LaserDiscs with extra features included on bonus discs, with ratings and commentary. Most people didn’t care about movies as anything other than something to do on a Friday night, but the studios presenting their films in this new format clearly had more than an idea of the intended audience.
You can now build a movie collection the same way people collect books or records. Your own library of entertainment, which you can enjoy in private.
The quality gap actually mattered (for a while)
Everything is relative
When VHS finally got around to bringing movies home via rental or purchase, the gap in quality between the two formats was hilarious.
I don’t even need to delve into my childhood memories, since I have commercial VHS and LaserDisc films to watch today. LaserDisc has twice the resolution of VHS and far superior sound, often reaching CD quality. There’s no rewinding, the discs don’t wear out from use, and you can skip straight to the chapter you want.
I even have one of the newer players that can play both sides of a LaserDisc without manual flipping! If you took care of your discs, the quality would remain consistent, and decades later it paid off when I analyzed the wear and tear of my VHS titles compared to our LDs.
The collector’s promise for the LDs has definitely been kept. Although disc rot is a rare but real thing, people who purchased LaserDisc copies of movies 40 years ago could realistically still watch and enjoy them today. The only reason we ditched LD was because DVDs, and then Blu-rays, offered much better quality. Technology has not failed; he has just been overtaken.
Which Vinyl Worked and LaserDisc Didn’t
Mastering Self-Deception
DVDs and BDs are built on the basis of LDs, at least in spirit, if not technologically. However, they do not benefit from the (undeserved) mystique of vinyl, which has helped it survive and even thrive among audiophiles. Vinyl fans could perhaps plausibly fool themselves into thinking that vinyl sounds better than modern high-quality digital, but the same trick won’t work for LaserDisc.
LaserDisc has its charms and warm analog feel, but no sane person would argue that its picture quality is somehow better than DVD. LaserDisc will therefore not become the video equivalent of vinyl, but it will remain the only format in which certain films are still preserved, as well as for those superb covers containing illustrations and information which might not exist anywhere else.
