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Year 2000 Doomsday for CD-ROM and CD-R?
Our sister journal Multimedia Week reckons that multimedia developers opting to put content on CD-ROM need to take a serious look at DVD-ROM. Market watchers expect the media format to surpass the 680 Mb disc by 2000. At the same time, they expect the write-once CD-R market to dry up by the turn of the century as the more flexible rewriteable CD-RW drive takes hold. 's the word from the latest research by Disk/Trend, International Data Corp. (IDC) and other market researchers. According to Disk/Trend, the worldwide optical disc market should jump to 106 million units in 2000, up from the 1997 estimate of 69 million units, generating revenue of $10 billion. For CD-ROM drives, the company estimates 66 million units will be in 1997, although sales will begin to decline in 1999 and fall below DVD-ROM sales by 2000. Disk/Trend expects 500,000 DVD-ROM drives to ship this year. Writeable drives, which reached 1.4 million units shipped in 1996, will jump nearly three-fold to 4.7 million units by 2000. /Trend estimates CD-RW and DVD-RAM drives will replace the write-one, CD-R in the next few years. Wolfgang Schlichting, an analyst with IDC, estimates CD-ROM drive shipments will drop to 40 million units in 2000 from his 1997 estimate of 61 million units. Meanwhile, DVD-ROM will surge to 89 million units in 2000 from today's estimate of less than a ion. On the writable side, Schlichting said the 2.4 million unit sales of CD-R drives estimated for this year will evaporate by 2000 because of a market transition to CD-RW. Unit shipments of the rewritable media format are expected to see a nearly 20-fold th and reach 9.1 million units. "DVD-ROM will replace CD-ROM in the 1998-to-2000 time frame," Schlichting said. "CD-RW will replace starting now and will be completed by 2000." Meanwhile, DVD-RAM drives should start to ramp after 1999 and become a mainstream product by the end of 2000 with 3.7 ion units. "Keep in mind that there are still format discussions out there," he said. "This figure would include no rnative recordable DVD." If another format does emerge, such as the alternate DVD-RAM spec being touted by Sony, Philips et al, Schlichting expects to see a temporary slowdown of the market. "By 2001, one or the other format will be most popular," Schlichting said. Media manufacturers report that they will pull back from the CD-ROM market once the high-capacity and rewritable drives catch hold. But that could take a while. "Even if you look at the most optimistic numbers, t's going to be three or four years before there's a significant installed base of DVD units," said Robert van Eijk, director of marketing at Philips Key Modules. "Everyone's looking for DVD to take off, but it's no secret that it's happening much slower than most people expected. The only market that's growing right now is the CD-R and CD-RW market." Van Eijk is counting on the installed base of CD-ROM drives to push the CD-R and RW market while DVD units attract a following. He expects the company to ship more than 1 million CD-R and CD-RW drives this year. (Disk/Trend, +1 650 961 6209; IDC, +1 508 935 4012; Hitachi, +1 415 244 7630; Philips, +1 408 453 7008). |
