Blu-ray vs HD DVD

as it turns out, that was being uh optimistic. This is going to be part six of I think seven episodes now because there's just so much to say, and there's so much that goes into this and that that is reflective of our relationship with media and also the business of media. This is a really complicated, deep topic, and obviously I could have looked at launching a full podcast, not just an episode, but a full series around the technology of media and its evolution and our our relationship

with it. That could have been, you know, a mini series, like a fifteen part mini series or something. But I do want to continue this and conclude it, so I'm hoping that in this episode of the next one, I'll be able to do that. We'll see how that goes. But in our last episode, I ended by talking about how DVDs rose up to take the torch from VHS, the VHS video cassette tapes, and how the DVD became the dominant form of media in the home theater space.

But I ran out of time to talk about a few other interesting points about DVDs, such as why some entertainment companies were excited about the DVD format and some were reluctant to support it. Now, to understand all this, we need to think about the television industry at the time that the DVD was starting to to come about.

And it's been a while since I've talked about television in this series, and in a much earlier episode, I talked about the birth of cable and also the transition that happened between black and white to color television, which was actually pretty early in the days of TV, but it took more than a decade for color TV to become kind of the norm in households across the world.

But besides cable delivery, you also had the rise of satellite television, and with that customers could access more channels than what over the air broad broadcast could support in those days. So if you had rabbitier antenna or you know, an antenna up on the roof and you're using that to pull down signals to watch on TV, you had a certain number of channels at your disposal, but cable customers and satellite TV customers had access to far more channels.

Some of them were premium cable channels like HBO or pay per view services, and it meant that customers had way more options than they would if they just got their their television over the air. And it also meant that some of the control for media was leaving the hands of the entertainment studios that were producing it and going more toward the companies that were distributing it, so

cable companies, satellite companies, that sort of thing. So that meant that some of the studios were starting to get a little antsy, because every player in a game wants to be in the lead. You don't want to see another element in that game start to outperform you. And that was sort of the feeling that these studios were getting at the time. And meanwhile, you had another player on the field that was also causing issue. That would be blockbuster video. It had ascended to a position of

dominance in the video rental market. It controlled almost half of the market share of all video rentals across the United States, and that gave Blockbuster a lot of power at the negotiating table when working with studios. Blockbusters gain meant lower profits for those studios that were actually producing the content, and the entertainment world is a cutthroat environment. The various entities are constantly maneuvering to get a better

deal than the other guy has. And also during this time, we saw entertainment companies began the process of consolidation with other big, big companies like providers and building towards what we would see today with these movie and television studios being part of gigantic telecommunications companies. So you could argue that these days, these mega giants are setting all the rules. But this was still in a time where everyone was

kind of maneuvering. It was sort of a game of thrones, but in the entertainment industry, not in a sword and sorcery kind of way. Anyway, back to why this matters for DVD, the studios preferred selling copies of movies to customers rather than the rental model. Because the studio has got a larger share of the sales revenue for sold movies than they would get from a rental royalty. It would take time for Blockbuster to make the switch from VHS to DVD. In fact, the lack of speed on Blockbusters.

Part of this is frequently cited as one of the many reasons that company eventually went bankrupt. But I did full episodes on Blockbuster already, so I'm not gonna go back into that. Warner Brothers in particular, was really jazzed about developing the DVD technology. Meanwhile, Disney, Paramount, and Fox were less enthusiastic. There was a fear that the copy protection on DVDs wouldn't be sufficient to keep piracy at bay, so these companies really wanted stronger DRM put on two

DVDs and for DVD players. Plus to use the DVD technology, the companies would have to pay a royalty fee to Warner Brothers. Because Warner Brothers was one of the entities that it was involved in the development of the DVD format. So if you wanted to put your movies on DVD, it meant that you had to pay a small, well not that small, but a licensing via Royalty v to Warner Brothers, and as it turns out, entertainment companies are

rarely keen to send cash to their direct competitors. Funny thing that getting those studios on board ended up taking a lot of negotiations and deals. For example, Fox agreed to jump on board the DVD wagon when Warner Brothers president Warren liber Fab was able to negotiate for Time

Warner to carry Fox News on its cable package. Time Warner had previously refused to carry Fox News because the company had been in a pretty public spat with Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, so liber Fat was able to smooth that out to get Time Warner to say, all right, we will carry Fox News on our cable subscription packages if, in turn, twentieth century Fox agrees to

support the DVD standard. Now, while the first DVD players on the market cost around eight hundred dollars, that was still cheaper than the first VCRs, particularly if you take into account inflation, and that price dropped fairly quickly. In fact, the DVD player would become one of the fastest adopted consumer electronics gadgets ever. It debuted in and by two thousand three, DVD rentals were outperforming VHS rentals, but it was in sales where you really saw the big difference.

Not only were studios making lots of moolah from the business, but also lead to big companies like Target and Walmart getting truly enormous by selling DVDs in their stores. Big retailers were carrying DVDs and it was a profitable business. And it was because of a change in consumer behavior ce DVDs managed to do something that vhs had largely failed to do. It made buying movies a fairly mainstream activity.

There were a few people out there who had impressive libraries of movies on VHS tape, but most people were buying blank tapes and copying stuff off television. They might own one or two prerecorded movies. Often they were family films, things that were appropriate for families, in other words, but most people were just renting VHS video cassettes. They weren't going out and buying a copy. But DVDs were a

different story. Average consumers were more likely to purchase a DVD, and so we see how a change in technology changed our consumption of the media. On that technology, rather than rent something so that we could watch it. We would actually go out and purchase something so we could own a copy, and DVD became a place where a film that performed poorly at the box office could thrive in

the home market. Fight Club is one of the most cited examples of this particular phenomena because in the movie came out in nine it made a paltry thirty seven million dollars at the U S box office against a budget that was estimated at sixty seven million, so it was by all definitions a box office flop. But then it came out on DVD. It was stacked to the brim with special features, which helped to kind of define what special features would be for DVDs, and it flourished

on in the home market. It became a best seller. There was another film that had a similar story, Office Space. It made a measly ten point eight million dollars at the box office, but it would go on to become a big success on home video, particularly after the cable channel Comedy Central aired the film in two thousand one.

Now I could get into some armchair psychology to talk about the implications of renting versus owning, but Frankly, I'm not qualified as a psychologist, so I'm not gonna really do that. However, it does seem interesting to me that we saw a shift from renting a film, so we might say I never got around to seeing that movie, I want to rent it and watch it, and then we shift over to purchasing a copy of a film

that we can watch whenever we want. And DVDs began to really appeal to collectors, particularly if those collectors were interested in special features that were available on many DVDs. And I'm one of those people. I certainly fell into the trap of collecting DVDs. I probably own a dozen that I've never even taken out of the shrink wrap. But it has been years since I bought a DVD, so I'd say I'm mostly over it until the next Uber Super Definitive edition of Evil Dead comes out, anyway.

But like the VHS tape, the DVD craze also followed a peak and a decline. The early to mid two thousand's would mark the height of the DVD's dominance in home theater media. It was king, but by two thousand seven those numbers were starting to dip. In the United States, In other places, the sales would continue to climb a little bit longer. For example, in the United Kingdom, two thousand nine would mark the first year that would see a decline in sales. So why we're DVD sales on

the decline by two thousand seven to two thousand nine. Well, one big reason for the decline was the next generation of home video media was emerging at that time. The media would be able to take advantage of another advance in technology that would affect our consumption, and that was

the development of high definition television. The history of HDTV is a surprisingly long one, and it could merit a full episode on its own, but I'll give a short overview all the way back in nineteen seventy, a Japanese company called the Japan Broadcasting Corporation or n h K, began researching how to develop high resolution televisions along with

the formats that those televisions would rely upon. By nine seventy seven, the Society of Ocean Picture and Television Engineers would form a committee called the Study Group on High Definition Television. That group worked on recommendations for standards, including a recommendation to shift away from the four by three aspect ratio of television at the time to the widescreen format or the sixteen by nine format. The group published

their recommendations in nineteen eighty. Now work was continuing on developing the technology for HD, but progress was slow, and that wasn't just because of technological limitations, but also the need to establish agreed upon standards and regulations. So in the United States, the FCC formed an Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service UH and they stacked it with people from the private industry to kind of talk about, argue over and and hash out the proposals for a high

definition television standard. The initial versions would rely on analog technology analog signals in high definition format, but by nine the committee had largely abandoned those ideas to consider an all digital approach. Eventually, a confederation of companies proposed an all digital format for h D t V to the f c C in nineteen and after some additional tweaks, the FCC established the standard for digital TV and hd TV prodcasting at the end of nineteen ninety six in

the United States. The standard definition resolution in the US ends up essentially being six forty by four a d pixels we usually refer to it just as four A D. H D is a little more confusing because you could get a h D screen that was twelve e d by seven twenty pixels in wide screen. Uh, there were some that were sold that were nine sixty by seven twenty, which you could argue as not really HD, but is better as a higher resolution than standard mission. It was

also in the old four by three aspect ratio. And also, just in case you are wondering what I mean by resolution, think of your Your image that you're seeing on a television is a collection of pixels, little points of light. The more points of light you have, the smaller they each have to be to fit on the screen. Uh. The higher your resolution is, the sharper the image, the more clear the details are. So if you have a higher resolution image, it just it typically looks better up

to a point. You start to reach a level of resolution that ends up being greater than what the eye can detect. And at that point it doesn't really matter if you have higher resolution because you wouldn't be able to tell the difference that ranges from person to person. Personally, I find it very challenging to tell the difference between say, an eight K set and a four K set. To me, they look practically the same unless I'm really close to the screen and in some cases have a magnifying glass

in my hand. Anyway, back to resolutions, So you had the seven twenty version, that's one version of HD, but you also had a nineteen twenty by ten eight HD screens, so we usually referred to that as seven twenty versus ten eight. In addition, there were other little letters that were attached to these, like P or I. P means progressive scan, I means interlaced, which made it a bit of a head scratcher for consumers. They were a little

confused as to what that actually meant. But the message was that these televisions and broadcast standards would provide much higher resolution images than standard television was able to do, and the next generation home video systems would likewise be able to deliver high resolution video because a DVD has a limit to the resolution it could deliver, and that limit was seven twenty by four eight d pixels for the n t SC format or seven twenty by five

seventies six for PAL, and that doesn't really qualify for HD standard. So even with a DVD with the best picture you could get. It was not the same as high definition, so the next generation of home media would change that. And before I jump into that hornet's nest, I should also mention that the FCC would eventually rule that all United States based TV signals would have to switch over to digital transmission. They made that decision in

June of two thousand nine. That caused an enormous amount of confusion in the United States, largely based off ignorance. People were worried about whether or not they'd be able to get anything on their televisions once the switch happened, and despite numerous efforts to communicate what this all meant, people were really confused, and it turned out that the people who needed to worry about this represented only a

small percentage of the overall population. Those were people who are getting their television broadcasts over the air, as opposed to people who are getting their broadcast through satellite or cable. If they had older analog TV sets, they would have to purchase a digital converter box and that would allow them to accept incoming digital transmissions. It would go through this converter box, which would then convert that to an analog signal and then pass that analog signal on to

the television. So it's just just a converter, that's all it was. And for months there were stories about people buying converters even though they didn't really need one because they weren't getting their television over the air, or they had a newer television that didn't need it in the first place. We even did a classic Tech Stuff episode

about that to explain what was going on. I've thought about doing a classic rerun of that episode just for fun, but ultimately decided not to do it because it's it's completely obsolete. It doesn't it doesn't have any bearing on anything anymore, so it really is just a footnote. No. What I really wanted to do, though, is get into a really big format war, one that was similar in some ways to the Beta Max versus VHS fight back

in the nineteen seventies. So I'm going to talk about Blu Ray versus h D DVD, but first let's take a quick break. High definition televisions began to enter the consumer market in the early to mid two thousand's. Like most technologies, they're really freaking expensive when they first came out, so there was a limited market at the very early days. There were also there's limited content. There wasn't a whole

lot you could watch on them. DVDs couldn't match the resolution of even a seven twenty P h d t V set, let alone the ten A d P and ten A d I models. There were very few channels that offered h d t V format, so it was kind of hard to sell these. However, it was clear the demand was there. People wanted to be able to see this higher resolution television at home, and eventually there were enough early adopters to allow prices to gradually fall

enough so that more consumers could jump on board. And so this created the incentive to develop a high resolution optical media disc format. Now, unlike the DVD, which evolved as a standard thanks to a unified effort among numerous companies to avoid another format war, the next generation of technologies coagulated into two opposing camps. So on one side you had Sony and Pioneer, and they were showing off a prototype system that at the time was called DVR Blue.

This would be around two thousand. This is what would evolve into Blu Ray. Sony had also explored an alternative called ultra density optical, but ultimately that technology would be reserved for professional use and not really make its way into the consumer video market. It did exist in parallel, but for other uses. Now on the other side, the other camp was being led by Toshiba. The company initially resisted Sony's approach because the early version of Sony's DVR

Blue was expensive. Sony was proposing an optical disc reader that used a blue laser rather than the red one that DVD players used. So why do that? Why switch to blue once? Because a blue laser can detect smaller objects than a red laser can. And it's all because of the wavelength of light. So if you look at a rainbow, you can see the spectrum the roy G BIV. Those colors also denote the range of wavelengths of light and it goes from longest to shortest. Red light has

a longer wavelength than blue light. The shorter wavelength lights can detect smaller pits on the surface of an optical disc, and pits are what represent information. So if your laser can detect smaller pets, that means you can pack more pits into the same amount of space of an optical disc right, you can fit more of them on there because they are tinier. So if you make the pits smaller, you fit more information on there. You can have a

high resolution video stored on there. However, blue lasers are also more expensive than red ones, and Sony's initial design required a special protective case around the discs. Uh the original one, it was almost like a cartridge that carried the disc and it was meant to protect it from being handled and getting scratched up. And that also meant that it was going to cost more to produce those discs because you had to produce little case that they

would come into. And Toshiba wanted to find a different way, so the company eventually would propose its own blue laser format. The DVD Forum adopted to Sheba's proposal as the successor to the DVD format and it would be called HD

d v D. This was around two thousand two. So now you have the two camps that eventually became known as the Blu Ray Disc Association or b d A. That's with Sony and its team, and then you have the DVD Forum with Tashiba, and each tried to establish their technologies as the standard, and it would be a few years before either group would produce anything for consumers.

So this is all happening behind closed doors at the at the time, they tried a few times to agree upon a unified standard, but ultimately one side would say, no, I don't want to do it your way, you should do it my way, and the others I would say, pound sand, I don't want to do it your way. We're gonna do it my way, and so no agreement was ever reached. They had hoped that they could avoid the kind of format war that Sony and JVC had fought in the nineteen seventies. Sony was backing Beta Max

and JVC was backing VHS. Sony lost that fight. The company was not eager to go into another format war, but they were never able to come to any kind of agreement. And you can sort of understand why, because whichever group was responsible for establishing the technology that everyone was going to use could make a ton of money off of it in royalties or licensing fees. So no

one was eager to give that up. No one wanted to say, find your idea is good, now, let me pay you for the privilege of being able to use your technology. Now, most of these fights happened well outside of the consciousness of the general public. H d t V was barely even a thing yet, and most people were still marveling over DVDs, so most homes didn't have

an hd TV at the time. But behind the scenes, the DVD form and the Blu Ray Disc Association were making deals with entertainment studios to get exclusivity agreements for their formats. It's a lot like how video game consoles will sign an exclusive title for their individual programs, and uh game consoles would play a role in this HD DVD versus Blu Ray format war as well. The PlayStation three, Sony's video game console. Unsurprised Rising Lee would support Blu

Ray It was a Blu Ray player. In fact, when the p S three came out, it would be one of the cheapest Blu Ray players available, So it really helped Blue Ray or p S three sales because people who wanted a video game console would pick it up for the video games, people who wanted a cheap Blu Ray player would pick it up and both got to enjoy all the different aspects of that device. Microsoft did not make HD DVD support native to its own console,

that would be the Xbox three sixty. But the company did manufacture an HD DVD accessory drive that you could purchase and then connect to an Xbox three six console. So you couldn't put an HD DVD disk directly into an Xbox three six and have it play, but you could go out and buy the successory this peripheral, attach it to your Xbox three sixty and watch them that way. Now, on the Blue ray side, you had studios like Sony Pictures again no big surprise, Walt Disney Studios and twentieth

Century Fox on board. They had signed on to that camp. Over on the h D DVD side, you had Paramount Universal Studios and Warner Brothers signing on. And the hope each side had was to get the support of entertainment studios in an effort to force the other side to give up and to say, all right, fine, we'll go with your way. But that didn't happen, and development of

both technologies continued. So it's kind of like a giant game of chicken, with Tashiba driving one car for h D DVD at Sony driving the other for Blu ray, and each of them had three movie studios sitting in the back seat of their vehicles, and as the time got closer for these two technologies to actually debut on the consumer market, the studios in the back seat began

to get a little nervous. As production time neared, Paramount and Warner brother there is, within days of each other, flinched a bit, and both studios announced that they would support both formats going forward. They would no longer just agree to be exclusive to h D DVD. That came as a blow to Tashiba, which can no longer hold that exclusivity as a point of leverage, and this was in two thousand five. This was a year that Tshiba was supposed to actually launch the h D DVD player,

but that ended up being delayed. Production problems and other delays forced their hand and they would actually launch in April two thousand six. Even so, even with the delayed start, they had a headstart over Blu Ray. The first consumer Blu Ray player was from Samsung, which ran into some production issues of their own, and that delayed launch until June of two thousand six, and then the gloves were off. Both sides had some early issues. Some early h D

DVD players weren't terribly reliable. It's a common problem with brand new tech products. That's why I frequently suggest that you wait for the second generation of a technology before you jump into it, because frequently the first generation still has a lot of bugs in it. And then on the blue ray side, some of the early film transfers were shockingly sub bar. You had this high expectation, I mean, here you're supposed to get this high definition, high resolution video,

and some of those transfers were not good. It actually prompted some recalls of some of those disks. And both technologies allowed for different digital rights management strategies to help prevent piracy, but those same strategies also posed some potential

problems for legitimate customers. In general, these entertainment companies really like to have super strong DRM attached to the technologies to prevent piracy, but in general consumers aren't crazy about it because often it has a negative impact on how we can access the stuff we actually buy. So the perception is it's technology that actively penalizes people who have been purchasing and supporting that technology, and it often is not a very effective way to stop piracy, but it

is an effective way to irritate your customer base. Anyway, this was when DVD sales were starting to slow down. Uh, some people were jumping onto the HD bandwagon and they would back one format or another. So some people were saying, all right, well, I'm gonna get an h D DVD player and go with that, somewhere going with Blu Ray. Other folks like myself said, you know what, I'm gonna wait and see to find out which format is going

to stand the test of time. I'm not too keen on either jumping on one or worse yet, investing in both. And we also spent time worrying that no format was ever going to win out and that would end up creating a split market and some films would oly be available on one format and other films would only be available on the other format. The release of the p S three and November of two thousand six was a huge help to Blu Ray gamers who love the PS platform and only got a game console, but a Blu

Ray player as well. Meanwhile, Xbox fans would have to shell out extra money for the HD DVD accessory. It did not come standard with the Xbox three sixty, so that was a score for the Blu Ray camp. I say that, by the way, as an Xbox fan, I loved and still do the Xbox three sixty. I preferred it to the p S three, But if you're looking at it as far as features go, the Blu Ray player on the p S three, I think far put it ahead of Microsoft's support for h D DVD. Now,

I said before that these two formats were incompatible. You could not put a Blu Ray disc into an h

D DVD player and watch it. The Blue ray format could hold more data than the HD DVD discs, but there was some disagreement over whether or not that would translate to an actual, perceivable improvement and picture compared to h D DVD, and HD DVD was able to have a feature called h d I which allowed for interactive content based off the Java platform, so you could have a more rich, dynamic, interactive experience with h D DVD than you could with Blu Ray. So they each had

things that set them apart from the other. And while the two formats weren't compatible, there were some companies that began to produce dual player devices that essentially had two sets of optical pathways inside them. In order to read the different formats. The first of those was from l G, but usually it also meant that you couldn't access all of the features of a true player. So, for example, with LGS dual Player, you couldn't access h D I features in an HD DVD set it didn't support them.

You would need to get a dedicated h D DVD player for that. Not first, h D DVD held the largest market share for the HD media market, no big surprise. It also had a two month head start, but by the beginning of two thousand seven things had started to shift into Blue rays favor. Now one big blow that the b d A dealt The DVD Forum was in a deal with Blockbuster. Blockbuster announced it would only carry Blu ray discs for HD content in many, but not

necessarily all, of its stores. The DVD Forum would strike back, and in the fall of two thousand seven, both DreamWorks and Paramount announced that moving forward, all of their releases in HD would be on the h D DVD format, not Blu ray. So Paramount had started out as part of h D DVD, then kind of hedged its beets and said we're gonna support both, And then the fall of two thousand seven, said Nope, just kidding, We're gonna

totally be with the h D DVD folks. It ticked off some people movies like Transformers would exclusively move to h D DVD. I would argue that that was actually in favor of Blu ray but that's me inserting my opinion of Michael Bay's Transformers movies. The less said about the better, the gap between the two formats would narrow a bit in the market, but Sony was still in

the lead at the end of two thousand seven. Just a short time before c e S two thousand eight, which happens c e S happens in early January each year it's the Consumer Electronics Show, Warner Brothers made an announcement that would in retrospect serve as the death knell

for h D DVD. Warner Brothers said they were going to concentrate exclusively on making Blu ray discs from that point forward, and Toshiba, rocked by this news, canceled an h D DVD press conference at c e S, and shortly after ce S, companies like Netflix, Best Buy, and Walmart all shifted their focus to Blu ray disc rental or disc sales. Toshiba considered its options but chose to

throw in the towel. They ceased productions on HD DVD players and discs, and by the end of two thousand eight, no major companies were pressing films to h D DVD, and so Blu Ray would win the format war. This war was hard on consumers, but at least it was over by the end of two thousand eight, and at that point less than half of all households in the

United States had a high definition television. So while the format war had a negative impact on early adopters, a large number of consumers never even really had to worry about it because they didn't have a television they could

watch high definition content on the first place. But did shake things up, and it also set the stage for the next generation of media players, the Ultra h D Blu Ray format, also known as four K. This format, which requires an Ultra HD Blu ray player because older Blu ray players are not compatible with it, can display video at a resolution of three thousand, eight hundred forty by two in sixty pixels, a much higher resolution than h D and way way higher than standard definition. That

format would hit the market in two thousand sixteen. But more on that later as it plays into the shifting behaviors of consumers. Now, while Blu ray won the war, it didn't become as ubiquitous as the DVD player. In two thousand seventeen of all US households with a broadband connection owned a Blu Ray player. This is according to

a Fortune magazine. Meanwhile, around eight seven percent of all households owned a DVD player, So DVD was able to displace VCRs, but Blu ray didn't quite displace DVD players, and Blue Ray sales have been on the decline for several years in a row. A big reason for that falls to the Internet and digital files. So now I'm going to switch gears and talk about the digital revolution

and how that changed the way we access entertainment. And it's another complicated story, and it's one that requires me to go back to talking about audio for a little bit. So back in the late nineteen eighties, a German company called frown Hoffer Gazelle Shaft funded research into audio compression technology.

According to Karl Heinz Brandenburg, who would play a pivotal role in the development of the MP three compression format, it all started with a discussion about how to transmit music over digital phone lines, which happened all the way back in nine two. The idea was theoretically possible, but the technology was not yet up to the task, and that remained the case until nine six. What happened next,

I'll tell you right after we take this quick break. So, beginning in nineteen eighty six, Brandenburg and his colleagues were hard at work on creating a psychoacoustic approach to audio compression. And by that I mean they were trying to think about the actual physical process of hearing sounds. Now, as I mentioned in the previous episode about c d S, the range of human hearing is limited. Sounds with a pitch below twenty hurts or higher than twenty killer hurts

are imperceptible to the vast majority of human beings. But there are other limitations to our hearing as well. So for example, if you have a very quiet sound following right behind a very loud sound, we tend to not hear the quiet one. So if you're trying to come up with a way to encode audio in a digital format, and you're trying to save as much space as you can, you might do what Brandenburg and his fellow researchers decided

to do. You exclude any information that wouldn't be perceptible in the first place, because if you can't hear it, it doesn't need to be there. This is what makes the MP three a lossy format. It means that some of the information in the original recording gets discarded through the compression process, so the rest file does not contain all the information of the original file. In nineteen eight, the International Organization for Standardization requested the formation of a

group to oversee standards in audio recording. In response, the Moving Picture Experts Group or IMPEG formed. The chief goal of this group was to standardize a way to record video to CD ROM discs, and audio compression was part of that approach. It was had its own subgroup in the department. Different groups worked on individual solutions to this, with one group coming out on top. That group designed a mode that was called Layer three, which we see

represented in the file extension of MP three. And it took a long time to get the compression model right in order to preserve fidelity and also reduce the file size to the point where it was practical. Uh the MP three technology would be unveiled in ninete two as a potential audio encoding technology. The MP three file extension wouldn't come along until and while the original concept was to use the technology to transmit songs over I, S, d N lines, it would be the Internet where the

MP three would really take off. Now, I gotta point out the MP three is not the only audio file format out there. Far from it. There are tons of audio files and audio file formats, I should say, out there. It's not even the only audio compression technology. There are other lossy forms of audio compression, and they're also loss less, meaning the compressed audio file contains all of the information

of the original file. However, MP three became the dominant one on the Internet, and it lead to gadgets like the MP three player, which is kind of a misnomer because MP three players frequently could play lots of different audio file formats, but we tended to call them MP

three players. The first portable MP three players be end to hit the market around Apple would then introduce the iPod in two thousand one, and I find it really fascinating that MP three sort of became shorthand for audio files, even if the person using the term MP three was

actually referring to other file formats and compression strategies. And then not long after that, you had the introduction of the iPod, and the term iPod sort of became shorthand for digital audio file players or m P three players. People would refer to it as an iPod, even if it wasn't an Apple iPod. Heck, the reason we call

shows like mine podcasts is because of the iPod. Even though most people aren't listening on dedicated iPods anymore, the name stuck even as the technology would play itself out tour fade a bit from prominence. Now, when the MP three debuted, it was filling a real need in the market because people wanted a way to share music. But a raw music file is pretty big. It was way too large to transfer easily, especially back in those days.

I dug up an article from c net back in nine at quoted an analyst named Robert Katzev who said that the sweet spot for a hard drive size on a PC in was four gigabytes. Okay, so my smartphone has a hard drive space of a hundred twenty eight gigabytes on my phone back in a sweet spot for hard drive was four. An uncompressed raw audio file tends to run at about thirty four megabytes per minute if you have a bit depth of twenty four bits and a sample rate of ninety six killer hurts for stereo audio.

Obviously that that amount of space is dependent upon the bit depth and the sample rate. If you played with those, you could change how much space it takes. But if you were using those uh uh standards as your your recording or your encoding method, if you had a three a minute song, it would take up about a hundred four megabytes of space. And so you have an album worth of songs, you've got at least a gigabyte worth of data there. It doesn't take long before you've used

up that four gigs of storage space. Now, the data size, again depends on sample rate and bit depth. So if you started cheat with that a little bit, if you made the sample rate lower, you decrease the bit depth, you could fit more stuff onto a hard drive. But the more you do that, the more you toy with compromising the audio quality of the actual recording itself. So something you have to keep in mind when you're playing with these sort of things. Also, Internet speeds back in

the early two thousand's were not super fast. Most people were relying on dial up internet, so they're actually using a dial up modem, they're not using um, you know,

kind of a cable modem or anything like that. And in the United States, less than twenty percent of households had a home broadband subscription as late as two thousand five, So it was necessary to have a compression format that would allow people to store songs to a drive and also to transfer them over the Internet without eating up all their data plan or or taking hours to transmit.

B MP three and similar compression formats were solutions to that problem, but those formats also opened up the floodgates for piracy in an unprecedented way. Now, as we've seen in this series, the history of the evolution of media is one in which the industry tends to freak out about the possibility of unlawful copies flooding the market every time there's a new form of media that that arises. And most of the time that fear was kind of hard to justify because, yeah, sure, in theory you could

make copies of VHS tapes. In fact, not theory, you could practically do that. If you had two VCRs, or a VCR that had to cassette readers on it, or you had some professional duplication equipment, you could do that. You could also transfer albums onto cassette if you wanted to. You could burn c d s if you wanted to. But these processes were typically time consuming and they required an investment because you needed to transfer the content to a physical medium. You had to go buy blank discs,

or blank video cassettes or blank audio cassettes. Digital files removed a lot of those barriers. Duplicating a digital file and storing it on drive as easy. You can do it as many times as you like. You'll never wear out the original file. You can distribute the file to a wide audience, or that was far more common. You can make a digital file available for other people to copy and download from a central source. There's already software out there that would let you rip audio tracks off

a CD in a computer. You put a CD in your computer, you ripped the music off of it. You've got them in digital files. You could then just compress them if you wanted to run through a compression program. You could upload the files to a server, or you could join up heer to peer network and suddenly you are bypassing the entertainment companies entirely. And boy how d the companies hated that. They hated it a lot, and there was enormous pressure from record labels, on law enforcement

and elected officials to do something about it. This was when we started seeing some pretty dramatic claims about what digital piracy was doing to businesses like the music industry, and this also applies to the software industry and a little bit later to film and television as well. I'd say a lot of those claims were at best not supported by evidence. I might even argue that some of them were essentially made up. But let's break it down.

Music piracy was a thing, whether it was off of servers or more frequently through peer to peer services like kaza or Napster. People were sharing music files and other types of files as well, without paying for them. Peer to peer technology is a valid way to transfer files from computer to computer, and it's meant to make those processes fast by sidestepping the need for the traditional server

client model. Quick explanation. With that traditional model, you have a central server, it's got files on it, and the computers that are connecting to it are clients requesting copies of that file. If a lot of clients are all contacting the same survey can get bogged down. Peer to peer, all the computers on the network are peers of each other and they can share files between them. The more computers that have a specific file on them, the faster

those transfers tend to go. So there's nothing illegal about peer to peer networks on their on the basis of it like that, that's a completely legitimate way to distribute files. Uh, it's illegal if you are sharing files that you do not have the right to distribute, like music files that you didn't record yourself. Now, the music industry argued that

this was costing them lots and lots and lots of money. Critics, including the Government Accountability Office, would counter that, saying there's probably an impact to the revenue of the industry because of piracy, but it is impossible to determine because you cannot say for certain that someone who download did something illegally would have purchased a legal copy if they didn't have the opportunity to get it illegally. So, in other words, if I download a copy of the Wolverine origin. That's

a great one because a lot of people did that. Um, then you you can't tell me, oh, if you hadn't downloaded that copy, you would have gone out and bought one. Maybe I wouldn't have bought it at all. Either way, the companies aren't getting my money. They're either not getting it because I didn't even bother watching it, or they didn't get it because I stole it. But the point being that you cannot easily translate piracy to lost revenue doesn't make piracy right. By the way, this is not

a justification for piracy. It's merely to say you cannot make the argument that someone pirating digital files uh directly translates to lost revenue. Now, the entertainment industries saw the threat of technology like the Internet long before services like Napster werepping up, and they lobbied hard to get updated copyright protection laws in place to take into account the

power of the Internet. And in the United States, this took on the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or d m c A, which was signed into law in n The rules of the d m c A would allow companies to go after people and entities that were violating intellectual property law, while also allowing for the concept of safe harbor, meaning the Internet service providers wouldn't be held responsible for the actions that their customers were

taking while using their services. But there were also requirements in there for the I s p s to follow. They had to follow these rules in order to to warrant safe harbor. That included taking steps to act on the notification that a customer was using his or her connection to share files illegally. Now, in our next episode, I'm going to talk more about how digital files changed the entertainment industry and how piracy and downloading gradually gave

way to a different business model, that of streaming. That'll finally bring us up to our current situation, which I think I've promised four times at this point in this series because I kept getting bogged down with all these cool details. But again, it shows how this nature of technology, business and consumer behavior has changed dramatically over relatively short time. I mean, the history of recorded media is not that long, and yet we've seen some really dramatic shifts in consumer

behavior in that time. Within my own lifetime, I've seen it changed dramatically. So we're gonna talk more about that in the next episode. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, send me a message. The email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or if you want to check out our website, that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive of

all of our previous episodes there. You also find links to our social media accounts, so you can follow us on Facebook or Twitter and reach out to us there. And you can find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of

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