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. The events of the PC Expo in New York this week may give us a clue as to which will occur.
There is a standards battle looming over which group of companies will get the lion's share of the emerging market for DVD recorders. 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-DVD recording will do much to glue your computer and home entertainment centres together. Content recorded on one will be editable and playable on the other.
And as a data-storage tool, a DVD recorder will have a capacity of 4.7G (single-sided) or 9.4G (double-sided), finally creating an attractive non-tape-based option for backing up the 10G to 60G 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.
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