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DVDs (Digital Versatile Discs)
DVDs, short for “digital versatile discs” or, more commonly, “digital video discs,” are an optical storage format for digital information that was developed through a collaboration between Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony, and Philips during the mid-1990s and first launched in Japan in 1996. DVDs have become a ubiquitous format in the ensuing years for everything from movies to music, to computer software, to data storage, to video games.
Development
In the early 1990s, two separate and competing digital disc formats were under development to replace the extant technologies for the distribution of movies, music, and computer software—the multimedia compact disc, a collaborative project between Sony and Philips, and the super density disc, a collaborative project of Toshiba, Panasonic, and several other tech companies. Eventually, these formats were combined ...
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