DVD divas sound off
By Robert Lemos
November 19, 1997 8:36 AM PST
ZDNN zdnet.com
LAS VEGAS -- Digital video disks and CD-ROMs may look exactly the same, but their paths to success will be completely different, said industry experts at a seminar on the next-generation media on Tuesday.
The difference? "CD-ROM was a breakthrough medium for the market," said Ted Pine, the publisher and chairman of industry watcher InfoTech Inc., in Woodstock, Vt. "But DVD is just an evolutionary step."
For DVD, that means the infant standard will leap far ahead of where CD-ROMs were at a similar age, if suppliers can agree on a standard. Part of the reason is the much larger installed base of PCs that exist today. Another is that "People know what to do with a DVD drive. Consumers do not need you to tell them what the benefits of the technology are," said Pine. "With CD-ROM, the content had to be made by trial and error."
Yet other differences between the two media are causing concern. "We expected faster growth month after month," said Ken Wirt, vice president of corporate marketing for multimedia add-on maker Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc., and a panelist at the DVD discussion. "But we are still waiting for software -- there are not enough movies, and nearly zero computer software."
Diamond is currently selling a single speed DVD-ROM upgrade kit for PCs for about $350. At Comdex, the San Jose, Calif., company showed off a next-generation system coming out early next year. Similar to offerings from Creative Labs Inc. and Pacific Digital Inc., the new second-generation system is twice as fast as older systems.
Wirt places the blame for the slow growth directly on the lack of interactive DVD titles in the market. According to Greg Berkin, DVD evangelist at Intel Corp., only about 150 movies and 25 interactive titles are currently out on DVD. Berkin, a panelist at the seminar, thought that those numbers would change soon; he expects 500+ movie titles and 100 interactive titles by Christmas.
"The interactive titles are winners as far as revenues for the developers go," said Berkin. According to Intel calculations, interactive DVD titles will account for more than 80 percent of the revenue of the DVD market by the year 2000.
Yet other hurdles could slow the market. For instance, much of the industry press has concentrated on Divx, a pay-per-view scheme for DVD, as a cool, but confusing, technology. InfoTech's Pine has little regard for the fledgling standard. "In a survey of consumers, only 14 percent knew what Divx was," said Pine.
The confusion does not stop there. Also on Tuesday, Philips Electronics N.V. announced its new rewritable specification, called the DVD-ReWritable. The standard competes directly with the defacto standard being pushed by the DVD Forum, the official body of DVD manufacturing companies. |
