Pioneer has decided to pull the plug on its three remaining Laserdisc players.

The move will mean the end of major manufacture for the long-obsolete format.
Laserdiscs have been considered dead for ages, but Pioneer kept making players because the Japanese had large collections that they built up when the technology was popular.

The fact that the players survived this long is a bit of a miracle as technology magazines were writing the technology off in 2000. The technology was initially called Discovision when it hit the shops in 1978. However, when it was licensed it came out under various names such as Reflective Optical Videodisc, Laser Videodisc, Laservision, Discovision and MCA Discovision until Pioneer Electronics purchased the technology and started calling it Laserdisc.

It was better than VHS, but certainly no match for DVDs. Discs could only manage 60 minutes of play on each side and were the size of an LP. The first Laserdisc title in  the US was Jaws in 1978, and the last one was Paramount's Sleepy Hollow in 2000. The last Hong Kong-released Laserdisc-format movie title was Tokyo Raiders. X