Back in 1996, nobody had a DVD player. But according to the Consumer Electronics Association, by the end of 2001 nearly 28 million units had been sold in the U.S. alone. That doesn't just make the DVD format a success. It makes it the fastest-growing consumer-electronics product in American history — and reports from the U.K. and elsewhere reveal a similar track record worldwide.
Most analysts attribute DVD's success to the format's convenience, high quality and low cost. Equally important, however, industry-wide acceptance of a single, universal DVD standard let consumers buy with confidence, assured that the equipment they pick up today won't be obsolete next week.
That leaves the DVD industry with just one question left to answer: How does it top its success? Work on the next generation of DVD technology has already begun, but a tangled morass of competing formats leaves the future of the medium uncertain. DVD's honeymoon may soon be nearing an end.
Get It Write
Unlike the compact-disc format, which uses different technologies for CD audio and data CD-ROMs, DVD movies and data DVDs for computers are virtually identical. That common format helped DVD sweep both the PC and home-electronics markets. But when it came time to address the growing demand for recordable DVDs, things weren't so easy.
Less than three recordable DVD formats vie for would-be DVD authors' dollars. DVD-RAM is the oldest and has the least market penetration, owing mainly to high cost and poor compatibility with standard DVD hardware. It's mostly used for data storage, though a few consumer DVD-RAM video recorders do exist.
Much more widely accepted is DVD-R, which is based on the commonplace CD-R technology for home computers. Its inventor, Pioneer, originally marketed it as a high-priced solution for professional DVD authoring. But with the introduction of Pioneer's low-cost DVR-A03 drive in 2001, vendors like Compaq and Apple Computer began bundling the technology with consumer PCs.
Though Pioneer had a head start in the market, a consortium of companies including HP, Sony and Philips quickly countered with a competing format, known as DVD+RW. Unlike the earlier DVD-R discs, DVD+RW media can be erased and rewritten many times. The consortium promoted its technology by promising lower costs than DVD-R for both drives and media — a promise that earned the newer standard considerable support from PC makers, though it has yet to be substantiated.
To confuse matters further, manufacturers have since introduced DVD-RW media, which can be written in Pioneer's DVD-R drives but is, like DVD+RW, also erasable. Likewise, the consortium responsible for DVD+RW is working to bring a format called DVD+R to market, which would be usable in DVD+RW drives but could be written only once. The trade-off for this limitation would be compatibility with a wider range of consumer DVD players, comparable to DVD-R.
VCR of Tomorrow
With so many competing technologies available, consumers are liable to be confused as to which option offers them the best value. Indeed, many home-computer users are bound to wonder whether they really have a need for recording to DVD media at all. The answer, say industry analysts, is that though the market for recordable DVD-compatible media may be small now, it's sure to increase in the future.
One use for high-capacity storage media that's expected to gain in popularity is recording live television broadcasts for playback later. Today's digital video recorders store video data on hard drives — a reliable medium, but one that has a finite storage capacity without costly hardware upgrades. Electronics manufacturers believe a removable, DVD-based storage device could prove to be a more flexible alternative.
There's also the issue of increasing demand for high-quality digital video. Right now, DVD movies offer the best image quality of any home-video format. But that will change once high-definition TV becomes the dominant medium for broadcast television. The industry has already proposed a new standard, called HD-DVD, that would bring DVD's image quality to par with HDTV — but there's a problem. The higher the quality of the digital video being recorded, the more storage space it takes up.
One thing all current recordable DVD formats have in common is that none can produce discs larger than 4.7GB. That's comparable to the capacity of first-generation DVD home-video discs, but isn't enough for any serious TV recording and is woefully inadequate for storing tomorrow's high-quality HD-DVD movies.
Feeling Blue
To address this concern, the DVD industry has developed yet another recordable DVD format. Blu-ray discs, so named because of the fine-focus blue laser used for reading and writing the new media, are the same size as conventional DVDs, but a single-sided recordable blank can hold up to 27GB — fully four times as much as previous recordable technologies.
Hoping to avoid a protracted standards battle the likes of DVD-R versus DVD+RW, a group of industry heavyweights agreed early on to collaborate on the development of Blu-ray. Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer and Hitachi, among others, have all agreed on the standard, and licensing of the technology to manufacturers is expected to begin in the spring of this year.
But while all nine members of the Blu-ray consortium are also participants in the DVD Steering Committee — the primary standards body for the DVD format — they don't themselves represent a majority vote. What they say doesn't necessarily go — a point driven home in February, when the Steering Committee voted to continue with the current, red-laser-based technology for the next generation of commercial DVD home video.
It's not hard to guess why the DVD Steering Committee made this decision. It claimed that switching to blue lasers would be too costly — but consumers will have to upgrade their equipment no matter what, since current DVD players won't support the new compression technologies used by HD-DVD. More likely, the committee chose to create a schism between DVD formats for recording and playback as a concession to the usual suspects: the big media giants, who want to maximize profits by setting up roadblocks against the perceived threat of piracy.
Blu-ray, the committee said, would complement rather than replace the existing technology. The new discs will probably become an important data-storage medium for PCs. But rather than revamp video DVD manufacturing to use blue lasers, HD-DVD will likely use a combination of the usual red lasers plus more advanced video-compression technologies to cram more data onto each disc.
Too Many Standards
The problem with this approach is obvious. Despite broad industry endorsement, Blu-ray has no chance of becoming a single, universal standard like today's DVD. The discs won't be compatible with consumer hardware, since home DVD players will lack the blue lasers necessary to read them. And it remains to be seen whether Blu-ray recorders will be backward compatible with existing DVD titles.
So let's recap. Very soon we'll have today's DVD, extra-compressed HD-DVD, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD-RAM and Blu-ray — and I won't even get into the distinctions between single-sided and double-sided or single-layer and double-layer discs. What's more, though each of these formats (with the possible exception of Blu-ray) calls itself "DVD," the only factor they all share in common is that their discs are 12 cm in diameter. It's enough to make you want to skip the whole thing.
Myself, though, I'm still betting on Blu-ray. Though initial hardware costs may be high, the fact that the discs are rewritable will help keep media costs down. And the high data capacity offered by blue-laser technology makes Blu-ray discs more valuable as a data-storage medium. That includes storing higher-quality video than would result from squashing movies with more aggressive compression. Of all the available options, Blu-ray offers the best value to the consumer — and sometimes standards have a way of finding themselves, no matter what the standards bodies say.
