DVD report from Germany. 600 US titles by Christmas......................
Germany - DVD Vendors Slug It Out At IFA Fair
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BERLIN, GERMANY, Newsbytes via Individual Inc. : The IFA broadcasting fair
taking
place all this week in Berlin has proven to be the first real opportunity
for many
Europeans to get a first look at the fledgling digital video disk (DVD)
technology.
As previously reported by Newsbytes, DVD is an all-digital video and audio
system
designed to act as an alternative to video tapes and, of course, the long-
running
laserdisk system. Like audio CDs, the plan is for DVDs -- which are the
same size -- to
become the common a-v (audio-visual) medium for video/music lovers. They
can be
played on dedicated players that plug into TVs. They can also be played,
CD-ROM
style, on a PC.
The IFA fair, is proving to be the European equivalent of the Consumer
Electronics
Show in the US. The difference, of course, is that the IFA is now, while
CES takes place
each January.
At IFA, no less than seven hardware vendors and five software companies
were
presenting their DVD products to show goers. Warren Lieberfarb, Warner Home
Video's
president, set the scene by announcing the company's joint marketing plans
for DVD in
Europe.
By approaching the sales potential from a joint marketing basis, DVD
software will be
available on a widespread basis by the beginning of next year, he said,
rather than
relying on existing outlets to stock the new disk format.
Lieberfarb said that sales of DVD players in the US have now topped the
120,000 mark
since their introduction earlier this year. This trend, he said, was due to
the rising
availability of DVD-Video software on disk.
Leiberfarb's comments were echoed by Jan Oosterveld, a senior manager with
Philips
Electronics, who said that around 600 disks would be available to US
audiences by the
end of this year.
Interestingly, the seven DVD hardware vendors -- Hitachi, Panasonic,
Philips, Pioneer,
Sony, Thomson Multimedia Europe, and Toshiba -- have now penciled in the
first
quarter of 1998 for a DVD player mass launch in Europe, rather than the
fourth quarter of
this year, a schedule that Newsbytes notes was looking almost impossible a
few weeks
ago. The gameplan is to have around 100 disks available in Europe in time
for the first
quarter launch, and 250 titles by the end of 1998.
Given the large volume of DVD disks already available in the US, however,
and the 600
title target by the end of 1997, Newsbytes notes that the tiny numbers of
European disks
to be available will, at best, fuel the number of vendors offering
unauthorized
conversions for European players to play US disks, or at worst, stifle the
technology at
birth in Europe.
DVD disks offer the audio-visual industry a key benefit of tagging discs so
that they will
only play in those regions of the world that they are licensed to, and on a
planned
timescale. This approach, Newsbytes notes, allows a DVD disk to be released
in the US
in, say March, 1998, and then released in Europe three months later.
Even if a US disk were to be played on a European DVD player, the system is
set up so
that it would not play until June, 1998, in the above example. This allows
film makers to
control scheduled releases on film and disk, to take account of their
release schedules in
cinemas around the world.
It now looks as though five primary companies -- Columbia Tri Star,
PolyGram,
MGM/UA, Universal Home Video, and Warner -- will start shipping DVD disks
in
Europe in preparation for the first quarter, 1998, European launch of the
technology.
Prospects for a resolution of the apparent dispute between Philips and Sony
over the
exact format for a recordable version of DVD -- known as DVD-RAM (random
access
memory) -- still appear as distant as they were earlier this year,
Newsbytes notes.
Without firm DVD-RAM plans, Newsbytes notes, the prospect of a small 100
disks only
being available in time for the European hardware launch of DVD could end
up being a
re-run of the Minidisc fiasco.
(19970903/Reported By Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com)
<<Newsbytes -- 09-03-97>>
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