standard deviations - This Changes Everything... Eventually
Dana J. Parker
EMedia Professional, March 1999
Copyright © Online Inc.
Buried in the flurry of press releases from Comdex last November was a lengthy missive from Hewlett-Packard, MCC/Verbatim, Philips, Ricoh, Sony, and Yamaha. Rather stuffily titled "CD-RW and DVD+RW Industry Leaders Unfold Roadmap for Data Interchange," the release included an announcement of a future 4.7GB capacity version of DVD+RW, featuring "linkless editing for easy compatibility with DVD-ROM drives and DVD video players."
Ho hum, nothing new there. The group of companies behind DVD+RW, collectively known as the DVD+RW Compatibility Alliance (DCA), has always claimed that their proposed rewritable DVD format would require only slight modifications to future DVD-ROM drives and DVD-Video players to ensure compatibility. It goes without saying 4.7GB is the magic number for rewritable DVD formats, since that's the capacity of single-layer, single-sided pressed DVD. And "data interchange" doesn't exactly grab the imagination like a sexy consumer digital video device would.
Compare this with a subsequent announcement about the same technology, unleashed in January 1999 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES): "Philips Announces DVD-Video Recording Technology for Consumer Use: Recorded discs will play on existing DVD-Video players." Now there's a lead that'll make you sit up and take notice. Couple this with a concurrent announcement from TiVo, Inc. (http://www.tivo.com) regarding the alliance between Philips, TiVo, and DIRECTV to create "a new generation of personal TV devices," and the pieces start to fall into place. What is a VCR, after all, but a data storage device that uses removable, prerecorded or rewritable, interchangeable media?
Continued: emediapro.net
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