This is the unspoken subtext in my post above about Sony’s business model. They keep inventing formats and hoping/pushing them to become a standard, not out of technical interest or for giggles. It’s for the walled garden potential and the licensing fees. Sony made billions from licensing fees on every CD and DVD sold, as well as the drives themselves. They’re always looking for that next one.
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My point is when they shot for the walled garden end of it, that’s when they really screwed up.
Sony made billion licensing out CDs, DVDs, the Betacam family, DAT, and others off to other manufacturers to make both media and the equipment.
It’s not just Sony either.
Before that Phillips with Compact Cassette, 8 track, 4 track, vinyl records both LPs and 45s, 78s before that. All from different companies or different partnerships. Especially post WWII the model was seldom to lock some one into either buying your device or buying your media, and attempts to do that tended to face plant.
Developing formats was more about getting other companies to license the tech, and buy materials and manufacturing equipment (or capacity) from you. You wanted to be the guy selling vinyl pucks to everyone else.
Very few of the formats we’re familiar with started as a license free, open format. VHS is one of the big exceptions there. There tend to be a lot more once we start talking about digital files and encoding.
MD was available for license and quite a few other companies did release equipment, just very few outside of Japan. Part of that was high license fees, but it was also high cost to the equipment. Just on the disc end at it’s cheapest a MD cost twice what a CD did.
And few other companies wanted to release media on it, which had more to do with the recording industry’s big giant rage at home taping.
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I used my own personal MD recorder when I did some radio reporting for a few years and it was mostly very good. Record duration was long enough, and the recorder was small and light so I could do silly things like stick it in a pocket and tape a mic to my bike frame to record while I cycled. The only time I struggled with MD was trying to record on a boat. I had the recorder on a table and it refused to record, because the vibrations from the engine stopped it working (I’m going to say the laser wasn’t locking in place properly but it was a while ago and I might have mis-remembered). When I went to hand holding the recorder everything was fine as I was an adequate shock-absorber. As a replacement for a cassette Walkman it was a massive improvement for listening on the go. Quality was better, battery life was better, the media were smaller and you had random access to skip tracks. I loved my little MD machine and kept it still it gave up the ghost and decided to stop working.
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Yah, I would agree with that. The walled garden is always a temptation for them, but always kills formats where they push for it.
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And it’s funny how far back that problem goes.
I’ve been on a bit of an obsolete media kick lately (if you couldn’t tell). And straight back every format we remember, had it’s format war. It’s long forgotten competitors. It’s didn’t quite make it grand parents.
It seems like every attempt at that walled garden. Either didn’t stick or killed the format.
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It still amuses me that Sony had a record label, and hated piracy, and at the same time released a music format that was fantastic for piracy.
Talking about them made me remember that I’d also use them to record sessions from the radio.I had a Sony mini-hifi which could do timed recordings from the FM radio. Actually worked pretty well.
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Or at least format-shifting which many companies (not sure about Sony) consider to be the same thing as piracy. But yeah, official Sony MD recorders were specifically designed to copy over your CDs to a MiniDisc and had tools for labeling tracks very much like what was the case for MP3 players a few years later.
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Sony does a lot of funny left hand / right hand things, I guess because it’s a huge company. Like any huge company, the different departments don’t always talk to each other. Early versions of the PlayStation 2 ran Linux, supported keyboards, and could read silver discs by design. Also all the logging ports were open as on a dev unit. Again, all by design. It was called out in the manual how to do all these things. They left the hardware engineers unsupervised too long, and engineers gonna engineer. It was perfect for all manner of hacking, jailbreaking, homebrew, etc. It took a while for Corporate (or maybe Sony Music or Sony Pictures) to catch on to that ability and nix it in later updates.
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Not sure where Sony is at these days, think I remember them being pretty heavy on the DRM side around HD, DVD/Blueray and the whole DVR shit show.
But back when they were developing MD Sony was pretty pro home taping. Since tape recorders and home taping had been a pretty core business for them after the transistor radio.
And apparently the music (and subsequently movie) business in Japan was a bit weird, with buying albums and films being nuts expensive. So renting and copying things was the normal way to go about things.
Sony and other electronics makers had been involved with a lobbying effort to make home taping explicitly legal in Japan. And they were pretty involved in a similar fight over VCRs in the US and Europe.
They bought Columbia Studios and CBS records in the 80’s so they’d have something to release on their formats even when under pressure from other studios and record companies.
But they still ended up including a form of copy protection on the Mini-Disc. I think it was you could make unlimited analogue copies, but there was a system to limit you from making 2nd generation digital copies. You could copy a CD to a MD all digital, but you couldn’t make additional copies from that MD.
Consumer A/V equipment and selling/licensing blank media isn’t the same core part of their business these days though.
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