Birth of a Buyer's Guide: Welcome to the Rehearsal

Emedia Professional, Jan 1, 1999 by Stephen F. Nathans

developing magazine content, like creating just about any product or service with regular subscribers or repeat customers, means serving two masters: innovation and consistency.

As for reflecting innovation, thanks to the non-stop action (read: DVD) surrounding the new media landscape, EMedia hasn't had to do much besides what we've always done--distill this maelstrom of activity into a perfect storm for coherent presentation to our readership. We've tweaked this and that along the way, and added occasional new elements like DVD TODAY to unify our DVD coverage within the magazine. But otherwise our long-standing model of combining trend-tracking and issue-oriented features and columns with critical product reviews and news has served us well. In short, we've covered the technology "in 3-D," as an EMedia reader once described our approach to me.

One thing we've never done before this year is combine all the technologies, vendors, and products in every category we cover, into a one-stop shopping source. The 1999 EMedia Buyer's Guide you are holding is designed to direct you through every electronic media-related purchase you may make this year. While not entirely exhaustive, it represents our best effort (primarily the gargantuan efforts of Assistant Editor Marla Misek), in conjunction with roughly 200 participating vendors, to provide as complete a picture as possible of the industry's current product and service offerings. That picture includes an alphabetical listing (pages 11-52) of participating vendors with descriptions of each, plus the guide's real treasure trove: 17 feature tables breaking down the hardware, software, and services by category. These 17 tables (pages 54-93) represent all the features you'll need to make point-by-point comparisons of the purchases you're considering. For expert perspective, we've also included commentary from several of our columnists, who've provided their typically visionary insight into this ever-complex industry.

This is, of course, our first attempt at a buyer's guide, and presenting it as such calls to mind John Lennon's nervous introductory quip as he took the stage at Madison Square Garden in 1972 for his first full-length concert since the height of Beatlemania six years earlier: "Welcome to the rehearsal."

It's a new year now, and long-hyped but little-seen technologies such as DVD RW are just around the corner, as are DVD-Audio and breakthrough performance levels in established areas like CD-ROM, CD-R/RW, DVD-ROM, and network servers. And if some innovations seem to make us wait interminably, sometimes it's worth the wait. Case in point: Smart and Friendly's 8X CD Rocket, a hands-down Editor's Choice selection for the simple reason that it achieved exactly what it promised to--recording CDs at breathtaking 8X speed--even if it did miss its original roll-out date by nine months.

But I'll take the best-in-field better late than never any day; and if DVD's swing set-pattern advances and retreats have left us naively heralding its "dawn" with the frequency of sunrise, that doesn't mean it hasn't been an exciting time to follow the technology. OK, so DVD-R didn't roll out of the Pacific Rim as cheap as CD-R (or a new Hyundai) and DVD-RAM is about as readable in most DVD drives as D.H. Lawrence in the Pleasantville Public Library. But ROM wasn't built in a day and the R & D wasn't cheap either, and the value of reliable disc-checking that DVD-R provides to higher-end DVD projects will sustain the technology until recouping and competition bring the price down. And DVD-RAM's $699 for 2.6 (or 5.2) GB of rewritable, removable storage makes it a worthy inheritor to Matsushita's earlier rewritable drive, the CD-sized PD--a fine technology whose only real shortcoming was bad timing.

On the network storage side, we've gotten thrills and chills from Elms' short-lived modular jukebox (which deserved a stable home and finally got one from Cygnet), and some long-time CD-oriented companies like Meridian showing us optical-uber alles types that there's more to life than lasers with their snazzy SnapServer, a hard drive-based NAS product.

The growing installed base of Windows 98 spelled relief for would-be DVD developers, and authoring tool and system providers as well. With DirectShow 98 finally providing a universal, DVD-ready authoring and playback architecture (at least for the Windows platform), at last developers can reliably expect their video-heavy DVD-ROM concoctions to perform predictably on desktop PCs. And tool-makers can feel confident that all the elegant technology they've bet the farm on will reach beyond the set-top market, which promises to be only a small portion of the installed base for DVD playback.

I'm reminded of another ironic aside Lennon made in "Let It Be," as the band's ill-fated Saville Row rooftop concert brought the Beatle era to a close: "I'd like to thank you all on behalf of the group ... and I hope we passed the audition."