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Strategies & Market Trends : Market Gems:Stocks w/Strong Earnings and High Tech. Rank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SMALL FRY who wrote (67022)	10/20/1999 3:43:00 AM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 120523

DVD's are hot and BGST sells then....... Thou Shalt Buy DVD Prices of DVD players have plummeted, and disks can now be rented easily. This technology is finally ready for its closeup. Mike Himowitz There's a home theater coming to a TV set near you. No, it's not the kind that requires a dedicated room with motorized curtains and a high-limit Visa card. It's a gadget that hooks up to your regular old TV but plays movies that look and sound like nothing you've seen or heard before. It's called a DVD player, and for years people have been saying that it may do to videotape what the compact disk player did to vinyl records. That's because the basic technology is great: It can reproduce a movie or concert with a visual clarity and audio fidelity that neither tape nor broadcasters can match--and it also plays your music CDs with the same great audio quality. A DVD (which stands for digital versatile disk or digital video disk, depending on which industry type you ask), is a beefed-up CD that can store an entire feature film in digital format, along with multiple sound tracks, subtitles, directors' cuts, shots from multiple angles, and other goodies. If DVD players haven't crossed your radar screen yet, you won't be able to escape them once this Christmas shopping season gets under way. You see, the consumer-electronics industry regards DVD as its hottest new product since the Walkman and thinks Christmas 1999 will be the technology's mass-market breakthrough. The industry is right, for three reasons. First, with more than 20 manufacturers now making DVD players, competition has pushed prices down--way down. You can still spend $2,000 for a high-end player, but this winter you'll find plenty of solid performers on retailers' shelves for $200 to $400. Second, all the major movie studios now issue new releases on DVD as well as videocassette, and they're pumping out scores of back titles every month. This summer the DVD version of The Matrix sold a million copies--the first disk to hit that mark. And third, major video rental outlets like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video are stocking up on DVDs. Unless you depend solely on the local mom-and-pop video store, DVDs are now as easy to rent as a video. The bottom line: DVDs aren't just for video geeks any more. You can buy a player without breaking the bank, and once you get it home, you'll be able to do something with it. Two years ago a flood of press hailed DVD as the Next Big Thing. One reason it has failed to wow the world up to now is its curious position in the market. DVD machines play videos but don't record them yet. So people who tape TV shows on their VCR aren't likely to replace that machine with a DVD player. And while DVD machines are thought of mostly as movie players, the machine they are likely to displace in many households is the single-purpose compact disk player. Indeed, manufacturers are already selling multidisk DVD changers--not because we want five movies on tap, but because that's the way we like to play music CDs. Sales soared this year as prices came down. In the first nine months of 1999, manufacturers shipped almost two million players--pretty remarkable for a machine that didn't exist three years ago. The Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association predicts total sales of three million units by year-end. Mike Fiedler, Sony's vice president for DVD marketing, says that figure could easily double in 2000. "The market is really ready for this," he adds. "There's a real 'wow' factor at work here." There may also be a wow factor for people like Fiedler, who hope that buyers snapping up DVDs will also want bigger TV screens, better audio-visual receivers, Surround Sound speakers, and other high-margin home-theater goodies. The technology behind all this builds on the past and leaps into the future. Like digital audio, DVD turns a movie or video broadcast into a series of ones and zeros, and burns them into pits on the tracks of a mirrored, 54-inch plastic disk. A DVD player reads those ones and zeros by bouncing a laser beam off the disk, then converts them into video and audio signals that can be pumped directly into your TV or home-theater system. Now let's take that leap into the future. Whereas music and computer CDs can store 650 megabytes of data--enough for 74 minutes of two-channel stereo sound--DVDs can store more than seven times as much. That's 4.7 gigabytes of information in a single optical layer, or enough for 133 minutes of video. Publishers can double that capacity by adding a second storage layer and quadruple it by using both sides of the disk. DVD-ROM drives for computers use the same technology, making this disk a triple threat that handles video, music, and software applications and multimedia. Over the next couple of years, most PC manufacturers will offer DVD drives as a standard feature. Next Section: The first thing you'll notice when you check out a DVD is the picture quality.