Compact disc
Compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony and released in 1982. The format was originally developed to store and play only sound recordings (CD-DA) but was later adapted for storage of data (CD-ROM). Several other formats were further derived from these, including write-once audio and data storage (CD-R), rewritable media (CD-RW), Video Compact Disc (VCD), Super Video Compact Disc (SVCD), Photo CD, PictureCD, CD-i, and Enhanced Music CD. The first commercially available audio CD player, the Sony CDP-101, was released October 1982 in Japan.
Gaston Bastiaens
From 1988–92 Bastiaens was general manager and director of the Multimedia Division of Philips Consumer Electronics. Jan Timmer, then Philips' head of Consumer Electronics, gave him four months to make or break the Compact Disc Interactive (CD-I) project, a joint effort between Sony and Philips to enhance the CD standard with multi-media technology. This so-called "Green Book" standard had been in development since 1985 but was still in the concept phase when Bastiaens took charge. He started out by changing the project to "full motion video", which would enable a CD-I disc to hold a full-length feature movie but was rather ambitious at the time, as the compression and decoding hard- and software had yet to be developed. The success of the project also hinged on the creation of software and tools to create the content which would be essential in driving the market. Bastiaens moved the project into the MPEG standard, getting Philips more actively involved in that technology. By the time the first CD-I products where launched in 1992, using the MPEG-1 standard for video, development of MPEG-2 technology was well under way for the upcoming DVD technology, which used a red laser for encoding more than eleven times as much information on a disk of the same size as a CD, which used a yellow laser.