DVD Is Coming to Town

DVD is coming, and you will be buying. By Christmas, major marketing campaigns from Toshiba, Sony, Philips, Pioneer and Thompson, among others, will be exhorting you to buy DVD players.

You may need to cash in your Netscape stock, because DVD (digital videodisc) players won't come cheap. You'll pay $500 to $800 to be the first on your block.

For that you'll get a machine that will play discs the same size as audio CDs that can hold up to 4.7GB of digital information, enough for two hours and 13 minutes of video. Not grainy quarter-screen video either, but full-screen MPEG 2, the same compression scheme used in the immensely successful digital satellite systems (DSS). Almost 2 million DSS dishes have been sold in a little over a year, even though they require expensive monthly programming fees. DSS has succeeded in part because MPEG 2 provides excellent quality and sharpness, even better than laserdiscs. The new DVD format sports 720 horizontal pixels and 480 vertical lines, as opposed to the 320-by-240 in a standard VHS picture.

Great picture quality is just the beginning. Heeding the lessons of the VHS vs. Beta and laserdisc format wars of the '80s, two fiercely competing consortiums settled most of their differences last fall in agreeing to the DVD standard. The new format specifies Dolby AC-3 5.1 Surround Sound, a theater quality, five-channel-plus-subwoofer standard; as well as the ability to place different aspect-ratio versions of a movie on one disc, including regular TV (4:3) and letterbox (16:9). Other unique features include the ability to view different ratings versions of a movie, so parents can exercise control, and the ability to switch between eight language tracks plus 32 subtitle tracks and closed captioning. Forward and reverse search/scan, super-slow motion and stills will all be possible with no wear and tear--or rewinding.

DVD could also stand for digital versatile disc, since it can hold movies, high-quality audio, computer data and more. How does all this stuff fit on a platter the size of an audio CD? Through several innovations. First, the density of the pits in DVD discs is higher than that of today's CD in both size and spacing. Second, the discs can be double-sided, and each side can have dual layers of information. Initially, discs will be single-layered and sided, and contain 4.7GB of data. Double-layered discs can hold 8.5GB; double-layered, double-sided discs can store a mammoth 17GB, enough for almost nine hours of video at MPEG 2's variable rate of 4.69 megabits per second (approximately quad-speed). In order to handle computer data, the RS-PC (Reed Solomon product code) error-correction protocol used on the discs is 10 times better than audio CDs.

Still, the home is the initial target for DVD marketers. Warner Home Video has already started replicating discs and says there will be about 250 movie titles available at launch this fall.

Existing CD plants can be retooled to produce DVDs for not much more than the 75-cent cost of replicating audio CDs or CD-ROM, and manufacturing capacity should not be a problem. Encoding capacity is an issue: MPEG 2 encoding systems are still expensive, and more human encoding artists are needed. Disc prices are expected to be similar to those of VHS cassettes.

At January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Toshiba estimated industry sales of 3 million units in the first year; Sony made a more conservative guess of 1 million. If either forecast is close, DVD is destined to be one of the biggest consumer product launches ever. DVD-ROM will follow in early 1997 and recorders should appear by 1998, but it will be a long time after that before recordable DVD is cheap enough for mass market.