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To: John Mireley who wrote (33526)	5/31/1998 8:19:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

DVD still a mess in Europe....................................... tvbeurope.com DVD in Europe sees muddled launch By Tim Frost Having been considered a reasonable hit the US and Asia, it is the turn of Europe to get DVD-Video, with announcements of an April launch spreading across the main European territories. On the hardware side Philips, Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and Grundig have all announced players and Warner Home Video, Warner Vision, Columbia TriStar, Carlton Home Entertainment, VCI, MGM and PolyGram will be supporting the launch with movie, TV and music titles. Right up to the week of first announcements made in London in March, it was still unclear as to when Europe would see DVD-Video. The uncertainty about standards, and the difficulties experienced by the software houses in actually bringing product to market, has made the DVD launch impossible to plan well in advance. Whilst the consumer electronics manufacturers were able to make the players, and the pressing plants had the production capacity to press the discs, getting titles authored for the European market has created a bottleneck that will only be gradually eased over the forthcoming months. Last year, many of the publishers made a big play of the arguments about the multi-channel audio standard for European DVD-Video, making the point that it was difficult to think about releasing product when the audio standards were still open to interpretation. If this was the core reason for the delays, then the final settlement in December last year with Dolby Digital and MPEG getting equal rights within the DVD-Video standard, would have opened the flood-gates for European titles and prompted hardware companies to match software with players. But it hasn't happened, because the difficulties in producing titles for Europe have turned out to be more deep-rooted than the relatively superficial arguments over audio.