Items filtered by date: May 2020

One of the most interesting aspects of having served as the editor of The Digital Bits website for over twenty years now, is that I’ve had a front row seat to some pretty dramatic changes in the home video industry.

At 53, I’m old enough to remember watching movies on black-and-white televisions—square analog displays that required the viewer to adjust a pair of “rabbit ear” antenna to get a decent picture. Like some of you, I saw the advent of cable television and the arrival of VHS and Betamax videotape—a technology the film industry fought tooth-and-nail to kill until its profit potential finally became obvious.

And of course, as a longtime film enthusiast, I’m someone who strongly embraced the Laserdisc format back when it was the only option for watching movies in their original widescreen aspect ratios at home.

I founded The Digital Bits in late 1997 (it actually began as an industry newsletter shared by email in late ’96) in part because I knew that DVD would be a hit. Having worked at a record store a decade earlier, when Compact Discs took the music world by storm, it was obvious to me that consumers would embrace the idea of movies on a disc that was—to them—essentially identical to the CDs they already loved. [Read on here...]