Howard Oakley
Online delivery is making optical discs an endangered species, but laser technology will still have a key role to play in home entertainment.
Your Mac may be composed of chips, but it takes light to make it work. That light shines not only from the screen in front of your eyes, but from lasers onto optical media, inside many printers, and along the vast mesh of fibre-optic cables that connect you to the online world. When Charles H Townes and Arthur L Schawlow were granted a patent for the first laser, just 50 years ago, they were mocked for having found a solution looking for a problem. To add to that insult, rival Theodore H Maiman pipped them to the post by demonstrating the first working laser later in 1960. Even then, it was another 14 years before the public came into daily contact with laser devices, in the form of barcode scanners.
Lasers differ from all previous light sources in that the fine beams they emit usually consist of coherent (in phase) light waves of a single wavelength. At low power, less than 1 milliwatt, they make ideal pointers for presentations. Up to about 10 milliwatts they can read the microscopic binary data in the spiral track of a CD or DVD, and more than 100 milliwatts is sufficient to burn data to recordable optical discs. In 1988, lasers of similar power transmitted data along the first transatlantic fibre-optic cable, showing the way for the backbone of the Internet.
It remains a moot point whether we’ll rely on lasers to deliver our movies from Blu-ray disc, or to pour them down cables. When the format war ended two years ago, Blu-ray received a substantial boost and has become a steady earner. With more than 1500 pre-recorded titles available in the UK, and former HD DVD champion Toshiba selling Blu-ray players, take-up has probably exceeded that of DVD during its early years. Even Alain Resnais’ inscrutable Last Year in Marienbad has now been issued in Blu-ray format.
However, the movie market has changed greatly since we were agog at the giant leap forward from VHS to DVD, and recession has swept the world. Portable Blu-ray players seem to have little to offer over cheap and ubiquitous DVD, digital rights management constantly sours the scene and even Apple has fought shy of building the drives into new Macs. Recall that Apple was a pioneer of optical media, introducing its first external CD drive in 1988, and being the first major manufacturer to drop floppy disk drives in favour of CD-Rom ones. By contrast, online delivery through the BBC’s iPlayer and the iTunes Store has started to sparkle.
As our attention span seems to have shrunk from the couple of hours required to enjoy a blockbuster to a few minutes for a video clip, so we have opted for lower-resolution, higher-immediacy shorts. If Hollywood’s strategists are looking to the new wave of 3D movies to pack people into movie theatres, they seem to have forgotten how to sell flat 2D versions of those same titles to a wider public. Perhaps they’re working on how to convince us to replace shiny new HD TVs with 3D systems? They also seem bereft of the compelling narratives that we enjoyed with the likes of Tolkien and Harry Potter.
The only thing that we can be sure of is that, one way or another, lasers are likely to remain key to our entertainment in the future. Until, perhaps, someone else comes along with a solution looking for a problem.
