More on Recordable DVD.....
New York Times
November 30, 1997
DVD Market Breaks Out With Competing Formats
By LAURIE J. FLYNN
Recordable DVD may hold the promise of crystal-clear video, but these days the future of the fledgling storage technology is more blurry than ever.
During the past few weeks, the latest in what has been a series of format battles has broken out among manufacturers of recordable DVD drives, splintering their already shaky alliances. Combined with high prices, this could mean a longer wait before consumers can start recording vast amounts of data and video off the Net and, eventually, from their television sets.
A DVD, which stands for digital video disk, looks like a CD, but it can hold an entire full-length movie, giving it many times the storage space of a CD. Because of their otherwise unmatched capacity, DVD's are expected to eventually replace both the video cassette and the CD-ROM, though just how that will happen is under debate.
Earlier this year, the industry appeared ready to settle on a recordable technology called DVD-RAM, a format backed by giants Toshiba, Panasonic and Hitachi, among others. But last week, a group of five major electronics companies that today represent the majority of CD-ROM sales -- Philips, Mitsubishi, Ricoh, Yamaha and Sony -- along with Hewlett-Packard, announced a new format for DVD recordable drives that it claims is easier to use and more able to withstand everyday use. With that approach, called DVD+RW, computer users insert the DVD into a DVD drive just as they would insert a CD-ROM into a CD-ROM drive.
With the arrival of this format, analysts argue that DVD-RAM has only one advantage over DVD+RW: it will be on the market first, for whatever that's worth, with a product expected from Panasonic in January. But as if two formats weren't enough, Pioneer Electronics last week introduced yet another version, called DVD-R/W. Due out next month, that product is initially aimed at professionals who need to record vast amounts of video, audio and data. That drive will be priced at $17,000 but is expected to drop to about $3,000 to $5,000 by late next year.
One key difference among the three formats is capacity: A DVD+RW recordable drive introduced by Sony can store up to 3 gigabytes of data, while DVD-RAM drives from Panasonic will be able to store 2.65 gigabytes. Pioneer's DVD/RW drives, on the other hand, will store 3.95 gigabytes.
Just who will win the battle nobody knows. Clearly, the industry cannot support three formats indefinitely. But, in the electronics industry, format battles such as this are commonplace.
"These very consumer electronics companies have been leapfrogging each other in the magnetic optical market for years," said Ted Pine, an analyst at Infotech Research in Woodstock, Vt. "Rewritable DVD is probably a format that's not going to be decided by committee, but probably in the marketplace."
And besides, an even bigger obstacle to the acceptance of DVD recordable technology than the plethora of formats is price -- at least for now. New drives announced last week range from $800 for the Panasonic device, to $17,000 for the Philips drive. But that is expected to change fast. By the end of next year, Philips expects the price of its drive to drop to about $5,000, according to Paul Dempsey, senior vice president of optical drives for the company, based in Long Beach, Calif.
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Electronic equipment manufacturers are expected to sell roughly 500,000 DVD players in 1997, making DVD one of the fastest growing technology products in recent history.
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While the market for DVD recordable drives is growing slowly, sales of DVD-ROM drives for PC's, which can play DVD's and CD's, and players that attach to your TV set to play pre-recorded movies, something like digital VCR's, are brisk, particularly as the holiday shopping season accelerates, said Richard Doherty, director of the Envisioneering Group in Seaford, N.Y. These players, set-top boxes roughly the size of a cable box and made by Toshiba, Pioneer and others, typically cost between $500 and $600, though some models run as low as $400, roughly the same price as a high-end VCR.
With those low prices, electronic equipment manufacturers are expected to sell roughly 500,000 DVD players in 1997, making DVD one of the fastest growing technology products in recent history, Doherty said. By comparison, he said, only 30,000 CD audio players were sold in the nine months after the technology was first introduced in 1982.
For consumers today, however, the difference between a DVD player and a VCR is in the movies. This December, there will be roughly 500 movie titles available on DVD, compared to tens of thousands available on VHS to play on a VCR, Doherty said. The other barrier, he said, is that rental movies in DVD format aren't generally found in neighborhood video stores where most people shop; instead, they are sold in specialty stores that rent laser disks.
However, the availability of popular movies on DVD is improving quickly. Beginning next week with the DVD release of "The Lion King" and others popular kids' titles, Disney will join the other half-dozen major movie studios to release its films in the DVD format. By June, Doherty expects there be more than 1,000 titles available on DVD.
Eventually, he said, DVD will start to replace VHS as the standard for recorded video, particularly as it makes its way into camcorders in 1998, he said.
Meanwhile, manufacturers of DVD recordable devices will continue to debate the merits of their formats. These days, analysts point out, consumers don't appear to be paying much attention. A recent poll of customers shopping in consumer electronics stores, conducted by Infotech, showed that only 7 percent had even heard of recordable DVD technology.
Doherty thinks it will be about five years before consumers are swooping up DVD recordable drives in substantial numbers. Other analysts think it will be much sooner, though not before the format issues are worked out. "The industry is split between those who think the market is five years away, and those who think it's two years away," Doherty said. Either way, the picture for DVD is bound to get clearer. |
