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To: Moonray who wrote (11706)	4/20/1998 5:26:00 AM
From: Javelyn Bjoli	Respond to of 25814

Moonray - I don't believe that being available first necessarily gets a technology adopted. I'm not "against" DIVX, but I believe it will fail (at least as-is) because all the support for it is coming from the supply side, not the demand side. It takes years to become an accepted technology "standard" and there will simply be much better options available in the 3-5 years it would take to sell enough DIVX players to have any real clout, regardless of how many content vendors are lines up behind the scheme. Unless they are going to shut down the purveyors of VHS tape, the content vendors are at the mercy of customers deciding they want this technology enough to pay $500 for a player. DVD will become (already is) a "standard", simply because it provides a video & audio format that everyone agrees upon, at least for non-streaming. Thus you could download a "DVD" movie to your hard drive, to blank DVD media, etc, the media doesn't matter, but the data format does. So if you happen to record to DVD media (or buy/rent pre-recorded media), it will work in a cheap, dumb player, but meanwhile there can be implementations ranging from "download to your notebook PC's hard drive for playback in your hotel room" all the way up to "streaming-ized" data transmission used in 2-way videoconferencing. Which may not be the most efficient way to do streaming, but once enough decoder hardware is in place, why bother trying to replace it? You don't need to count frames per second to know how much data it is. A DVD disc holds what, 5GB of movie data? I calculate that you would only need a bandwidth of 11.4Mb/s to transmit a full disc in 2 hours. Cable modems are promising 10Mb/s already (but delivering more like 1.5-2Mb/s, mine anyway), so we are about there already as soon as the current crop of cable modems gets rolled out to a wide audience and whatever is in the way of theoretical performance gets fixed. The cable companies might have to cache the full selection at whatever their equivalent of the "Central Office" is to boost performance, which effectively puts them in the position of "retailing" the data. This pits them directly against DSS/retail rental, which they are already anyway, so why shouldn't they push for this model as a competitor to DIVX? Eventually, they have to win, because the greater efficiency compared to the old physical distibution model gives them the ability to squeeze their opponents' margins to less than zero. If you want to see how this will play out, watch music audio, because the smaller data set will allow it to pioneer the business model(s) years ahead of video. Check out www.musicblvd.com, you can already order CD's over the Web, or download them to recordable CD media for a fraction of the price. Or www.audioactive.com, where you can listen to any of a dozen real-antenna radio stations simulcasting over the Web (for free).