Shopping.

I am currently struggling to find any optimism about the positive future of local shopping centres, including the Broadway centre in Bexleyheath, and the Riverside Shopping centre in Erith - photo above. Please click on it to see a larger version. It would seem that shoppers are determinedly moving away from traditional shopping methods in local high streets and are increasingly buying their goods online. Reports came in over the last couple of days that the traditional Boxing Day sales had been attended by fewer people than ever this year, and that retail sales were down - although the final figures have yet to be released. I think that the whole model of retail in the UK has changed massively over the last decade. Shop rents have gone through the roof whilst the level of footfall has decreased, as have the revenues associated with it. Out of town warehouses whilst not cheap, are far more affordable for vendors to operate and they don't have to deal directly with demanding customers. They may have to pay a premium to couriers to deliver their products, but this is still cheaper for them than to operate a conventional chain of shops. It would seem that customers prefer having goods delivered to their doorstep rather than hoofing around a High Street or shopping centre. This makes me believe that that place is like Bluewater may not have a positive medium to long-term future, even though the operators of the shopping centre have tried to transition it more towards restaurants, bars and entertainment facilities such as a large cinema. More on cinemas below. 

There has been much written in the popular press about several online video streaming companies competing to purchase various established Hollywood TV and movie studios. Unfortunately, many of these articles have not given any insight into exactly why this is happening, and why the whole world of cinema is changing, and in many ways has already started to change. Since the pandemic, the number of visitors to cinemas in many countries has been reduced. This is also because of the huge cost of a trip to the cinema nowadays, the problems that many people find with other members of the audience making sounds or being disruptive by using their phones whilst the film being played or alternatively, it may be due to the fact that modern TVs are so large nowadays with sound bars and surround sound amplifiers and speakers available. Not to mention the use of LED or laser projectors, that many film buffs are feeling that a trip out to the cinema with the additional inconvenience and expense is just not worth it. To add to this perfect storm, many of the very large streaming companies such as Netflix and Disney+ are funding filmmakers directly, and getting their films produced to be directly exhibited on their streaming platforms rather than at the cinema. It would seem that this is not going to change, and the current battle between streaming services and established Hollywood film companies is only going to get more intense over the next few months and years. The streamers want the content and the franchises owned by the Hollywood film companies, and have the very deep pockets to pay for them. It would seem to me that the whole way the entertainment industry has been running is now changing. I think there is a level of inevitability about this. I don't think that cinema is going to die out completely, but it is going to be seriously reduced over the next few years. One only needs to look at the number of cinema chains in the UK who are struggling, and looking to close a number of outlets to see that this has been happening for some time. I'm not advocating or decrying this - I'm merely stating a fact. More and more content is being made for streaming services exclusively. This is not just feature films, but also documentaries, music videos and pretty much every other format. On top of this, you have services such as YouTube where a vast majority of the content is made by amateur content providers who can gain huge numbers of views and generate substantial advert revenue for both YouTube and themselves. It is said that the amount of screen time that young people watch on average is nowadays exceeded by the likes of YouTube and Tiktok over conventional broadcast television. The world of entertainment is changing, and I think that a number of the long established broadcasting organisations find this fact hard to comprehend. What do you think? Please let me know.

Forty three years ago, the very first Compact Disk players were released to the public. The 12 centimetre optical disc became the biggest money-spinner the music industry had ever seen, or will ever be likely to see. The birth of the Compact Disk actually began way back in 1957 with experiments involving a rudimentary video disc by the Italian Antonio Rubbiani, that stimulated an entire generation of scientists to think along the lines of digital technology. Almost 12 years after this, Philips started work on the Audio Long Play (ALP) disc that used the laser technology and which rivaled the traditional analogue vinyl records. The ALP discs played for longer times and occupied less space than their vinyl counterparts. Under the guidance of the technical director (audio) in Eindhoven, the Philips team tried many experiments with the digital disc technology, including the idea of quadraphonic sound that required a disc as big as 20 cm in diameter. These experiments were later abandoned. However, in 1978, the project took off on a more serious note and Philips launched the Compact Disc Project. The aim of the Compact Disc Project was for the new format to eventually replace both the analogue video equipment and the Compact Cassette Tape. Both were popular technologies at the time, that had been in use and established for a good many years.The name for the project (decided in 1977), Compact Disc Project, was chosen by Philips with the hope that it would bring to peoples’ minds, the Compact Cassette’s success. Philips, by then, had started paying more heed to the work done by its digital audio research department. All this research into the project led to a very interesting juncture.Philips, having already released the commercial laser disc player in to the market, was ahead of its competitors in terms of the physical design of the compact disc. However, Philips lacked the experience of digital audio recording to develop the compact disc any further. On the other hand, Sony, that was also working alongside to develop the Compact Disc, had exactly the opposite problem to contend with. Whereas it had over a decade of experience in developing and implementing the best digital audio circuitry, it lacked the know-how to make the actual physical CD. As a result of these developments, in 1979, during a conference in Japan, Philips and Sony stunned the world with the announcement that both the companies would jointly develop the Compact Disc. Thus, a new deal was forged, and the two companies worked together for the next few years. Engineers at Philips concentrated on the physical design of the disc: how the laser would read off the information from the pits and lands on the disc surface. Sony’s digital technology specialists worked on the analogue to digital conversion circuit design, with emphasis on the encoding of the digital signals and design of the error correction code. In the year 1980, Philips and Sony, in general acceptance of certain specifications regarding the CDs, brought out the Red Book. The name was attributed to the colour of the cover of the first publication. The Red Book contained specifications that included the size of the disc, the recording details, the sampling, and other standards, many of which remain unchanged even today. The CDs could be played in stereo systems, had a diameter of 120mm (making it portable and smaller than the vinyl record), and could hold an immense amount of data, much more than the vinyl record or the cassette did. The size of the CD has an interesting story to it: Philips’ idea of a 115mm CD had to be shelved because Sony insisted that the longest musical performance should fit on to the disc, which was Beethoven’s entire 9th Symphony, at 74 minutes, and the size of the CD was increased to 120mm. Soon after, Sony and Philips parted ways and started working separately, trying to produce their own CD-drive equipment. The first commercial CD drive was released a month earlier by Sony on 1st of October 1982, making it a notable event in the history of CD development. The CDP-101 Compact Disc Player by Sony hit the market first in Japan, followed by Europe. It did not reach the shores of America until the early part of 1983. Sony beat Philips once again for a second time when it released the first portable CD player in the year 1984. The time was ripe for commercial CDs to make a foray into the market. The first commercial CD to be pressed was Visitors by ABBA. Soon after this, the first album, Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, followed. In spite of the concerns of the major music labels, the popularity of CDs soared and over a thousand different singles and albums were released in the first year alone. Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler was an early convert (the second track on Pure, Perfect Sound Forever, the promotional 1982 compilation that came free with early CD players, was Dire Straits’ Once Upon a Time in the West). Knopfler insisted on recording Brothers in Arms on state-of-the-art digital equipment, so a promotional partnership was a natural fit. Philips sponsored Dire Straits’ world tour and featured the band in TV commercials with the slogan, attributed to Knopfler: “I want the best. How about you?” Brothers in Arms was an iconic release, the CD came to symbolise the so-called yuppie generation, representing new material success and aspiration. If you owned a CD player it showed you were upwardly mobile. Its significance seemed to go beyond music to a lifestyle statement. It went on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time, it revolutionised the music industry. For the first time, an album sold more on compact disc than on vinyl, and passed the one million units sold mark. Three years after the first silver discs had appeared in record shops,”Brothers in Arms” was the symbolic milestone that marked the true beginning of the CD era. “Brothers in Arms was the first flag in the ground that made the industry and the wider public aware of the CD’s potential,” says the British Phonographic Industry spokesperson Gennaro Castaldo, who began a long career in retail that year. “It was clear this was a format whose time had come.” CD sales overtook vinyl in 1988 and cassettes in 1991. It was not just in music that the Compact Disk had a great influence - but also in computer data storage.The electronics of the CD could be tweaked in a manner such that one would be able to store data on the disc that could be read by a computer. This was a landmark development in the history of CDs that had far-reaching effects. CDs would prove to be an ideal replacement for the existing floppy discs and would store a large amount of data in spite of their size. They would have a greater speed that positively impacted data access times. It was 1990 by the time the standard was ready for commercial use by businesses and individuals. The next major landmark was in the year 1995, when Sony initiated a move to standardise Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs), a plan that they had had in the pipeline. DVDs were not only expected to replace analogue video storage and video cassettes, but could also be used in computers in place of CD-ROMs and CD-Rs for data storage. The nine-company conglomerate that Sony pioneered for the purpose of standardisation ensured that DVDs could easily be accessed by the public. However, it is also true that DVDs are not completely standardised even till today as both DVD+Rs and DVD-Rs are still available in the market, offering slightly different functionality, however the difference can be considered negligible as they are quite small. The discoveries spurred by the development of CDs are, by themselves, astonishing. The development of the CD led directly to the DVD format and digital video recording. The impact of the simple disc on subsequent technology has still not stopped. The advent of the Blu-Ray disc, which brought high definition video in to our homes, is a direct descendant of the compact disc. It is ironic that on the 43rd birthday of the launch of the CD - the idea of physical data storage media is rapidly waning, and direct streaming has become the norm. What do you think? Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

On Christmas morning, I was taken by cab from my house to my mother's place in Upper Belvedere to visit her for the day. The driver of the cab had relatively recently moved to the area, and was not overly conversant with much about local culture and habits, although he was extremely keen to learn. He did say he'd spent a lot of time online researching the local area and was amazed at the amount of history he had discovered. It turns out he had stumbled across my blog during his online explorations, he commented about the huge amount of history that the area has that he was completely unaware of, and was mostly undocumented in the popular press, and the only place that covered it was from online contributors such as myself and some notable others. This was quite flattering when I explained that I was one of those contributors, although there were several others who were probably more eligible than myself. He was of the opinion that Bexley Council should be doing more to commemorate and publicise the history of the borough. I told him that the Local History and Archives Service based at Bexleyheath Library was both under resourced and under funded, and it was a miracle that it existed in any way whatsoever, and what a shame I felt that that was. In the relatively short journey between my house and my mother's, he expressed the opinion that the area deserved more recognition for its contribution to areas such as engineering and social reform. I said I could not agree more. What do you think? Please let me know.

The end video this week is by veteran transport YouTuber Jago Hazzard on the London Air Ambulance. Please give it a watch, and consider donating to this very worthwhile charity if you are able. Comment and feedback as always should be sent to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.