Computer makers forced rival camps into one DVD format by threatening a boycott
In 1995 two alliances were racing to replace the CD with a higher-capacity disc: Philips and Sony against Toshiba and its partners. Then IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Compaq and Hewlett-Packard declared they would back neither unless the camps merged. They did, and the DVD became one format instead of a format war.
The Philips and Sony disc was called the Multimedia Compact Disc; the rival Super Density disc had Toshiba, Time Warner, Matsushita and others behind it. After the computer group's statement of 3 May 1995, IBM's Lou Gerstner leaned on the executives, and on 15 September Philips and Sony agreed to unify. One compromise put both layers of a dual-layer disc on the same side so nobody had to flip it over. Another adopted the EFMPlus coding Kees Schouhamer Immink had designed, which let drives reuse CD servo technology but trimmed capacity from 5 to 4.7 GB. The specification was settled on 8 December 1995. Toshiba had been saying digital video disc, but computer firms complained, so the letters officially came to stand for digital versatile disc.
Discs went on sale in Japan on 1 November 1996, mostly music videos. The American launch slipped repeatedly before arriving on 24 March 1997 in seven test markets with about 32 titles, including Twister; that was actually a day earlier than planned, prompting studios to tighten street-date rules. Physically, every DVD is two 0.6 mm discs glued together, and the gluing must be very flat or the disc tilts and becomes unreadable.
Early players paused noticeably when the laser refocused onto the second layer, so cases carried notes insisting this was not a fault; studios learned to hide the switch at a cut, as on Toy Story. Sony had initially said it would not use DVDs for games, then released the first DVD console, and the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Xbox 360 all ran on the format.
DVD players outsold VCRs in the United States in 2001, and by 2007 about 80% of Americans owned one, more than had a computer or cable. The licensing body and the DVD Forum dissolved at the end of January 2025, depositing the specifications at the National Diet Library in Tokyo.
Source: DVD
