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When Philips Electronics first presented the video Laser Disc to the world in the 1970's, they designed its diameter size based upon the 12 inch vinyl Long Play (LP) record. This was practical. They could then fit into existing LP packaging inventory, including mailers and boxes. Retailers and consumers already had racks and custom shelving that would fit them. Print companies and graphic artists had templates and years of experience decorating a product that was exactly 12 inches across. Thus the physical size the LD's should be was clear. But when Philips' engineers demonstrated an "audio" version of the Laser Disc to record companies, publishers and promoters, they got an unexpected reaction. Though impressed with the potential improvements in sound quality and durability, the music professionals soon became alarmed when they were told the amount of music this new digital marvel could hold. Hours! Hours of music on one piece of product? The shock of the potential legal, marketing and production ramifications on the music industry was immense. The record industry at that point, had a long (and lucrative) history built around the marketing of the LP Record. In fact, almost all aspects of the music business (mechanical royalties, release schedules, recording contracts, record promotion, distribution, pricing and management agreements) were firmly based on the marketing of a 10 to 12 song (under one hour) album, released annually on one retail unit of product. To address growing industry panic (including that of its own record divisions) Philips' engineers agreed to create and produce a new format of audio Laser Disc that corresponded to the content capacity and playing time of the vinyl LP. As it would now require less capacity than a full size Laser Disc it could be smaller and more compact. Thus the names: Compact Audio Laser Disc, Compact Audio Disc, Compact Disc, then CD. The story in Holland goes that after experimenting with many different sizes for the new format, a very inspired (or very tired?) Philips engineer from Eindhoven placed a standard Audio Cassette on a piece of paper and drew a circle that touched all four corners of the cassette. The audio cassette was a huge success for Philips and people were very accustomed to handling them. What appeared on the paper was a circle with a diameter of 120 cm's. At that moment, the exact size of billions of future Compact Discs (and CD-ROMs, and CDRs and now DVD's) was born. Try it yourself. Place an audio cassette on top of a CD or DVD to see how accurately it fits. Due to the monumental success of the Compact Disc, literally hundreds of millions of CD players have been manufactured over the last thirty years, lowering the actual drive price to mere dollars per unit. This is the major reason DVD player prices have dropped so dramatically in the last couple of years. The mechanical drives to spin DVD's are identical in size to those for CD, so basically only the lasers and chips need to be different. Now that the R&D costs have been recouped so many times over, these inexpensive drives have locked in the size of future disc formats for the foreseeable future. At current drive prices, the cost of introducing any new disc platform is nearly impossible to justify. So while we expect to see more storage capacity through more multiple layer DVD's and Dual Discs, and finer tracking per layer through higher spectrum laser use such as Blu Ray formats and beyond, one thing seems certain .... commercial optical discs will be based on the size of the humble audio cassette for quite a while to come.
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