The truth about DVD
By Rob Lemos
November 17, 1997 6:45 PM PST
ZDNN zdnet.com
LAS VEGAS -- People said it would never happen.
Yet hardware makers showing off their technology at Fall Comdex are betting that people will watch movies on their personal computers. The heart of the future PC entertainment system? Digital versatile, or video, disk.
"There are few interactive DVD titles out there," said Alan Asvadi, vice president of marketing for peripherals maker Pacific Digital Corp. "For us, the most important feature is to play digital movies as best we can."
The Irvine, Calif., company has shipped its second-generation solution priced at about $380 -- a point intended to target multimedia leader Creative Labs, Inc.
Next year, sales of DVD-ROM drives -- aimed at PCs -- will grow five-fold to hit 10 million units, according to Dataquest. Driving the growth will be early adopters looking to watch movies on their PCs. It won't be until the following year that the next generation of read-only storage will begin to replace CD-ROM.
Already, Creative has shipped hundreds of thousands of its first-generation DVD drives. The company hopes that its second-generation DVD upgrade kit will match those sales between now and the end of the year. The key to success: enthusiasts looking to play DVD video on their PCs.
"We think that the high-quality playback of DVD and its sound quality will impress the enthusiasts," said Tom Hannaher, senior vice president of marketing for the store chain Cambridge SoundWorks Inc., the Creative subsidiary that will be selling the Surround-sound system.
Creative Labs Inc. is pushing this vision hard. Asserting that the PC entertainment experience should be better than that of the TV, the company is showing off its high-fidelity audio and second-generation DVD player at Comdex.
A key to its strategy: a six-speaker Surround-sound system for the PC priced at a modest $200. "We really want to make this solution work for the consumer," said Hannaher. "Part of that is quality and part is price."
Yet game makers would prefer a software DVD solution, says chip maker Zoran Corp. "Right now, the market belongs to the hardware-only DVD solutions," said Mike Schmit, software manager for the Santa Clara, Calif., company. "But starting this year, software schemes will begin to take over. For games makers, software players mean better compatibility."
Since decompressing a digital video stream from a disk requires at least a 266MHz Pentium II -- nearly the top of the line for computers -- today's PCs need special hardware on an add-in card to play DVD.
But that will change in the future, said Schmit. "As soon as 300MHz Pentium II computers start shipping in numbers, software DVD solutions will become important," he said.
In the future, Zoran expects the market to split into hardware solutions for the consumer electronics makers and software solutions for PC makers.
For now, however, the company plays both sides of the DVD market, and hopes for a good year.
Dave(SoftDVD comes with a $5000 computer) |
