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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Rieman who wrote (44285)	8/30/1999 8:41:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

Okay. Thanks.

To: John Rieman who wrote (44285)	8/30/1999 8:49:00 PM
From: DiViT	Respond to of 50808

FINALLY, PIONEER'S SECOND-GEN DVD -R DRIVES BEGIN TO SHIP 08/30/1999 DVD Report (c) 1999 Phillips Business Information, Inc. Customers have begun receiving the first shipments of Pioneer's (Long Beach, CA) second-generation DVDR-S201 drive, the eagerly awaited DVD-R model that offers a capacity upgrade and a price cut. The new drive writes to DVD-R version 1.9 media, which can hold a complete 4.7-billion-byte DVD -5 project, as compared its predecessor, which only wrote to 3.9-billion-byte version 1.0 discs. And while the drive sells for a hefty $5400, that's a bargain compared to the $17,000 that the previous model fetched from authoring houses who needed to test drive their projects before going to replication. Supply is currently at a trickle, but Pioneer expects shipments to begin in earnest in September. The drive was originally slated to debut in April, but was delayed by a number of factors, chief among them Pioneer's last-minute decision to add copy protection features to protect the interests of content owners who were worried about the future potential for piracy, given the inevitable drop in prices for DVD -R media. Pioneer's Andy Parsons stressed that the measures were taken voluntarily, and not under duress from the movie industry. Among them was ensuring that, while the physical data from an encrypted disc can be copied, the decryption key will not be recorded on the DVD -R disc, rendering it useless for playback of scrambled content. Copy protection will be more robust on v2.0-compliant drives, which are slated to be available later this year. Once the new drives and media are available, Pioneer will modify the v1.9 drives to the v2.0 spec (either through a firmware flash upgrade or minor hardware adjustments), at which point they will no longer write to the old v1.9 media. It's not yet known whether the S201 will be compatible with DVD -RW media - that depends on the specific hardware requirements once version 1.0 of the -RW spec is finalized by the DVD Forum. Contact: Pioneer New Media Technologies, phone: 310-952-2111