The consumer electronics market has traditionally been a little slower at imposing planned obsolescence on its customers than the computing industry, but it violated that rule with the work on the next-generation DVD. Before DVD even hit the market in 1997, consumer electronics manufacturers were already at work on the next iteration of the standard.

Word about these new technologies began to trickle out in early 2002, with demo units making their debut at the January 2003 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Sony made a great deal of noise with its Blu-ray format and had considerable support from other OEMs. Toshiba and NEC seemed like a dark horse with their Advanced Optical Disc (AOD). Given this, a lot of people were shocked in 2003 when the DVD Forum, the trade association that shepherded the DVD format from spec to market, adopted AOD as the official, Forum-endorsed next-generation format. It was felt that Sony's Blu-ray had the edge in every way, but the Forum picked AOD, which was renamed HD-DVD.

There's a lot of confusion surrounding the two formats, which, as the DVD editor for IGN, I experienced almost from day one. Hopefully, this article will help shed a little light on what's going on in both camps. It's not easy to fully explain everything, since some specs have not yet been settled upon, or are stable but not thoroughly documented. I expect to revisit this story more than a few times as things fall into place, standards are adopted and the whole situation shakes out.

DVD Roots

DVD's roots can be traced back to 1994, when an ad hoc committee of movie studios first met to create a format for disc-based movies. A year later, two formats emerged: Philips/Sony announced Multimedia CD (MMCD) and Toshiba, Matsushita, Pioneer and Warner announced Superdisc (SD). Funny how history repeats itself.

IBM proved to be the hero here, as it worked behind the scenes to twist some arms and get the two camps to unite under one effort. After the expensive disaster that was the Betamax/VHS fight in the early 1980s, it wasn't hard for IBM to convince the consumer electronics manufacturers that it was in their best interests to ensure that the industry did not go down that particular road again. In the end, a single spec, called DVD, was established in December 1995.

The final specification of DVD-Video, for home video viewing, and DVD-ROM as a replacement for CD-ROM on personal computers, was agreed upon in September 1996. A month later they settled on the Content Scrambling System (CSS) copy protection method that would prove the source of so much controversy three years later. The DVD Consortium was established as an independent arbiter and keeper of the specification, later changing its name to the DVD Forum.

The first DVD players and discs became available in Japan in November 1996. The technology was launched in nine cities in the U.S. in March 1997, with a national rollout several months later. Around 80 million DVD decks have now been sold in the U.S. alone.