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Technology Stocks : Nimbus CD International -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Carmine Cammarosano who wrote (1516)	5/14/1998 10:16:00 AM
From: Don Dorsey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1673

If Nimbus doesn't invest money to expand DVD they are conceding the future to their competition. It is the responsibility of management to value the long term growth of the company over short term profits. Here is an article on the future of DVD. I have been visiting the "Computer Game Developer's Conference" from Mayÿ4 to Mayÿ8 and it gave me the chance to take a look at what is going on in this industry branch in regards to DVD. The past days gave me the chance to talk to many industry people regarding the DVD platform and their future plans. Whileÿ - obviously - heavily geared towards the software side of DVD, some trends became very obvious and the signs are unmistakable. Hardware and software manufacturers are gearing up for DVD on all fronts. Many of you have probably asked themselves already, how DVD-ROM will eventually affect other facets of the DVD market - mainly our point of interest, the movie segment. It was easy to predict that many people would see the potential in DVD as a storage medium and make use of it at some point in time. Remember, in the first place DVD is nothing but a CD-ROM with a much bigger storage capacity and this plus on storage space allows them to be used for home video applications as a result of it. CD-ROMs were never able to hold enough data to allow for acceptable compression schemes in both, the video and the audio area. With DVD all this has changed as we know just too well. Now, walking the showfloor of the "Computer Game Developer's Conference" it became all too obvious that DVD is catching on as a storage medium for the computer industry as well. Not that we hadn't expected this earlier, but now the signs become stronger and stronger. By the end of the year supposedly every PC will be shipped with a DVD-ROM drive and prognosis's say that by the end of the year some 7 million drives will be installed in PCs here in the US alone. Now that's a savy number, even more so considering that DVD movie player sales are expected to hit "only" 1 million by then end of this year. With those numbers it is easy to see that computer based DVD is one important factor that will drive DVD sales through the roof all over the world and elevate DVD to a level easily comparable to CD-ROM and Audio CD. Those numbers and prospects make the question whether Fox will join DVD or not completely academic because they simply have to, considering the brute force of the medium's stellar rise. The "Computer Game Developer's Conference" is a show where hardware manufacturers like to show off their latest technologies, hopeful that developers of entertainment software pick it up and develop applications based on it. Everyone who has followed the PC market in the past years knows how 3D accelerator cards have changed the face of computer gaming, just the way CD-ROM has and DVD will. It was interesting to see that literally every hardware manufacturer had something DVD related to show. Every video board company had at least two new boards in the program that had hardware MPEG-2 decoders on them to allow uninhibited DVD movie playback. Those boards have usually outputs that allow you to connect your computer to your TV set so that the comparably small size of your computer monitor is not an issue any more. Not a big deal, you might think, there have been boards before. And while this is correct, it is a clear sign when every vendor is suddenly putting those decoders on their boards at literally no additional cost. Those boards will retail at around $100, complete with 2D, 3D acceleration and MPEG-2 video decoding and many of those manufacturers are currently in the process of convincing computer manufacturers to include these boards in their systems. So, just like the DVD-ROM drives, we will see these boards shipped with every PC that goes over the counter by the end of the year. The same is true with PC soundboards. While not available yet, every soundboard manufacturer I talked to is currently working on a Dolby Digital ready soundcard for PCs. They don't do it because it is fun or cheap. It is obvious that they prepare the imminent explosion of demand that will go hand in hand with DVD sales. With the introduction of those boards prices for Dolby Digital technology will plummet, making dedicated Dolby Digital decoder chips available to all markets. The result will probably be that Dolby Digital receivers will eradicate Stereo and Dolby Surround receivers altogether. Interestingly, not a single manufacturer I talked to had any plans for DTS support, making it clear that DTS is not the standard of choice for this branch of the industry. One of the most interesting sights and places was of course Creative Labs' booth. The company was on the forefront of PC DVD-ROM technology and even though they still have their fair share of compatibility problems, the next revision of their Encore boards will supposedly eliminate these, according my contact in the company. One of the highlights of their booth however was their display of a brand new DVD-RAM kit, which came out of its prototyping phase only two weeks ago. It will probably be the first DVD-RAM kit available for PC and will hit the streets later this year. Like with all of their products, Creative Labs' pricing is very consumer oriented and this DVD-RAM kit will retail somewhere between $500 and $600 dollars! Will this mean you can simply copy your DVD movies with this kit? No, it will not, but it will help bring down the prices for DVD-burners considerably, helping to make DVD video recorders more affordable in the long run. Still, there will be the authoring problem however, which needs to be overcome, as only very few people will have the skills to actually author a DVD, which includes programming skills as well as certain knowledge in image technologies. But that's a completely different story. Another aspect of the conference was the usage of DVD as a storage medium for software. Computer games have always been driving forces for hardware sales. This industry is raising the stakes for hardware practically every six months, literally forcing people to go out and upgrade their system. While some people are downright annoyed and frustrated by this fact, most PC users readily accept it as part of the progress and the lifestyle of a computer society. Currently many software game publishers are wetting their feet with DVD technology and work on dedicated DVD versions of certain titles. Just as CD-ROM took the industry by storm, DVD will take over computers in no time until we find ourselves sitting in front of the monitor one day, realizing that we wouldn't even be able to install the latest version of the machine's operating system without a DVD drive. So, what's the point of this whole article, you might wonder now. What does it have to do with our DVD movies? While DVD-ROM storms the desktop computers it will expose many millions of people to its technology worldwide. You can be assured that many movie studios will use computer sales to bundle their latest demo discs with and I am sure companies like Warner and Columbia have already plans for that sitting on their desks. Before the end of the year we will see DVD trailer discs coming with every shipped computer and DVD drive, giving people the chance to see and judge DVD quality all for themselves, without having to ask store staff who don't even know how to correctly set up a DVD unit, stumbling around poorly exposed or well hidden DVD setups somewhere in the stores. We, the current generation of DVD owners, have been convinced by DVD's capabilities early on because we were interested in the medium and proactively went out to see what DVD can do for our movie experience. Now it is time to turn the tables. Computers will be the future evangelists of DVD. They will spread the message and go out there, showing people what DVD can do for them, right there on their desktop, in the office or at home, creating a huge following for all aspects of DVD and most importantly for the home video industry. Because there are so much more computers in use than DVD players sold, desktop computers will become a massive driving force for DVD movie players in no time at all. Stay tuned as yet another very important show is just around the corner. I'll be there and let you know what news and information I have been able to dig up. dvdreview.com