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

To: John Rieman who wrote (24777)	11/3/1997 5:48:00 PM
From: Bill DeMarco	Respond to of 50808

Part 1: DVD: The Future Face Of Storage, Or Just Another Orphan? Digital versatile disc technology in its read-only format is already the anointed successor to the CD-ROM. Like CD-ROM, DVD-ROM is cheap, convenient and fast. Of course, DVD-ROM discs hold more data than CDs -- 4.7 gigabytes vs. a paltry 650 megabytes, respectively. That's a compelling advantage, but one that would be meaningless if the drives weren't backward-compatible. In the case of DVD, backward compatibility means that the drives can read traditional CD-ROMs. With the ability to read CD-ROMs, consumers are likely to find the advantages of DVD-ROM persuasive. The drives cost only slightly more than high-quality CD-ROM drives, and you typically get an MPEG-2 decoder thrown in for playing fast, full-screen digital video. But even this early in DVD's life, consumers are beginning to consider the obvious next steps, recordable and rewritable DVD. These capabilities have been planned almost from the beginning, and DVD-R, or write-once DVD, drives are already beginning to be available in small quantities. Vendors aren't pushing DVD-R drives very heavily, however, because they always anticipated that DVD-RAM, the rewritable version of DVD, would follow DVD-R so closely that it wouldn't be worth bothering with DVD-R. And everything was going according to plan until this fall, when no fewer than three major alternatives to the proposed DVD-RAM format appeared. The members of the DVD Forum, which planned and announced DVD, originally specified DVD-RAM to be a 2.6-GB-per-side storage medium that could be read in standard DVD-ROM players. The read-only version of DVD was specified to accommodate 4.7 GB per side, since extremely dense digital data is easier to read from a disc than to write to one. But several members of the DVD group clearly didn't think the 2.6-GB capacity was good enough. First, forum members Sony Electronics and Philips Electronics joined forces with Hewlett-Packard to announce a new rewritable DVD format, called DVD-R+W, that can hold 3 GB per side, can be read by standard DVD drives and doesn't require a cartridge shell to hold the disc during recording (the original DVD-RAM spec requires this). Hot on the heels of this action, NEC announced a technology to produce a 5.2-GB-per-side format. Then Hitachi, hoping to stem further fragmentation of the DVD standard effort, announced a plan to extend the original DVD-RAM spec to accommodate 4.7 GB per side while leaving unchanged the other aspects of the standard. In addition, Hitachi mapped out a grand 15-year plan that would eventually lead to a DVD-RAM device that could store as much as 180 GB. Finally, Fujitsu and other manufacturers announced their intention to pursue another technology designed to hold between 7 and 8 GB of data per side. All of these competing proposals are, of course, incompatible, though each is backward-compatible with both DVD-ROM and CD-ROM. Entertainment Reigns Supreme So why the huge split in the DVD market, especially after a generally successful launch of the basic DVD technology? The real source of the problem lies a few more years in the future, when the consumer electronics giants expect the next generation of the big three electronics purchases -- TVs, VCRs and CD players -- to emerge. The move to a digital TV standard eventually will come, although it is happening extremely slowly. When digital TV does materialize, a digital replacement for the VCR will be needed. The industry expects DVD to fill that need. But to store two hours or so of high-definition digital video will require at least 14 GB, well beyond what the original DVD spec provides for.