a blog by Peter Leonard
Today brought news that Sony has canceled its Professional Disc for Data. The PDD was an early standard for storing data and video on a high-capacity optical disc -- it's the direct antecedent to Sony's BluRay discs which will soon compete against HD-DVD. I vaguely recalled seeing these a the NAB video tradeshow sometime in the past few years. The press coverage today said that the discs were introduced in 2004, but I found a few shots (of prototypes?) amongst the 387 pictures I took during the 2003 NAB convention.
Despite the above-linked Wikipedia article's focus on data backup applications, I remember there were video cameras on display in 2003 which could record direct to PDD. In all, it's an eerie reversal of the consumer Beta format losing out while BetaMax lived on in the professional world -- here Sony's professional proto-BluRay couldn't keep up with the advances in its own consumer format.