ProDisc

ProDisc was a CD format made by Escade Corporation and first released in 1990. It was made to avoid manufacturing VHS tapes that were popular at the time as they had lower quality standards and were more expensive to produce. It is an unofficial predecessor to the DVD format that was adopted later on in 1997. ProDisc was initially a proprietary format exclusively for Escade Studios until 1994 when it was bought by ATBW Label Networks. Since then, the ProDisc format had been used for other films, surpassing that of VHS. However, other major film studios still reverted to using VHS despite the ProDisc's success since the ProDisc could only store up to 80 minutes of film while VHS could store up to eight hours.

History
The ProDisc was released in 1990 by Escade Corporation, and was created by John Escade in college. The format became popular in the mid 1990's in that it could offer better quality movies than VHS, but that the ProDisc could only store up to 80 minutes of film. Like the CD, the ProDisc uses a laser to read data instead of a needle. The ProDisc Player was released with the format and only used RCA connectors to work.

The format would start to wane in the early 2000's with the rise of DVD, which could store even more minutes of film, and had better quality. It further decreased as the Blu-ray Disc became more popular, storing even more data. Escade Corporation had already started releasing DVD movies in 1998, and by 2005, there were almost no advantages to using ProDisc over DVD. The medium was discontinued in 2008 and now the company releases only DVD and Blu-ray, though in the late 2010's, this has also started to wane as streaming services such as ATBW+ have become more widespread.