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Microcap & Penny Stocks : edig (e.Digital ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bob who wrote (558)	11/11/2001 11:05:45 AM
From: bob	Respond to of 1644

Did someone say QDX? MORE ON DATAPLAY! Dataplay Release: Winter The CD has survived previous attempts to dislodge its supremacy - witness Sony's MiniDisc. But Dataplay hopes to fare better with a coin-sized optical disc that's about to descend upon record and computer stores. Backed by major music labels, software companies, and over 60 hardware manufacturers, DataPlay media store up to 500 Mbytes of audio, photos, games, and video. You'll be able to choose between prerecorded discs and write-once blanks; the double-sided blanks will cost $5 to $12, making them pricier than writable CDs, but far cheaper than similarly small, rewritable flash memory. Three of the Big Five record labels - Universal Music Group, BMG, and EMI - plan to issue new releases in CD and DataPlay formats in early 2002. Samsung and others are manufacturing portable players, which will be followed by digital cameras, PDAs, and PC peripherals. Record companies favor DataPlay because it supports digital rights management, which determines how many copies you can make of a file, if any, and what you're permitted to do with those copies. Buy corporate rock on DataPlay, and it'll take some hacking before you can share it peer-to-peer with Gnucleus. (Hint: You can recapture anything directly off the headphone jack.) The consumer sell: The format's encoding standards, Dolby's AAC and QDesign's QDX, use a fraction of the space that CD's Red Book Audio does. The extra room will let prerecorded DataPlay discs, which are expected to cost about as much as their CD counterparts, hold bonuses like videos, lyrics text, and extra albums you can "unlock" by buying codes online. In the abstract, DataPlay looks good. But as with other standards, people want to go with the winner - which is often determined by marketing and momentum rather than technical superlatives. If by next year we get a dazzling array of clever and reasonably priced DataPlay gadgets, plus lots of big-name music, then we'll embrace the format. If not, it will still be a nice and small removable storage medium, for what it's worth - Michael Gowan P.S. Anyone know if Warner Music has finalized their plans to join DataPlay? Cheers!