2/3rds of PC sales are corporate, in the US. DVD goes corporate.................................
nikkeibp.com
Teri Sprackland, Santa Clara
DVD Tipped to Penetrate
Workplace in 1999
The digital video disk (DVD) is the heralded medium for extremely high quality home entertainment. Uniting the facility of videotape, the familiarity of compact disk, and the interactivity of the Internet, DVD equipment and disk sales already indicate that consumers are eager to welcome this new format. However, corporate America has also begun exploiting the multifaceted new technology.
Many DVD participants expect full-scale corporate sales to materialize in 1999. The key turning point is the volume shipment of PCs with DVD drives underway in the fourth quarter of 1998. About 40% of new business computers will contain DVD-ROM drives by the end of 1998 and 80% by the end of 1999, according to Kilroy Hughes, Microsoft Corp (www.microsoft.com) of the US's "DVD Evangelist."
Pushing DVD Development
The DVD evangelist at Intel Corp (www.intel.com) of the US, Greg Berkin, is working with software developers on DVD titles for the Pentium II. "Our group is here to motivate computer sales by encouraging DVD title development on the content side. We provide technical assistance, developers' conferences, and testing of DVD-ROM titles for compatibility and functionality," said Berkin.
Once DVD drives start appearing in desktop and notebook computers in significant numbers, corporations will exploit the possibilities inherent in broadcast-quality video coupled with computer and Internet accessibility.
What applications will corporate, industrial and educational markets find compelling? Any application that requires either video or storage capacity, such as video applications for training, evaluation, presentation, advertising, documentation, communications, or POS. Storage needs include the thousands of existing CD-ROM applications that use more than one CD, including catalogs, accounting information, databases, images, software distribution, government regulations, company policy and training, CAD/CAM, schematics, etc.
Many training titles now on laser disk will be transferred to DVD-ROM, because the new format supports the video quality of a laser disk with all the advantages of computer interactivity. Where CD-ROMs ran at 15 frames a second on quarter screen video, DVD-ROMs run at an MPEG-based standard of 30 frames a second on full screen.
DVD may also become the new corporate virtual filing cabinet. As users deal with hard drive capacities that fly right by the 8-Gbyte mark, they will move from the size-limited CD-ROMs to the much larger storage capacity of DVD-ROMs. Hughes feels that DVD-ROM can be cost-justified as storage capacity with full backward compatibility to CD-ROM.
Authoring Prices to Drop
DVD authoring tool prices are ready to drop, as providers entice video producers and corporate facilities to move up to DVD productions. (Early DVD adopters were primarily in the entertainment industry, such as post-production houses.) For example, Minerva Systems, Inc (www.minervasys.com) of the US, is leveraging its state-of-the-art MPEG encoder hardware experience into new, streamlined software tools for the larger corporate market.
Among this fall's deals for Minerva is an agreement with WAMO, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers studio, as WAMO facilitates new business using Minerva equipment. That agreement is scheduled for announcement in Taiwan, which points out the importance of the Asian marketplace in the creation of new DVD titles, says Susan Hwang Correll, Minerva's vice president of corporate marketing.
All indications are that by the end of 1999, DVD technology will be out of the Hollywood studios and into corporate hands.
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