Many people are interested to fresh new technologies and like to adapt them. Amidst all the excitement of “new media” in 1990s, Bruce Sterling coined the term “dead media” to describe the whole domain of obsolete platforms and formats, unsuccessful experiments, neglected also-rans, and visionary failures whose history was ignored in favor of dot-com boosterism, Whig history and the next big thing. For technologist, it is truly meaningful to look into how media (technologies) become alive or dead. Here, my story tells about a dead medium: ‘Mini Disc’. Mini Disc(MD) made success in Asia market, while it was neglected in the western world. Interestingly,  MD underwent several adaptions every time its market share was threatened by competitor media and its uniqueness faded away through those attempts. I examined how a medium loses its advantages or uniqueness and its effect on media life.

Mini Dead

1. Dead Media?

Mini-Disc is a miniaturized optical disc medium, which is packaged like floppy disc. In 1991, Sony proudly introduced MD. It featured near CD quality sound and one fourth size (7cm x 7cm) of CD. It was innovative that MDs are rewritable optical disc within portable devices. As our late twenty century turned out to be the golden age of pop music and digitized media, people expected MD to be successful along with expanding music industry. Mini-Disc inherited its genes from Compact-Disc and Cassette as an auditory medium. However, the technological development brings multi-media devices and this small storage for a particular information became obsolete as MP3 players became dominating. As of 2013, manufacturers announced to stop creating MDs and we can say MD is a dead media. 

To begin the story, my definition of deadness for media is losing capability of mediation. When the media is not able to fill the gap between people, I would call it just “something” rather than media. Bruce Sterling defined the media as a commodity. To give examples of what media does, media extends our senses and sometimes it works like a memory. That is, the essence of media lies in the act of reaching from people to people. Further, it is worth taking the purpose of media into consideration. Since the media uses changes depending on the context, media itself is social sometime might become political. Steve Wu delineated, in his book, how the media empire were developed and influenced on people reacted and adapted media technologies. Depending on what we want to say, the proper media are supposedly chosen. Conversely, the media also affects how we form ideas. It is another egg or chicken problem but it is certain that they are correlated. In media life-cycle, the media is forced to transform by users or competitors. Therefore, it is meaningful for us to study about the moment when the media changes for survival. Media revision is a good indicator of media crisis and upgraded features or new shapes reflect the market needs. In following paragraphs, versions of Mini-Disc and their rise and fall will be discussed.

2. The Birth of Mini Disc

MiniDisc package

In order to find the design concept and uses of MD, we are going to look at the birth of MD. Sony invented MD in 1986 and it was launched in 1992. The appearance of MD reminds of Compact Disc and Floppy Disc: 7cm of optical disc is packaged in a plastic case. The initial version of MD can store 140MB of audio-data.  Sony accumulated experience regarding portable optical drive and analog circuit design through successful walkman series. MD was innovative at that time because of its re-writability. Due to very high data rate of Compact Disc, it had been unable for users to write on CD with portable players. While MD uses laser to read stored data similar to CD technology, MD employed magneto-optical technology for writing. According to the technology manual, the disc consists of a ferromagnetic material sealed beneath a plastic coating. The only physical contact is during recording when a magnetic head is brought into contact with the side of the disc opposite to the laser. During reading, a laser projects a beam on the disk and the magnetic state of the surface reflected different light in accordance with written state. During recording, the laser power is increased so it can heat the material up to the Curie point in a single spot. A single electro-magnet occurs on the opposite side to change the local magnetic polarization. Another innovative feature of MD is extended anti-shock time. For optical disc drives, it was a critical defect for the portable optical drive to fail reading data with external shock. With the help of microschip technology, MD players are equipped with digital buffer memory to pre-read a certain amount of data to keep playing even when being shaken. Also, it features meta-data index to guarantee writing process while reading. With recognizing those new technological features, MD’s focal point lies in mobility based on handy size and enhanced stability in moving environment. Sony also boasts the sound quality of MD. With ATRAC(Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) compression, MD offers very high quality of sound almost equivalent to that of CD within 292kbit/sec. Consequently, ATRAC decimated data to have same playtime with CD. However, some audiophiles argued that the quality was overblown because the it has a high compression ratio (5:1). We should notice that MD and ATRAC are inseparable because it is inevitable to fetch data in it and the concept of compression was essential to supplement its relatively small data storage. The purpose of MD is now obvious. It is invented as a portable music medium.

3. The Debut

The market consumptions of MD greatly varied in markets. In contrast to its huge success in Japan, MD sales did not really take off in the States. For instance, 500,000 units were sold in the States for the first five years from launching. Japanese users consumed ten times of it in 1997 alone. In fact, Sony was willing to spending substantial money to push MD for success in western market but the outcome turned out to be disastrous. Sony overlooked MD’s inherent limitations and market contexts. First, MD still required original CDs and CD players for recording. The catchline of MD ads emphasized that MD is recordable. “The horse, the automobile. The typewriter, the computer. The cassette tape, the Digital Recordable MiniDisc.” It sounds like MiniDisc can completely replace CD. However, using MD was highly dependent on CDs and it degraded attractiveness and mobility of MD. To be specific, Users have to connect CD player with optical cable to transfer track from CD to MD. It was the only way to enjoy the best audio quality. More importantly, this synchronous process is synchronous and thus it have to listen to whole playlist until writing task finishes. However, it is noticeable that CDs were pretty popular media in the States. What made the difference then? To understand this, we should look into that Japan and the United States have different market systems and pricing in copyright industry. If we look into the general pricing of music CD in two regions, consumers have to pay 5800 yen (about 50 dollars), whereas it is around $10 in the States. This huge gap formed different cultures about media consumption. Japanese market formed higher price range than other countries and it brought about the growth of rental industry.  Many types of rental shops flourished in Japan but CD rental shop was the most frequently visited by people. With high population density, it was reasonable for Japanese to rent CDs and copy information to their MDs. In Japan, Buying one CD equaled to buying 25 Mini Discs. Also, its tiny size was more compelling to people living in urban areas. Highly developed public transportation system contributed to formation of a huge market for portable devices. Every time they ride on subway or bus, people had to escape from massively awkward atmosphere. On the other hand, American consumer market seemed more conservative. Once Professor Richard Dasher supposed that the active early adopter market in Japan exists because of a large amount of disposable income among Japanese consumers. Due to less population density, consumers used to spend their money on large-scale devices such as home appliances. With reasonable price of CDs, they preferred CD-players at home and radio served enough fun while driving. Meanwhile, established cassette tap market was still active attribute to lower price. That is to say, transition cost from CD to MD was lowered by rental shops in Japan but purchasing MD was just redundancy for Americans because CDs were just affordable and packages are small enough to carry. In short, MD became partially dead in a different circumstance.

4. Competitors

The first competitor of MD was CD-R, which is a recordable Compact-Disc. From mid of 1990s, the prices of CD-R media and recording devices fell down more rapidly than Sony predicted. The price of a 80 minute blank CD dropped below $1.00 while Mini Disc stayed around $2.00. Combined with high-speed internet, global media landscape and copyright systems encountered radical changes. CD appeared as a writable and large-size storage media. At the same time, people began to download MP3 files from P2Ps or websites. The Internet acted as an international free rental shop. Once a CD is ripped by a user, created MP3 files could travel all around the world. Although CD-R had larger space and generality, writability and slick design of MD were re-illuminated. The sales of MD temporarily grew in Asia at that time. Next, the emergence of MP3-CD player threatened MD again with its scalability. MP3 CD player is designed to play highly compressed MP3 files stored in CD or CD-R/W. Considering 700MB of storage, users could put more than 100 audio tracks in a CD. Finally, the trade-off between size and storage was solved in such a way of giving more options to users and they co-existed in the market. MP3 player industry was expected to collapse because contents providers such as music/video industry were unfavorable of free MP3 sharing. As a result, MP3 files are tagged as illegal content by copyright alliance, and companies were reluctant to manufacture MP3 CD players. On the other hand, Sony’s MD and ATRAC were introduced to protect copyright with its dependence on CD. ATRAC had to compete with MP3(MPEG-layer3) format. However, built-in copyright protection and the poorly designed user interface of only software tool(SonicStage) made users prefer MP3. Sony still persists ATRAC with Playstation series but MP3 is dominating the digital audio market. With the help of semiconductor memory industry, MP3 player became more powerful. FLASH memory was sensational. It is re-writable and immune to external shock. As Moore said, device density has been skyrocketing and soon MP3 player’s storage and access performance surpassed those of MD. Also, USB port connects every PC and supports faster link speed than that of optical cable for MD recording. To address this issue, Sony continued further development of MD and introduced new types of MDs. This was the beginning of the Mini-Dead.

There were mainly four types of MD. Each was announced when formidable competitor jumped into the market. To tell the truth, Sony also introduced MD for computer data called MD-Data. It was born dead because it never got paid attention attention. That was largely because it was incompatible with compatible audio purpose MDs. Takeaway here is that closed medium is unlikely to mediate people or become meta-media.

MD Data contains 140MB

The first MD extension happened in 2000, when CD-R and MP3 CD player is rising. Sony was aware of the larger storage was the only merit of CD and revealed MDLP, which stands for MD-Long Play. The technology employs an improved ATRAC3 for audio on Minidisc. To briefly talk about the bit rate, standard ATRAC (SP) is 292kbps, LP2 is 132kbps, LP4 is 66kbps. In LP2 and LP4 modes 20 bytes of dummy data is inserted per 212 byte to keep compatibility with SP mode. Therefore, LP2/4 tracks play silence on non-MDLP equipment. This actually prevents producing random digital noise in old devices. LP2 mode can be extended to maximum160 minutes of stereo sound. LP4 gives 320 minutes joint stereo. MDLP was not welcomed by users and even rather blamed for its poor quality. Most of MD users are audiophiles or early adaptors, who have substantial knowledge about technologies. They understood the practical compression process is unable to achieve near-CD sound quality and there could be no reason to use MD without it.

Sony N707 model supporting MDLP

The next variation of MD was NetMD announced in 2001. NetMD was successful attribute to increased openness. Another reason for NetMD’s success was that it appeared in the market while MP3 player technology was immature. Users had not been allowed to transfer music from PC to MD until NetMD supported USB connection. What’s more,, NetMD can speed up to 32 / 64× real-time while writing in LP4 mode. Sony did not want to completely open the process and insisted proprietary software, SonicStage til Net-walkman turned out to be a failure. By limiting means of data exchange, Sony continued to protect copyright because themselves are huge publisher. As MP3 market grew, MP3 got smaller than MDs and featured larger space of general purpose. People were able to put documents or multimedia information in MP3 player. Then, NetMD began to lose popularity again. Hi-MD was the final transformation of MD. Hi-MD was almost new medium based on the original Minidisc. The most striking change of Hi-MD media was offering 1GB blank in the existing MD form-factor and a reformatting of original MD media that doubles its capacity from 177MB to 305MB. Also, Hi-MD provided users with ability to store general computer data. Later, there was Hi-MD Photo for visual image storage. 

Specifications of Each Mode 

5. Conclusion

In conclusion, it is hard to see MD because factories ceased manufacturing and shipping. Now MD became one of the most recent dead media. Ironically, MD was designed to replace CD but it went dead earlier than its predecessor. Media disappear never because its technological excellence such as capacity and size. Rather, the essence of media is mediation and its design purpose makes it liveness. Accordingly, the life of media has more things to do with community’s media use. MD made success in Asia but was totally disregarded in the States. Consequently, the majority of Americans have never used or been mediated by MD due to their media use pattern. Portability did not appeal to their life styles and CDs are provided in reasonable prices. After that, we have explored design purpose of MD and how it had been changed over competitions. Three competitors of MD were examined: CD-R, MP3 CD player, and MP3. Although MD was not overwhelmingly victorious in all cases, it spotted a niche in the industry and survived in first two competitions. As mentioned, proponents or early adopters are often critical of media revision because they might lose  what fascinated them. Similarly when a media loses its unique feature, we can diagnose that the media gets ill. And the media possibly becomes dead unless it effectively beats competitor media in user context. Media is more likely to  survive if features are revamped with more unique feature. In case of MD, it had become more like MP3 player over the time and it lost the raison-de-tre.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to students’ Professor. Finn Brunton in the School of Information for providing a great deal of knowledge from interesting topics and inspiring lectures. Through his lectures and a number of discussions with him, I became able to read technological context outside of engineering academia.