Recording, lower prices coming to DVD
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By Jim Davis
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
January 14, 1999, 4:00 a.m. PT
Although the technological standards still aren't set, variations on the DVD player
as well as lower prices are coming to market.
Consumer electronics companies are working on delivering home players with the ability to
record disks while also hashing out plans for new audio formats that incorporate
multichannel surround sound for more lifelike music reproduction.
The availability of recordable DVD discs is seen as one of the keys to tapping into a
potentially huge consumer DVD market, analysts say. An estimated 1.2 million DVD home
players were sold worldwide in 1998, double the figure from the previous year, according to
InfoTech Research. This is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of drives that have
shipped with home PCs to date.
But judging by the prototype devices and statements of intention to build new devices at
last week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, consumers are likely to wind
up taking a gamble on which enhancements to DVD technology are going to win in the
marketplace.
<<CLICK ON THE LINK AND SEE THE COMPARISON TABLE IN THE ARTICLE>>
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Philips announced at CES that it intends to build by early 2000 a DVD player for
consumers that can also record up to 4.7GB of data, enough to store a two-hour film, in a
format known as DVD+RW. Pioneer Electronics demonstrated a prototype DVD player
that could record up to 1.5 hours in a different format called DVD-ROM.
Panasonic and Hitachi meanwhile, exhibited prototype DVD camcorders using the
DVD-RAM recordable format.
Re-recordable DVD allows consumers to erase and re-record data, like people do with
VCRs and tape decks but in a pristine, digital form. Unfortunately, none of the three
standards touted above are compatible at the moment.
Not surprisingly, different formats could mean problems for consumers. Since the industry
has yet to decide on a format, there could be players introduced into the market that
couldn't read recordings produced by other manufacturers. Not only that, but these disks
may not be readable by DVD players that are available today, thereby decreasing the
usefulness of the devices.
Companies are working to fix these problems. Philips's technology, according to industry
analysts, will let the deck produce disks that current-generation DVD players can
read--something which has to date been difficult to accomplish with all re-recordable DVD
formats.
Of equal importance is the fact that drives will get cheaper. Current DVD recordable
products that can take MPEG 2 data and store it on disk are very pricey. Some in the
$10,000 range. But Philips is hoping to sell its device for around $1,000.
"They are taking the bull by the horns," Richard Doherty, president of The Envisioneering
Group, said of Philips' announcement. "If the company is first to market with a low enough
price, "[DVD+RW] a force to be reckoned with."
Others are more cautious, noting that other technologies are more mature than Philips's
DVD+RW, which is also supported by Sony and Hewlett-Packard. "Philips is making a
preemptive technology announcement. If you look at the state of [the technology],
DVD-RAM is ahead, so in order to get a product to market by the end of 2000, Philips has
a lot of ground to make up," said Ted Pine, analyst with InfoTech Research.
Pine thinks DVD-RAM supporters such as Matsushita Electric--which markets products
under the Panasonic brand name--are trying to boost the storage capacity of their drives to
4.7GB by the end of 1999 to beat Philips to the punch.
Indeed, companies continue to butt heads over differing standards, including
next-generation audio formats. Even as Pioneer was demonstrating "DVD Audio" players,
Sony, Philips and others were demonstrating a competing next-generation audio format
called "Super Audio CD" (SACD). Both would allow for multichannel sound, although Sony
and Philips (the originators of the original audio CD format) claim that SACD allows better
sound quality.
What are consumers going to make of the growing list of alphabet soup format names?
Tom O'Reilly, executive editor of the DVD Report, an industry trade report, said that the
market's growth is ultimately contingent upon streamlining the numerous proprietary
storage formats being shown at CES into one or two standard formats, at consumer price
points.
O'Reilly is skeptical the format wars will be much of an issue until after 2000. "It always
takes twice as long as people expect," he said, noting that DVD+RW has been talked
about for well over a year and no products based on the technology are available yet, and
that similar engineering and marketing issues delayed the rollout of DVD Video and
DVD-ROM, the read-only version of DVD used by PCs.
In the meanwhile, an industry trade group called the Optical Storage Technology
Association (OSTA) this week said it would work on a standard that would ensure
CD and DVD drives can read all re-recordable disks in their various formats.
Envisioneering's Doherty thinks the market will eventually wind up deciding which
format it prefers, regardless of industry efforts. Audio CDs weren't available in
standards formats for five years, he said.
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