Colin Hume from our sister publication Software Futures investigates the likely impact of Digital Versatile Disks on the software industry. Is DVD more than just a high-capacity CD-ROM?
DVD (or Digital Versatile Disk) is a new high-capacity, high-quality compact disk standard which looks set to replace current CD-ROM drives over the next two to three years. For users for whom the CD has become effectively a high capacity replacement for the floppy drive, the obvious question is – why do we need to replace the present hardware format at all? The answer lies in the origins of the CD-ROM. The CD was originally designed as an audio medium, for storing a stereo sound recording running to a maximum playing time of around an hour and a quarter. In computing terms, this translates to a maximum data capacity of 650MB. As a handy means of distributing software the CD is great – but using it to store multimedia soon reveals its shortcomings. Audio quality is affected by factors such as the sound-card and speakers, but even regardless of such things the CD can seriously hamper the quality of the software product. A soundtrack in more than two languages is just not possible, and video quality on most hardware at full screen is dire. Even within a small window, video quality is barely acceptable, simply because of the lack of available storage. These limitations have not prevented the sales success of the multimedia PC. However, sales of multimedia CDs have not achieved the volume that some publishers expected. And if the sales of multimedia CDs have been muted, the sales of movies on CD have been virtually non-existent. Certainly, a factor is the need for an MPEG card or adapter, but the main reason for the flop has been the need to use two or more CDs to store a single movie, and the consequent interruption as they were changed.
Higher quality
The pressure to address all of these shortcomings came primarily from software vendors, but also from the movie industry – where there was a great desire to replace VHS tape with a higher quality format. That situation could easily have led to the creation of two or more competing new CD formats, and for a time that’s just what the situation was. Eventually common sense prevailed, and a consortium was set up to focus efforts on producing a single new CD standard. The members of the DVD Consortium rightly judged that obsoleting all current CDs would be a major obstacle to hardware sales. Maintaining compatibility with existing audio or computer CDs meant sticking to conventional CD dimensions, but this has not prevented DVD from delivering some astonishing advances in capacity, quality and versatility. One of the consequences of the diverse interests represented in the Consortium is that DVD as a standard covers five different formats. The five formats are: DVD-audio; DVD-video; DVD-R; DVD-RAM; and DVD-ROM. The plan for the first – DVD-audio – is that it will provide a higher quality, longer-playing replacement for Compact Discs. However, there seems to be a conspicuous absence of interest in it at present. DVD-video is intended for movies, or for high quality video presentations. The others – DVD-R, DVD-RAM and DVD-ROM are the computer-based formats.
Stand-alone players
The first DVD format to hit the market has been DVD-video, but then only in the US market and primarily for movies. DVD-video CDs can run on stand-alone players or on a DVD drive, but the initial concentration has been on stand-alone players linked to television sets. This hardware combination offers output to broadcast standards, high quality audio including Dolby and surround-sound, and a running time of around two hours. The DVD-video format also has a host of other features including up to eight separate sound tracks, plus navigation and interactive features. A degree of programming is possible but it is primitive by computer standards. Providing all of the above on a standard CD-diameter piece of plastic is only possible because of advances in laser technology, which allow data to be stored at a high density. There can also be two layers on each side of the CD, and for even higher capacity DVD media can be made double-sided. The effect is to increase the capacity from the present 650MB to 4.7GB, 8.5GB or even 17GB. The growth in storage capacity is matched by a big improvement in the data transfer rate. The standard rate for DVD is equiva lent to a normal CD drive running at 20x speed. Higher speeds are already being proposed by the hardware vendors. It seems that DVD for movies is taking off. Both hardware and software vendors are reporting better early sales than expected. DVD-video movies are not only selling in quantity but are also beginning to feature in the rental market starting, as the movie industry intended, to replace the ageing VHS tape format. DVD players should begin to appear in Europe later this year, and will probably attract a lot of interest in the run-up to Christmas. One of the reasons for the concentration on stand-alone players in the early stages is that using DVD with computers is far from straightforward. Just adding a DVD drive to your PC is not enough, for two reasons. One is that decoding the video data typically requires additional hardware. The second is that because of the involvement of the movie industry, DVD has an in-built security system and this also demands hardware support. The DVD security system is based on international zones – such as ‘North America’ or ‘Europe’. It’s not a particularly sophisticated system – the zone number is encrypted on the CD and the playing hardware reads it and compares it with its own, rejecting disks that show a mis-match. This prevents, for example, North American releases of movies from being exported and used on European equipment. DVD kits for PCs have just started to be released in America, priced at around the same level as a player. These kits will run on any PC with a Pentium 133MHz chip or better. While aficionados might be prepared to pay around $800 to add DVD capability to their PC, this is likely to be too high a cost for most of the multimedia PC market. As an alternative to the extra hardware needed to support a DVD drive some companies – including Intel – are planning to use software emulation. The downside of this approach is that you need a very powerful CPU, at least a 233Mhz Pentium II, which effectively will limit software emulation to the new-PC market only.
Os upgrades
The complications do not end there, however, because exploiting DVD fully will also require operating system upgrades. Microsoft has already introduced some of the changes needed to support DVD in the latest service release of Windows 95, but full support is not scheduled until the next major release of Windows 95 and NT. What is happening with other operating systems is not clear, although Apple has demonstrated a DVD-equipped Mac. The major issue is the very large capacities of DVD-ROM – 4.7GB per side – and to a lesser extent DVD-R (3.8GB per side) or DVD-RAM (2.6GB a side). These are single layer figures, a double-layer double-sided DVD-ROM could hold 17GB. Accessing volumes of this size requires an OS-supported Common Disk Format, and as DVD support will be restricted to 32-bit Windows and NT, it will if nothing else contribute to the demise of the pockets of 16-bit Windows use that remain. The timing of DVD players reaching the market, combined with the technical issues that need to be resolved for the full use of DVD on computers, will create an apparently slow revolution. However, the revolution still promises to have a profound effect on business and personal computing by 2000. Steve Nickerson, Toshiba America’s vice-president of marketing has stated that DVD will accelerate sales through the entire consumer electronics industry. One reason for this prediction is the forecast future sales for DVD players and drives. Hardware supplier InfoTech, for example, predicts combined DVD drive/player sales world-wide of some 3 million units by the end of 1997, increasing to around 12 million units by the end of 1998 and a staggering 60 million by 2000. What these projections suggest is that just as DVD players have energized the market for video material of all kinds, so DVD drives, once they are installed in significant numbers, will trigger a software explosion. The basis for this prediction is the vast potential for both personal and business uses of a cheap medium that allows 4GB-plus of data storage. The initial phase in exploiting this capacity is likely to be in replacing multiple-CD sets. This is exactly what one vendor of CD-ROM based telephone directories in the US has already done, replacing a previous six-CD set with a single DVD. Another example is the publication of back-catalogs on CD by the major national newspapers. Conventional CDs restrict back-catalogues to six-month segments, but DVD will allow seven or eight times that quantity to be published as a single volume. Multimedia games will also benefit from this aspect of DVD – ending the need for the six-disk packaging of Wing Commander IV from Electronic Arts, for example.
Potentially useful
DVD’s capacity to eliminate multiple CD sets will be useful, particularly as it will often do away with the need for slow multi-CD drives, and to some extent reduce the need for jukebox CD servers. What is potentially even more useful is the ability of DVD to enhance existing data or to develop new categories of data-based applications. CD-based directories could be extended by adding mapping data, allowing a single DVD to contain a full profile of a region or a country. Mapping data and GPS satellite navigation are a natural combination, and at least one DVD-based system is already under development. Another potential use of DVD is in sectors such as product design or manufacturing, where extensive product technical and reference information is produced. In the aircraft industry this has included hypertext manuals of up to 3GB or more in size. If the information is static or changes infrequently, DVD would offer an alternative to using a network drive for storage. Also, it offers the prospect of integrating documentation with audio or sound elements, such as maintenance videos, quality testing data and so on to produce a complete reference. DVD-ROM, like DVD-video, allows multi-lingual soundtracks and this feature will be particularly useful to international organizations or to those operating in international markets. One feature of DVD that should not be overlooked by businesses is that DVD-video can be more than just an entertainment medium. There is already at least one DVD-video based journal in America, and others are planned. The journal concerned covers short films. Using DVD means collections can be presented on a single, easy-to-distribute CD, at close to the original sound and visual quality. The initial media bias is not unexpected, but it does serve to underline that DVD holds some interesting possibilities for journal and magazine publishers. For businesses, the potential of DVD to replace VHS tape is also of interest. Training videos are obvious examples, in particular because either a DVD player or DVD drive could be used to present them. Customer and dealer presentations are other areas where the quality of DVD and the convenience of CD could be exploited. These presentations, like videos, will in most cases need to be professionally authored. The necessary authoring software and hardware is already being installed by the major video producers, and CD duplication houses are also re-equipping to handle the new format. The two writable DVD formats, DVD-R (multiple write) and DVD-RAM (write once) will build on the relatively recent but growing market that has been established by conventional writable CD-ROM. The big bonus with DVD will be the enormous jump in storage capacity. At the present time, no DVD-R drives have been announced; the first DVD-RAM drives are becoming available. The prospects of DVD-R, in the longer term at least, replacing hardware such as removable cartridges and disks, and tape backup systems is obvious. The ability of modern hardware to boot off a CD could have some interesting potential uses for DVD-RAM. For example, it’s easy to see the attractions of producing a fully configured and licensed operating system, packaged together with supporting applications, on a single DVD disk. This could then be booted-up on a workstation, reducing the need for or the cost of maintenance and of user support when configurations change.
The future of dvd
One of the current trends in both computing and consumer electronics is convergence – of which DVD-players are good examples, combining as they do the features of existing CD drives and VHS tape units. Further developments could include a combined DVD player/Net station. There are in fact already plans to do just this, using Microsoft CE (the cut-down version of Windows developed for palm-top computers) as a DVD player operating system. The effect of developments such as these will be to enhance the enormous potential growth in DVD as both a home and business medium. Home use will not be restricted to movies or multimedia – there is potential for expansion in the not inconsiderable games market to exploit the capabilities of DVD. Over the next three years the increasing uptake and growth of DVD will have widening implications, affecting companies with interests in virtually every sector of domestic electronics as well as those involved in home and business computing. For home users, DVD players are likely to reduce spending on alternatives such as VHS tape players. This will create new opportunities and markets for some businesses, particularly those currently involved in VHS tape hardware, or the manufacture, distribution and rental of VHS tapes. In the US these companies are already switching over to DVD and the same pattern is likely to be repeated elsewhere.
A DVD strategy
For businesses that don’t expect to be directly affected by DVD, there are existing investments in conventional CDs and hardware, and potential future spending to be considered. This does not mean that companies should or could stop buying present CDs or hardware today. It may mean buying DVD hardware when it becomes available, even at higher prices than the conventional CD alternatives, as it could prove to be a better long-term investment. Failing to take account of DVD by continuing to maintain a conventional CD hardware base could involve a costly and disruptive catching-up exercise at a later date. Given all these factors, businesses should be formulating a DVD strategy today. This should include identifying potential benefits, even of DVD-R and DVD-RAM, which look to be on a longer timescale than the other DVD formats. The pace at which DVD takes over from conventional CD is going to be an important consideration, particularly as it may differ from region to region. Based on current expectations and forecasts, conventional CD could be obsolete by 2000; and even beyond 1998 the market for old-standard CDs and hardware looks uncertain. The key to maximizing the potential of DVD for businesses is to begin planning for it now. By doing so, businesses should be well placed to take advantage of one of the most important new technologies in years.
