T3 at 30: How home entertainment has evolved over 30 years of innovation
As part of T3's 30th birthday bash, we're looking back at the biggest shifts in home cinema – from the first flat screens, to home surround sound, and beyond
The first issue of T3 magazine hit the newsstand on 3 September 1996. Independence Day was number one at the cinema then, as it had been for many weeks – and that was the only way to watch it, as the VHS release didn't happen until the next summer (that's Video Home System, or 'video' colloquially, for those who aren't old enough).
It was a different time; a slower time. But the pace of innovation has ramped up so significantly over the last three decades that I sometimes forget I've lived through such huge evolutions in home entertainment – and a shift in consumption habits, too.
Indeed, back in 1996 my 14-inch Philips cathode-ray tube (CRT) telly with integrated VHS player just about handled my ageing Sega Mega Drive and let me tune into 'the big four' UK channels. It was beyond fathomable that Ultra-HD resolution on flat-screen TVs would become the eventual norm – not that it happened overnight.
So strap in as we take a wander down memory lane, revisiting those pivotal moments in the home entertainment landscape that completely changed the idea of what a home cinema A/V setup could do – as covered by T3 at every step along the way.
1997: DVD
I'm sure you've still got a box of these knocking about somewhere in your home. The DVD – which stands for Digital Versatile Disc – was a major step in the digitalisation of movies, providing much greater quality.
But by 'greater', I don't mean 'great' by today's standards. The PAL system – that's Phase Alternating Line – as used in the UK and much of Europe (it's NTSC in the USA), delivered a maximum 720 × 576 resolution. A far cry from 'Full HD' since, or the now-standard 4K Ultra-HD.
Nonetheless, DVD was a huge success, despite some studios being a little slow off the mark – Independence Day, for example, didn't arrive in a PAL-format DVD until 2000, a full four years after its major box office success. Twister was the first release in the UK, arriving in June 1997.
I can understand some of the hesitance, mind. The first DVD player available (also in June 1997) was the Thomson DTH-1000U, which would have cost you £600 at the time of launch. Adjust that by inflation and that's over £1,400 in today's money – and we call the PlayStation 5 Pro expensive!
Far cheaper players eventually entered the market, of course, and disc production costs improved too. Gone were the days of 'flipper discs' – movies that had 'side A' and 'side B', as they couldn't fit into the format's capacity limitations, so you'd have to manually get up, eject it from the player to turn over, before continuing to watch.
1997: Dolby Digital 5.1 surround
DVD brought with it some other magic: surround sound. Dolby Digital 5.1 had been available in cinema from 1992, but the advent of the digital disc meant delivering a true surround track was part of DVD's bigger perks – albeit one that was rarely benefited by most users.
It helped to generate greater focus around the importance of sound for home playback, though, as most chunky CRT tellies of the time didn't have the greatest speakers – and very few people could afford to invest in a full separates system back then.
Indeed, in 1997 you'd need to buy something like the Yamaha DSP-A3090 ('DSP' meaning Digital Sound Processing) – but it'd have cost you £1,750 even then, which is over £4,000 in today's money! And that's without the actual speakers and subwoofer, meaning it was very much a true 'home cinema' install option.
1998: The first flat TVs
Speaking of high-priced items: the introduction of flat-screen TVs was no overnight shift by any means, despite the omnipresence of such designs today, as the early models cost a small fortune.
Philips launched a notable 42-inch flat panel in 1998, the Flat Panel, which was yours for a cool $15,000 – it was barely available in the UK except through some luxury channels and would have been well over £10,000 at the time. A little more than driving a mid-level Ford Fiesta Zetec off a forecourt would have cost you in that same year.
I recall a friend's dad owning a large plasma screen in the early 2000s, likely a Panasonic from memory, which still would have demanded a price in the several thousands. It wasn't until after 2005, when glass production had improved and costs shrunk, that panels began to become mainstream.
2005: Full HD TV
It's almost funny to think that many of those TVs costing into the multiple thousands weren't even 'Full HD' (1920 × 1080 resolution), with Sharp's LC-45GD1E being the first model to deliver that resolution to the public back in 2005.
That's when flat-screen TVs really took off, with sales surpassing CRT in 2006, and by 2010 it was almost implausible you could buy anything else. However, I do recall the confusing nature of 'Full HD' (i.e. 1080p) and 'HD Ready' (i.e. 720p) being a sticking point for some time.
No wonder that 2005 was declared "Year of HDTV". I don't think anything epitomises that better than Sony's iconic ad, 'Bouncy Balls', embedded above, in which 250,000 colourful bouncy balls were captured descending a hill in San Francisco. That put its Bravia brand all the more on the map.
2007: Blu-ray
Taking advantage of those more resolute TV panels, it took a new format to really step home cinema viewing up a notch. And that came, eventually, with Blu-ray. Not that it was an instant or obvious solution.
At that time, Toshiba's HD-DVD was a core competitor – and you can still find movies on that disc format, all published between 2006 to 2008, which was the full two years it existed – and I even recall some companies hedging their bets on which to support.
Indeed, at the IFA technology show in Berlin in 2007, I distinctly recall LG showcasing its dual HD-DVD-and-Blu-ray player, featuring two separate drives. Quite a rare bit of history – and I suspect there's little chance that many (any?) still exist.
However, Blu-ray ultimately won because Sony used the disc format in its PlayStation 3 games console. That opened the gates for both the movie and gaming industries, with access to high-capacity and high-resolution discs.
The Full HD (1920 × 1080) support was Blu-ray's biggest boon, of course, bringing home cinema visuals that hadn't been remotely possible before. But it wasn't only clarity – colour accuracy was a big difference, with many studios re-grading their movies before committing to the format.
2007: Netflix moves to streaming
Much as I've discussed the various physical formats, there was a much bigger movement going on in the background.
The lore of Blockbuster Video, the advance of DVD-by-mail from Netflix and Lovefilm (the latter which was eventually bought by Amazon to become Prime Video) – you didn't have to outright buy your movies in this era.
Netflix really stepped up that change in 2007, when it introduced its streaming service ('Watch Now'). That's what changed everything, though not immediately, as streaming became the dominant force in how people wanted to watch. Convenience had arrived.
2008: First OLED TV
Technological progression was also pushing new ground. Sony was the first to reveal its consumer OLED TV, the Sony XEL-1, which showed off Organic Light Emitting Diode's obvious advantages – that being true contrast, no light bleed and black levels that were of cinema projector quality.
It was the perfect format for the just-released Blu-ray, except in 2008 that first TV was a mere 11-inches and cost a staggering £3,489. I remember being at the launch event and feeling somewhere between awestruck and bamboozled. Yet here OLED continues to reign supreme for home-cinema enthusiasts.
It grew at pace, too, with LG the first to introduce a 55-inch OLED TV in 2012. Then bigger flat-screen displays were in greater demand, thanks to improved pricing. Having a massive panel in your living room – one that wasn't a separate 'home cinema' install that few to no-one possessed – became more normalised.
2012: Netflix's first exclusive changes the model
Just five years after Netflix introduced its streaming platform, it flipped the script again when its first exclusive commissioned series, Lilyhammer, debuted on the streamer.
That a largely Norwegian language show was its first almost defies belief, but I still fondly remember watching that show – it's hilarious; Steven Van Zandt is the perfect balance point for an international audience – and it set the foundations for yet more.
This was the turning point when traditional movie studios and production houses had to take note. Netflix's new power was as much a threat as it was potential opportunity to partner up, with many makers later going on to produce exclusive Netflix content.
2012: First 4K TV
While Full HD had only just about been accepted as the norm by this point, in around 2012, more technological shifts were incoming. Sony's XBR-84X900 was the first 4K resolution TV to launch, setting out the stall for the Ultra-HD format.
It was quite an extraordinary showcase: 84-inches in scale, 2160 × 3840 pixels of resolution, and with a £25,000 asking price to boot. This was not a TV for mere mortals, that was clear – but just like the Philips in 98 before it, Sony's luxury set put 4K in the spotlight. It was aspirational.
The 4K standard at smaller scales became more readily available, and within four years Ultra-HD panels had overtaken Full HD sales. It was a much quicker adoption than previous step-changes – and gave more reason for 4K UHD content to be created, too.
2014: Dolby Atmos surround sound at home
Dolby was doing a lot of work in the background, not only for visuals, but also in audio development. And Dolby Atmos was a game-changer that, initially, was looking to upsell cinemas – debuting with Disney-Pixar's Brave back in 2012.
The system went from using rigid channels – say, 5.1 or 7.1 – to an object-based system that could move many multiple sound sources through space and across many more speaker arrays in a way that hadn't been possible prior.
It coming to home systems has arguably been even more of a milestone, however, especially as its original multi-speaker requirements have been overtaken (on a volume of sales basis) by digital processing solutions, giving a psycho-acoustic surround presence to numerous current-day soundbars, for example.
If you'd bought into Atmos back in 2014, however, then Denon's AVR-X5200W audio-video receiver was the first to offer it – yours back then for a cool £1,300. That sort of setup will still deliver Atmos delightfully, but it's the all-in-one systems since, such as the Sonos Beam, that people are now more familiar with.
2014: HDR's beginnings
With an ever-accelerating pace in technological progress, 4K was bolstered by greater brightness options courtesy of new LED backlight technologies. But it was Dolby Vision that presented a mapped, metadata-driven way to best control this potential to the benefit of viewers – and that's what we call High Dynamic Range (or 'HDR').
While 8K floundered – Samsung showed off the first consumer set in 2012, but there's only so much benefit extra resolution can provide – the next evolution really came down to brightness, dynamic range, and colour volume. Even today that's where TV-makers are looking to eke out the extra point of difference compared to their peers.
HDR now has even more formats, too, with Samsung locked to its own royalty-free HDR10+ (and Advanced version), while Dolby continues to drive the volume, with Dolby Vision 2 the incoming standard.
2016: 4K Blu-ray
Here's the point at which physical media became secondary: because Netflix was already streaming House of Cards in 4K two years prior to the first 4K Blu-ray reaching the market.
I'm not saying that 4K streaming is better (because it categorically just isn't), rather that consumption habits had shifted by this point – and convenience had the upper hand for the majority. Pricing also remained reasonable at the time.
But while the streaming services were winning, true collectors were still thrilled by 4K Blu-ray's next-level standards. Huge disc sizes (up to 100GB these days) means minimal compression for the best possible visuals.
I suspect 4K Blu-ray will be phased out over time, as studios forego the production costs and opt to maintain control of where their content exists. I, however, will continue my monthly 4K Blu-ray Club purchase, continuing to explore the best in the home-cinema format for as long as possible.
2019 onward: Streaming wars
Part of the reason that physical media is likely to fall away comes down to the way content is made and distributed. Streaming services used to be minimal – Netflix and Amazon, really – which would then buy the rights to other studios' works and provide them for a permitted period of time.
Today, however, there's all-out war in the streaming world. In 2019 both Disney+ and Apple TV+ came to market. Since, in 2022, we had Paramount+ added, among others. Most recently, HBO Max has finally come to world markets, too.
That's great for consumer choice, in one sense. But it's also seen buying and selling of various franchises and IPs being housed in niche separate streamers. Not to mention less risk-taking in independent movies being made. And, don't forget, the unpredictable removal of content or cancellation of shows.
So what of the future? There's no doubt that streaming is the dominant force and will continue to be the de facto source. But cinema releases are also making a comeback, as people want to explore bolder formats (such as IMAX). And, let's not forget, a lot of home viewing is around social media, with the likes of YouTube not to be ignored.
While the exact outcome is not obvious, I'm sure it'll bring with it more technological advancement and innovation that will improve what and how we can watch. T3 has been immersed in all this for 30 years already – so here's to another three decades and all that brings (so long as it's not just an Independence Day prequel movie, alright?)!
