Evolve or die My journey through videoland he journey from the arrival of colour in the UK Packaged media pioneer BOB AUGER (left, with Stefan Sargent, producing Tto the Web TV of today has been an interest - one of the first Laserdiscs) established the authoring facility that became ing ride. My starting point in the 1960s was at the Panasonic's base for the launch of DVD in Europe. He has lived through all high-tech BBC Television Centre in London, recently handed to a developer for conversion the skirmishes, battles, successes and achievements of disc-based video. to a hotel and apartments. The closure of this Now heading his consultancy Newmérique, Bob offers a personal account temple to the art of television echoes the rise of the changes in the audiovisual landscape over the past five decades. and fall of other industries, once a pillar of mod - ern society and now discarded as old-fashioned 65k of memory and storage on a 5.25 floppy Philips, the brilliant team behind the BBC and obsolete. disc. Domesday Project had successfully delivered Technology is an unforgiving master: if you When coupled to six Kodak 35mm slide their multimedia edition of the 900-year-old are not at the leading edge, you fall into the projectors, an optical multiplexer (made by a census of life in England on Laserdisc. The RTS abyss. The trick is first to catch the wave and specialist company in Pittsburgh) and a Philips planned to commemorate the half-century of TV then to know when to jump off, not an easy task plumbicon colour camera, it delivered many broadcasting with a video installation in a for people raised outside the surfing communi - corporate videos on Sony U-matic and quite a London venue and playback from videodisc was ties of California. few local TV ads on BVU or 1” C-format video. the obvious solution. Philips agreed to sponsor Innovation is inevitable, challenging tradi - Advanced as it was, you could not call the the technical side of the project. tional monopolies and providing new opportu - AVL Eagle interactive. Everything had to be The BBC and all the UK regional television nities. Nowhere has this been more evident than meticulously pre-programmed in a linear fash - companies (bar one) offered free access to their in the world of packaged media. VHS has come ion, which was fine for corporate presentations, archives, the craft unions and rights owners and gone, replaced by DVD, which is itself under but not so good when accompanying live waived their fees, so the problem was not so threat from Blu-ray as HDTV gives way to 4K events. You have to hear six or more slide pro - much “what to put in” as “what to leave out” video. jectors simultaneously searching for a cue to With Stefan Sargent back in London master - Now, the once-mighty cable operators and know exactly what this means... minding the production aspects, I found myself broadcasters are starting to feel the wind of In the mid-1980s, Philips wowed a meeting of in Eindhoven in an almost- change, as Netflix, Amazon and other streaming the BKSTS in London with a demonstration of empty warehouse, looking services disrupt traditional monopolies. There is high quality Laserdisc video in a computer- at 73 blank screens, a one constant, as CBS Corporation CEO Leslie controlled player. The experience opened my dozen videodiscs and a Moonves told the New York Times , “Our job is eyes to the advantages of disc-media. Here was computer. Fortunately, to do the best content we can and let people the perfect delivery medium, combining still Philips also provided their enjoy it in whatever way they want.” It’s a images and live-action video with great sound. top programmer to stitch message that has taken a long time to arrive. The added bonus of interactivity meant that I the multiple picture After 15 years “doing content” – first with the couldn’t wait to try it out. sources together. The BBC, then Granada TV and subsequently with The opportunity arose with “The Golden PAL video from the discs my own recording studios in Manchester, I Box,” a 1986 celebration of the 50th anniversary fed a wide screen com - decided to move back to London and in 1979 I of BBC television for the Royal Television Society prising a giant Eido - became Director of AudioVisual at Molinare in (RTS). Working as co-producer with Stefan phor video projector the capital. On arrival, I took delivery of my first Sargent, joint founder of Molinare, the project and two 6x6 video programmable computer, an AVL Eagle II was conceived from the start with disc delivery walls. running CP/M. It was, in the jargon of the time, in mind. Things went well “the bees’ knees,” boasting a 16kHz processor, With the support of Acorn Computers and for the first couple >> 12 >> of days, but then I was summoned to an More than a year later, in casual conversa - emergency meeting. The 10Mbyte HD drive on tion with the company who ordered the the controlling computer was full and we were discs, I asked why we had done no work for still some way off completing the program - them since. “Well, after we came back from ming… The problem was swiftly resolved Berlin, we sent them to a testing house and and the show ran continuously for several they said they found lots of flaws,” was the weeks without a hitch. reply. I vowed then never to deliver a disc that Laserdisc and the MCA equivalent had not been through the test pressing and D iscoVision offered better picture rigorous quality control procedure. quality and greater longevity than After a difficult first year, the Royal Bank tape-based formats and estab - of Scotland sent in its specialist advisors to lished disc media as the way assess the financial viability of DVD. Its con - forward. However, the limited run - of titles such as Gone clusion – that “DVD is going nowhere and will ning time (one hour per side on with the Wind (two minutes follow CD-i into oblivion” – cost several people linear discs) and the physical size of the media shy of four hours) from a DVD9 dual-layer single- their jobs and ensured the loss of independence were obstacles to consumer acceptance. sided DVD. of the company. Electric Switch had everything Video compression seemed to be the answer Determined to be among the first to work it needed to meet the imminent demand for and in the early 1990s I worked with an Atlanta- with the new format, I contacted a good friend DVD authoring – except European customers! based company called Iterated Systems. Based at Panasonic, with whom I had worked on a By the end of 1999, the average price of DVD on the theoretical work of the British mathemati - number of Video-CD titles, and asked who to hardware was tumbling, down by 35% over the cian Professor Michael Barnsley, “Fractal Video” contact in Japan. His response amazed me: the year. More than 70,000 players were sold in was a technology that offered remarkable com - authoring system used to create Panasonic’s first December alone, according to the UK DVD pression ratios and full frame rates. It was while DVD titles was written and supplied by committee, at the bargain price of £299 ($480, working on this project that an IBM executive Matsushita-owned Panasonic OWL – and the €380) each. told me there is “no place for video in company was based in Edinburgh, Better times were clearly on their way, under a personal computer,” a fact he Scotland. the ownership of VHS duplicators Rank Video demonstrated by trying to run OWL Development Man - Services and with a team producing some really the fractal file with an EGA ager Lindsay Holman sug - innovative titles. Leaving the operation in the (4-bit, 16-colour) video gested a trip to DVCC, hands of a great team, including technical wizard card. which at that time was Ges Hinton and compressionist Andy Lagowski, In partnership with located within Universal I moved on to pastures new in North America, John Paul Docherty, who Studios in Hollywood. commissioned by British Trade International and founded the pioneering There, I met Jerry Pierce , based in Montréal, Canada. UK computer animation who was respon sible It was here that I came across an intriguing company Electric Image, for the technical launch project, which combined the best attributes of a I started Electric Switch in of DVD for Universal and DVD player with the interactive capabilities of 1993, initially to exploit a saw with my own eyes the Compact Disc Interactive and an online connec - promised contract to convert quality that was achievable tion. A company called the Ohana Foundation, the entire TV ad archive of a major from DVD with the best real- based in Hawaii, USA, had secured the contract advertiser to fractal video. The time encoding technology. A visit to convert the VHS libraries of three major edu - arrival of the 12cm Compact Disc- Europe’s first PAL DVD movie to CES 1997 followed, at which cational publishers to DVD. It had also signed a (Concorde Video GmbH) Interactive (CD-i) format seemed to the deal with Panasonic was con - contract with the People’s Education Press (PEP) be a solution to the delivery of full-motion, full firmed: Electric Switch became the sole Euro - in Beijing, to create an “English for China” series colour images to the screen, but the promised pean operator of the Panasonic encoding and of DVD titles, using Ohana’s proprietary MPEG-1 video cartridge was delivered late and authoring system, on condition that the equip - eWhiz!™ DVD disc and player format to combat proved unreliable.