Once renting movies on videotape became common in the early 1980s, consumers started hungering for ways to replicate the movie experience in the home. To answer this demand, TV manufacturers began to produce TVs with larger screens. Until October 1986, when Mitsubishi became the first manufacturer to offer a 35-inch TV, the largest TV available was 27-inches. The biggest direct-view TV made was 40-inches. The problem was that a 40-inch screen was about as big as a CRT could get. In order to get a bigger picture, manufacturers began to experiment with projection and flat-panel technology.

The first and most famous of these early attempts at big screen projection TV was the Advent VideoBeam, introduced in 1975. The VideoBeam was a two-piece system with three CRT tubes – red, green and blue – housed in a coffee-table-sized console with the image projected on a 7-foot diagonal curved aluminized screen that had to be placed precisely eight feet away. The VideoBeam was designed by audio pioneer Henry Kloss (working with Tomlinson Holman, who later would design the THX surround sound standard for LucasFilms), and its success led Kloss to found his own large screen TV company, NovaBeam.

The first one-box rear-projection televisions (RPTV) appeared in 1982. These large screen TVs incorporated the same CRT projection technology found in front-projection systems such as the NovaBeam, but used a series of mirrors to reflect the image onto the rear of a screen. This arrangement allowed RPTVs to take up much less space than front-projection systems. In the past five years alone, sales of projection TVs have more than doubled.

In 1988, the first LCD front projector became available. In 1993, in anticipation of the coming HDTV age, RCA unveiled the first widescreen, 16:9 tube TV. CRT and LCD remained the lone large screen display technologies until 1997 when two new technologies were introduced: gas plasma and digital light processing (DLP).

Gas plasma allowed the creation of large, flat-panel screens measuring less than six inches deep, but could be made larger and produced crisper and brighter images than flat LCD panels. Research began in the mid-1960s in Japan by Fujitsu and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the leadership of Dr. Don Bitzer. Bitzer was the director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois charged with creating the first computer-based instructional system, PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), which presented computer graphics with overlaid slides on a television set viewed by the students. But as PLATO expanded to several terminals, it was clear that using storage tubes for memory and a television channel per terminal would not be economical and digital memory was too expensive to use in large quantities at the terminals. A display that was bright, had high contrast, was transparent, had inherent memory, and didn't flicker was needed.

These display needs drove Bitzer to recruit fellow research professor Dr. Gene Slottow and graduate student Robert Willson to develop a new kind of display. In a doctoral paper, Willson suggested one solution that solved some problems but not others. One spring evening in 1964, Bitzer and Slottow found themselves outside the lab waiting to be picked up by their wives discussing how to proceed. While they waited for their tardy spouses, the pair discovered a solution that would enable them to emit light by energizing neon gas sealed between two sheets of glass coated with phosphor to produce color. The morning after their revelation, Bitzer, Slottow and Willson started on a new model that used three layers of glass, the center layer with rows of tiny holes filled with a mixture of gas, and the outer layers lined with transparent metallic lines to carry the necessary electrical current to excite the gas in the tiny holes. The trio completed the first plasma panel, a monochrome display that glowed orange, in July 1964.

The original panels of these early plasma displays were orange and found early use for computer graphic displays. But by 1966, Bitzer, now an associate professor, along with Slottow and Willson demonstrated multi-color panels using a gas discharge rich in ultraviolet light and color phosphors.

Commercialization for consumer TVs took 30 years, however, with several major industrial and computer companies attempting commercialization development. But much of the work to turn Bitzer's, Slottow's and Willson's display into commercial television panel was done by a successor of the trio, researcher Larry Weber, who spent more than 20 years on plasma development, much of it with a company called Plasmaco, as well as Fujitsu, which unveiled the first color plasma display in 1993. The first high-definition monitor was unveiled in 1999.

Since then, flat plasma displays have become the "must have" HDTV. In 2002, the National Association of Television Arts and Sciences awarded a technical Emmy award to Fujitsu as well as Bitzer, Slottow and Robert Willson for the development of plasma display technology.

DLP, developed by Texas Instruments, used in both front- and rear-projection TVs, uses a million tiny mirrors to create large, bright images, but requires much less physical space and power than CRT-based rear projection sets and LCD-based front projectors.

Bigger sound also was needed to complete the theater-at-home experience. In July 1983, JVC introduced VHS hi-fi bringing the stereo sound from the theater to the home. But stereo wasn't adequate to simulate the increasingly loud and immersive movie theater experience. In 1982, Dolby Labs developed a four-speaker scheme called surround sound, consisting of two speakers in front and two behind the movie watcher.

Dolby Surround Sound was expanded to four channels (front left, front right, center and rear) and five speakers (the fifth speaker was a subwoofer to supply additional bass) with Dolby Pro Logic in 1987, then to five channels employing five speakers (two rear channels rather than one) and a subwoofer with Dolby Digital in 1995, then to six channels with Dolby EX in 1999.

By the late 1990s, the two-channel stereo receiver had disappeared practically, replaced by a variety of economical multi-channel surround sound A/V receivers.

But what do you project on these big screens and listen to using those multiple speakers? Blowing up the images from broadcast TV and VHS tape onto large screen and projection TVs revealed the flaws in both analog video delivery methods. What was needed was a higher-quality video format.

At the same time the CD was being developed, so was its sister product – the laserdisc. While the original development work was done in the early 1960s, it took 20 years for pre-recorded laserdiscs and players to make it to stores. Even though laserdiscs produced a picture twice as good as VHS along with digital sound, the 12-inch disc was too large for consumers familiar with five-inch CDs and used analog video encoding instead of digital. The format never caught on beyond film fanatics and videophiles.

Around the same time that the first laserdisc products were hitting store shelves, so was a 12-inch video disc product from RCA that used a technology called Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED), which used a physical needle to read information on a videodisc, much like a record player. The public, however, was uninterested and, after spending millions and selling only a half million players, RCA dropped CED in 1984.

After losing the VCR legal battle, and seeing the rise of video rental stores on every corner in America, Hollywood finally realized there was a great deal of money to be made in home video. Remembering the debacle of the VCR format wars, several studios worked with a group of hardware manufacturers on the ultimate digital home video platform.