When rival Digital Video Disc camps announced on September 15, 1995 the basic specifications for a single DVD standard, it may have set in motion the eventual replacement of the videocassette, the laserdisc, the CD-ROM, and even the audio CD, by one worldwide system for digital media storage, with a market potential of 50 million players per year in the early 21st century. The name for the new format is DVD (officially Digital Versatile Disc so as not to over-emphasize the video application).
Even a small share of a future $50 billion a year hardware and software market no doubt motivated many companies to agree, but the involvement of so many computer manufacturers and major movie studios in the design of a consumer electronics product is strong evidence for the much-ballyhooed "convergence" of computers and consumer entertainment, as interactive multimedia computers become home entertainment centers.
Historically, vested entertainment interests shortsightedly fought any technological change. At the turn of the 20th century, John Philip Sousa lost his significant fortune trying to prevent Edison’s recordings from killing the market for live bands. In the twenties, powerful record companies in turn sued to prevent the new radio stations from broadcasting their music and destroying the record business. In the seventies, Hollywood studios sued Sony to prevent Betamax from being used to videotape movies and demolish their film distribution business. Today nearly half the movie companies’ revenue is from videotape sales, radio is the music companies’ strong marketing arm, and live bands tour the world to sell their recordings.
Another history lesson is that competition, while generally a great consumer benefit, has often slowed the growth of entertainment technologies when it offers the consumer only a choice between incompatible, otherwise comparable, formats. Look at Matsushita VHS vs. Sony Betamax or Philips Digital Compact Cassette vs. Sony MiniDisc. And the music industry’s successful copy protection campaign against Digital Audio Tape produced the Serial Copy Management System that limited sales of DAT largely to a professional market.
While the Justice Department may raise their anti-trust eyebrows over backroom meetings between the likes of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, IBM, Philips, Time Warner, and the Hollywood movie moguls, the 21st century consumer of music, movies, and computer software is the big winner. The Digital Video Disc deserves standardization the way we standardize electrical plugs, automobile headlights, and the television signal itself. There’s still plenty of room for price and features competition on DVD players and recorders, and we can expect the brutal competition for a $50 billion market will serve the consumer well.
The first Digital Video Disc design, Sony/Philips single-sided 3.7 gigabyte Multimedia CD (MMCD), was aimed primarily at the consumer entertainment market. It was a direct extension of CD technology, and thus of hundreds of patents held primarily by Philips. The lion’s share of CD royalties, over 25 cents per disc, has kept Philips very profitable for several years.
The competing Super Density (SD) proposal came from Toshiba and partner Time Warner, who was instrumental in lining up several entertainment companies behind a double-sided 10 GB design that would allow longer playing times and higher quality than the MMCD, and not incidentally let the SD alliance participate in the future royalty income stream.
The original SD design stores 5GB on a 0.6mm disc half the thickness of the MMCD, then laminates it to a second disc, so overall thickness is the same 1.2mm as MMCD (and standard CD). The thinner size will work better when blue lasers, with shorter wavelengths and shorter focussing distances, are introduced. Late last year giant Matsushita Electric (who won the VHS - Betamax war on playing time, not quality) opted for the Toshiba design, and the SD alliance was soon joined by Hitachi, JVC, Mitsubishi, Pioneer, and Thomson.
Sony then offered a longer double-layer 7.4 GB version of the MMCD, developed by 3M, which can refocus a laser instantly and "seamlessly" to read a second set of tracks without interruption from just one side. The inconvenience of flipping discs over or buying an expensive twin-laser player limited the success of laserdisc players. But the SD camp, with so many partners, now smelled victory and rejected double layers.
Movement toward compromise then came from Sony and Philips, who admit they were responding to pressures for a single future DVD-ROM format from a computer-industry technical working group led by Apple Computer, IBM, Compaq, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. IBM particularly is reported as having told Sony and Philips that they were about to adopt the longer format, and gave them a few weeks to work out a compromise.
IBM also told the Toshiba designers that Sony’s signal-modulation and storage techniques were better, and easier to manufacture. Storage and error-correction schemes of the SD disc (8/15 modulation and Block Product Code) were regarded as adequate for movies but not robust enough for data applications. MMCD methods (EFM plus and CIRC plus) are more highly refined, and are backward compatible with audio CDs and CD-ROM standards, so existing CDs can play in new machines.
The announced compromise first and foremost includes MMCD’s backward compatibility with current CDs, a great benefit for consumers. And it uses the Sony/Philips EFM plus (eight-sixteen modulation) data storage scheme. From the Toshiba side, it adopts the 0.6mm thickness of the SD disk and the double-sided bonded laminate of the SD disk. It will also permit 3M double-layer technology, giving rise to four possible storage capacities.
A single-layer single-sided disc will store 4.7 GB and have a 133-minute playing time for standard definition television (SDTV). This is reduced from the 5 GB and 142-minute SD design, but with better error recovery and lower susceptibility to scratches for DVD-ROMs as a result. Double-layer single-sided disks will hold 9.4 GB, and double-layer-double-sided discs will hold a whopping 18.8 GB, on a disc that can be manufactured almost as cheaply as today’s CDs. The 9.4 GB capacity will allow single-sided discs with high definition HDTV movies.
A published standard endorsed by major Hollywood studios and the computer industry is expected very soon. DVD discs and players should ship in fourth quarter 1996. DVD-ROMs should also appear by early 1997, along with write-once DVD-ROM recorders later in 1997. Toshiba and Matsushita bring phase-change rerecording technology to the new consortium that could lead to rerecordable DVD-ROM discs as soon as early 1998.
DVD may have stumbled recently, with 1996 just an introduction for some companies and not a product launch. One reason may be DVD titles avaiable. Despite many new MPEG-2 authoring solutions shown at NAB and being installed all over Hollywood, only a few dozen movies may be compressed and encoded to DVD for the Christmas sales window. The big stumbling block is the copy generation management system, approved in a "gentleman’s agreement" between MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America, Jack Valenti, Director) and the CEMA (Consumer Electronics Manufacturing Association), but upsetting to the computer industry working group (IBM, Apple, SGI, et al.) who won the compromise last year between the Sony/Philips (Multimedia CD) and Toshiba/Time Warner (Super Density Alliance) that led to a single DVD standard. The Working Group walked out of talks intended to agree on a copy-protection standard by the end of April as input to the Digital Video Recording Act of 1996, about to be entered in Congress in May. DVD-ROM may be seriously compromised by the copy-protection scheme, according to the Working Group. Toshiba and the former SD partners will probably ship with or without computer-industry approval, but Sony may delay to 1997.
[The new DVD standard books will get letters, rather than CD colors. Book A = DVD-ROM, Book B = DVD digital video, Book C = DVD music, Book D = write-once DVD-ROM, Book E = rewritable DVD-ROM. Book B is scheduled for imminent release. All others are uncertain.]
Bob Doyle