In
the News
November 15, 2006
Technical
changes fuel revolution in DVDs
Danny Bradbury, For CanWest NewsService
The quality of our television might be going down (how
many more reality TV shows can we watch?) but at least
the quality of the picture is improving.
High-definition TV and movies are fast approaching.
The problem is that for recorded media, high definition
video will require new hardware. DVDs have been with
us for some years, and as studios begin offering high
definition movies for rental and purchase, they will
not have the storage capacity to hold all of the necessary
video on one disc.
Two new standards are emerging that
promise to solve that problem. Vendors including Toshiba
and Microsoft are both supporting HD-DVD, a storage
format able to store 30 gigabytes on a single sided,
12-centimetre disc -- over six times the capacity of
a traditional DVD. Sony is supporting Blu-Ray, a rival
standard with a 25-gigabyte storage capacity for single-layer
discs, or a 50-gigabyte capacity for dual-layer ones.
Fortunately for consumers, both of
these standards are designed to be backwards-compatible
with existing DVDs, meaning consumers will be able to
play their existing movies on the new players. Unfortunately,
the two technologies aren't compatible with each other,
meaning once you've purchased a particular player, you're
stuck with that format.
Manufacturers have unleashed two competing
technologies, which will likely confuse customers and
discourage them from choosing a format until the market
sorts itself out. Anyone who remembers the tussle between
VHS and Betamax might be surprised the entertainment
industry hasn't learned from its mistakes.
Darren Meister finds the situation depressing, but not
surprising.
The associate professor of information
systems at the Richard Ivey Business School says the
struggle has nothing to do with consumer convenience,
and everything to do with vendor politics. The companies
piloting the standards are hoping to win their way into
the living room, selling consoles that support these
high definition formats to bring computer gaming and
film entertainment together for the first time.
"Sony hopes that it will lead
that convergence through the Playstation 3, and Microsoft
would rather do that via its Xbox console," he
says.
"So that's where you have the two leading protagonists,
and both of them believe that they can probably have
the larger market share by putting out their own standard
first."
But the consumer remains the important
part of this equation. What will their experience be
like? The most likely answer is this: slow.
The players supporting these formats have to process
vast amounts of information. They also have significant
copy protection mechanisms built in which require a
lot of computer processing when a disc is inserted.
Consequently, says David Vitale, product
manager for digital audio-visual products at Toshiba
Canada, "The HD-DVD player has its own internal
operating system that starts up when you turn it on.
The boot time is about a minute, while the loading time
(once a disc is inserted) is 45 seconds," he says.
"It's checking to see how many layers are on the
disc, checking the disc is authorised and legal to use,
that sort of thing. There's a lot more than the standard
DVD player has to look for."
Customers might not be happy to hear
these new technologies will be slower than the older
ones. They'll be even less happy to hear the opinion
of Dan Diotte, CEO at Venmill Industries. Venmill is
a specialist in disc formats, and makes its living resurfacing
and repairing DVDs.
Blu-Ray discs might hold more data
than HD-DVD discs, but there's a trade-off, says Diotte.
To fit more information on the disc, Sony had to reduce
the thickness of the protective coating on the drive,
he says. Consequently, the discs are much more vulnerable
to scratches, especially if left lying around on a table,
for example.
"In the US, there's a billion-dollar
buy-sell industry around computer games," he says,
adding many pre-owned game discs arrive with scratches
and have to be repaired.
He asserts that because the coating
on Blu-Ray discs is so thin, repairs to the discs would
be very difficult.
"I do not know how they're going to face the reality
that Blu-Ray is an unrepairable format."
If the influential market in pre-owned
games begins favouring one format over another to help
minimize returns, the same is likely to happen to the
rental market. If these influential sectors favour one
format over another, that could dramatically affect
the success of the medium, says Meister.
"If it's cheaper, easier and more economically
viable for people to resell one format over the other,
then that makes it more dominant," he says, adding
he expects one format to usurp the other, as happened
with VHS and Betamax.
Once one format pulls ahead of the other in volume,
the disparity is likely to snowball.
"It doesn't take much in those
massive Chinese factories for volume to drive costs
down in one direction," he says.
But this battle might be little more
than a skirmish on the road to a more startling conclusion.
Microsoft's Bill Gates has said HD-DVD is likely to
be the last physical distribution format for entertainment.
If that happens, the content will have become separated
from the physical medium altogether, and customers will
be able to forget the tedious political tussle between
manufacturers once and for all.
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