Personal computing, the Internet, and home entertainment are on a collision course. This could wind up being that wonderful "synergy" they talk about in those pop-business books, or it could be a train wreck. What happens at PC Expo this week may give us a clue as to which it will be.
There is a standards battle looming over which group of companies will get the lion's share of the emerging market for recordable DVDs. If you remember the war between the technically superior Sony Betamax format and the more commercially popular VHS, you have an idea what I am talking about.
The stakes in this battle make the VCR fight look like a mere tussle. This time we're talking about a new recording medium that is a replacement for existing VCRs, is a data and multimedia add-on for PCs, and already has begun finding its way into digital camcorders.
Whatever format(s) win--and there could be more than one winner--recordable DVD will do much to glue your computer and home entertainment centers together. Content recorded on one will be editable and playable on the other.
And as a data-storage tool, a recordable DVD will have a capacity of 4.7GB (single-sided) or 9.4GB (double-sided), finally creating an attractive non-tape-based option for backing up the 10GB to 60GB hard drives now common on PCs.
There are three major formats that will be doing battle in the 12 to 36 months ahead: DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW. Note the use of the dash and plus sign: DVD-RW (the dash is not meant to mean DVD-minus-RW) and DVD+RW do pretty much the same thing, but come from different groups of companies.
DVD-RW and DVD-RAM are already shipping. DVD-RW, which is limited to 1,000 rewrite operations, is not the likely winner, although Sony recently introduced a desktop PC that uses DVD-RW to record television programs.
My sense is that DVD-RW is a transitional phase and the market won't really take off in time for it to preempt the assault by DVD-RAM and DVD+RW. Having said that, we're already seeing some PC makers other than Sony, like Compaq and Apple, bring DVD-RW to market. My advice: Unless you have money to burn, don't buy until things settle down.
That settling will determine how the three formats play with one another and whether any of the three will achieve the dominance VHS has in home video. As the videotape battle wasn't won on technology--Beta was clearly the superior format--I expect marketing muscle and the ability to drive down prices to play key roles here as well.
Panasonic will be here at PC Expo (the show actually opens tomorrow) showing DVD-RAM, which is also supported by Toshiba, Samsung, Hitachi, and others. A DVD-RAM drive works very much like a typical hard disk drive, allowing random access to all the data on the disk. Panasonic will be showing its shipping and soon-to-ship products.
DVD+RW, whose main backers are Philips and Hewlett-Packard, will also be here. This format is a bit of an enigma to me, lacking as it does the official endorsement of the DVD Forum, an important standard-setting group. I will investigate DVD+RW and will provide a better comparison of the three formats later this week.
But, again, technical issues may not really play into this at all. The major consumer electronic players and their personal computing divisions and friends smell big money here. DVD-RAM and DVD+RW seem to be technical kissing cousins, but consumers could still be hurt by choosing the wrong format early.
This is one of those times when I am glad prices are still way too high for most people to seriously consider a recordable DVD for either the family room or the computer room. But within a year or so, I expect they will be common on new PCs.
By the end of this week, I hope to have nosed around enough help AnchorDesk readers avoid some of the pain associated with choosing the losing side in the Beta/VHS war.
Bottom Line: I think this is a market in which the vendors will decide what customers get rather than customers actually voting with their dollars. Yes, there will be some competition, at least for a while, but in the end I suspect we will all settle on what everyone seems to settle on--and it will be the consumer electronics companies that make the decision for us.
I would ask you not to buy anything until I can report back, but with prices high and availability limited, I guess I don't really have to worry about that.
