Is DVD today 2Real to ignore?

Emedia Professional, June, 1998 by Stephen F. Nathans

Looking into my editor's crystal ball, I see a cherubic-looking man with his hair tousled, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose, and $1000 bills carelessly spilling from his pockets. He's speaking at a lectern and seems to be talking about something important--at least important enough that someone is videotaping his speech--but his audience hardly seems to notice him, as they sit transfixed by the action on the other side of the stage. The speaker's partner in crime is dazzling the captivated crowd with an unprecedented display of technological wizardry: he's encoding, in real-time, an WPEG-2 stream from the S-Video live camera feed on the speaker. As the speaker crosses the stage to see just what's drawing all that attention, the other man inserts a blank disc in the Pioneer DVD Recorder at his side and commences to bum the video he's just encoded. Five minutes later, the crowd watches with hushed awe as a brand-new DVD-Video disc plays before their eyes.

The best thing about this crystal ball vision is that it's no dream of the future, but historical fact. It all happened March 26, 1998, during Bill Gates' keynote address at Microsoft's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference and Exhibition (WinHEC 98). The latest piece in the DVD-on-the-fly puzzle is C-Cube's 2Real single-chip MPEG-2 codec, and Gates and Microsoft DVD Evangelist Peter Biddle demonstrated the technology to show, in C-Cube's words, "how digital video recordability will open new opportunities for consumer and business PC users."

But how genuinely accessible are those possibilities to the broad base of PC users? More than you'd think. While the Pioneer DVD Recorder still lists for a steep $17,000, the real-time encoding 2Real C-Cube chip, according to Biddle, should be showing up on retail MPEG-2 boards with enabling software for under $300 in time for summer 1998. That means a PC system fully equipped for real-time MPEG-2 encoding and DVD recording will sell for under $20,000 this summer, and users can expect that price to drop precipitously as the Pioneer recorder earns back its R & D and second-generation pricing starts to look significantly more manageable.

The most visible impact of technological breakthroughs like 2Real is how quickly they get DVD's mass-market hopefuls salivating over the possibility that DVD may someday soon corral not just the video playback market dominated by the VCR, but also the home recording market. You really need look no farther than the myriad recent DVD developments within the computer industry and the business-oriented markets that have sustained the technology's CD-ROM and CD-R antecedents to see that DVD is here and it's real. From the near-simultaneous rollouts of DVD-R, DVD-RAM, and DVD-ROM authoring products like Sonic's Vobulator, and new DVD-ROM drives racing to five times the speed of their first-generation predecessors; to the raging debate over Divx and the satisfyingly settled controversy over MPEG-2 support in DirectShow, there's no shortage of DVD activity in the industry.

So, however far DVD penetrates mainstream entertainment markets in 1998 and extends beyond CD-ROM and CD-R`s traditionally strong market segments, one thing is clear: industry professionals with long-term interests and investments in DVD technology remain awash in issues surrounding its evolution, and need more than ever a time and a place to talk shop.

A reader once described EMedia Professional (then CD-ROM Professional) to me as "shop-talk central" for the electronic media industry. Given the prevalence of Internet listservers, chat rooms, and the like, there's clearly an immediacy of direct dialogue industry professionals can get elsewhere that we can't provide; but for reporting the news that matters to a well-defined group of electronic media users and producers, and providing focal points for the type of dialogue that needs to go on among them to keep an industry based on evolving technology thriving, that reader's characterization reflects our purpose pretty well.

With the cyclone of change and controversy that the business and technology of DVD have become in recent months, we'd be remiss not to accentuate our focus on an area where our readers invariably find themselves at the eye of the storm. With this issue we're introducing DVD Today, a new section of the magazine that spotlights our DVD coverage with news features, product announcements, case studies, a regular column, product reviews, roundups, and longer analytical pieces on DVD technology and market trends. This month's inaugural DVD Today includes stories on Pioneer's debuting DVD recorder; Panasonic's all-DVD, all-the-time replication service; an update on Online Inc.'s DVD Pro fall conference; and more.

The purpose of developing this section is to bring DVD issues to the fore in the magazine as they have advanced within the industry we cover, and to give necessary attention to the complexities of the technology at this stage of its evolution as CD-ROM Professional did in its "CD-R Record" section of yore. DVD Today will likely continue to evolve as rapidly as the technology it addresses, so I encourage you to give us feedback on the new section and let us know how it can become more useful to you as your own involvement with DVD grows and changes through the year and into 1999.