DVDoomed - Company Business and Marketing

ENT, Oct 11, 2000 by Mark McFadden

I recently bought a laptop for the family and showed it to my friend Lisa.

"You paid the extra money for a DVD?" she asked. "I'm not going to buy a laptop with a DVD until I can have a rewritable DVD."

That seemed reasonable so I checked my notes -- I'm an inveterate collector of notes about coming technologies -- about the timing of rewritable DVD. During my search I noticed that I had a note saying vendors were working out the differences between the various rewritable DVD drives so that units could appear in the fall. Then I noticed the note was from 1998.

If she sticks to her guns, Lisa may be collecting Medicare before she buys a new laptop.

DVD-RAM, the first recording format of the DVD family of products, features random access and guarantees more than 100,000 rewrites. These are designed mainly to meet the requirements of the computer storage industry. For certain applications the technical complexities of DVD-RAM make it an expensive choice.

In response, a new format was proposed -- DVD-RW -- that can be rewritten 1,000 times. Several vendors liked DVD-RW, reasoning that there were plenty of applications where rewriting a disk 1,000 times was satisfactory. Panasonic is one of the leaders behind DVD-RW: It sees a large market for consumer video recording. The company was a leader in the development of the format that uses sensitive materials to achieve high capacities with simpler technology.

Not to be outdone, Sony introduced a separate format called DVD RW. Using groove recording strategies similar to DVD-RW, Sony attempted to remain close to the mainstream DVD-Video format and Panasonic's DVD-RW.

Add to this the existing formats for audio and video -- named DVD-Audio and DVD-Video -- and you almost have enough specifications for every starting player on your favorite World Series team.

This hodgepodge of proposed standards will lead to incompatibilities and confusion in the marketplace -- and a slower acceptance for rewritable DVD technology. You'd think the industry trade association for the technology might step in and settle on a single standard useful to consumers and storage management architects alike.

You'd be wrong. The DVD Forum, in fact, announced a completely new specification and a logo that is supposed to help us figure out which rewritable DVD drives will read and write which disks for the various DVD consumer and computer applications. As it stands today, each drive manufacturer decides for itself which types of disks its systems will read and write, and by extension which disks its products will not be able to use.

The Forum's specification, called DVD Multi, adds to the already confusing array of DVD specifications. A first DVD Multi specification for computer applications may be completed -- does this sound hauntingly familiar -- in the fall of 2000. DVD-ROM drives with the DVD Multi logo must be able to read the DVD-Video format, DVD-Audio, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, and DVD-R disks. In addition to working with disks in all those older formats, recorders sporting a DVD Multi logo are also required to compatibly write on DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, and DVD-R disks.

DVD Multi-compliant consumer DVD-Video players will be required to read DVD-Video and all recordable disks, including ones written using DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, or DVD-R systems. To get the DVD Multi logo on DVD-Audio players, they must be able to read DVD-Audio and all disks in the recordable audio recording formats. DVD-Video/Audio players will read DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, and, once again, all recordable disks in video and audio recording formats.

Research firm IDC says more than 60 million DVD-ROMs will be sold in 2001. That prediction is hopelessly optimistic. After all, second-generation rewritable DVD drives are just starting to appear. They are more than twice the cost of their CD-RW cousins. And that's without the rewritable media -- just go to your local technology store and try to find blank DVD rewritable disks. In fact, if 60 million rewritable DVD drives are bought next year, I'll buy Lisa that laptop.

It's not that I'm not excited about the promise of rewritable DVD technology -- I am. It's not that I don't believe that some version of DVD technology will eventually become as popular and common as CD-RW -- it undoubtedly will. But the path to that future will be painful and confusing with many of us investing real money and time in technologies that eventually will go the way of eight-track tape, the Beta video format, and cars you could service yourself.

Mark McFadden is a consultant and is communications director for the Commercial Internet eXchange (Washington). Contact him at mcfadden@cix.org.