Toronto AES Bulletin
April 1997
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Toronto AES BulletinApril 1997
Feature Article |
DVD Update
DVD hardware is expected to hit the shelves in the US this month; Asia and Europe should follow soon after. Sony will introduce a DVD-ROM drive in the early part of this year, featuring "Dual Discrete Optical Pickup" technology which enables the drive to read CD-ROM, CD-R and DVD discs. The Players will be priced at between $699 to $1000 US.
The movie industry is gearing up software releases to coincide with the hardware launch. Copyright protection issues appear to have been resolved and video releases of the future may also include commentaries by the director, interviews with the cast, as well as rough cuts and storyboards.
According to a recent survey from InfoTech, DVD-Video player sales are projected to be 820,000 worldwide in the first year. By 2000, economies of scale derived from the rapid acceptance of DVD-ROM on the PC desktop will drive down the cost of shared components dramatically. This should knock the price of DVD-Video players down to $250-stimulating a further tenfold increase in demand, resulting in a worldwide installed base of over 80 million units by 2005.
Industry predictions are for 600 DVD-Video titles to be available worldwide by the end of this year-increasing to 8,000 by the year 2000. Market experience shows that it is critical that we have a large catalogue of titles in place when the players start to come down in price. For example consider the videodisc-with a worldwide installed base of around 7 million players, which today supports a catalogue of over 35,000. It is believed that all the major studios will commit to supporting DVD-Video when it reaches a comparable installed base, which is projected for 1999.
The unified DVD specification Version 1.0 was officially published on September 13, 1996. The specification covers the physical and logical structures for DVD-ROM and DVD-Video as well as the application layer specification for DVD-Video. The specifications for the remaining format variations (DVD-Audio, DVD-R, and DVD-RAM) are still in development, and are not expected to be published until late 1997.
Manufacturing issues are being resolved but it will be some time before we see the widespread manufacture of DVD discs. The investment in new equipment and the retrofit of existing equipment for production is substantial and QC with the format is even more crucial than with previous formats, as DVD is less tolerant of all optical media failure modes due to the high information density of the disc.
Manufacturing costs for DVD will be substantially higher than for CD due to the increased complexity of the product. The addition of the bonding process, the impression of the lacquer layer and the control of the metalization for semi-transparent layers will all lead to lower overall production yields and consequently to higher unit costs.
The early scuttlebutt on DVD video releases for '97 include: "The Fugitive" (Warner), "Twister" (Warner) and "The Birdcage" (MGM), "Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Special Edition" (Columbia Tristar) to name just a few. And Sony Music is pleased to announce the release of the Grammy-nominated "Tony Bennett Unplugged" on DVD (possibly as early as April '97). Other Sony titles to look forward to include: "Beavis and Butt-head's Final Judgment", "Odyssey Into The Mind's Eye", "Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie" and "Sesame Street's 25th Birthday: A Musical Celebration".
Thanks to Mary-Kay Lippert for the background information.
by Denis Tremblay
Quality Assurance Specialist
Sony Music CanadaDenis did a presentation for the Toronto Section on DVD in Feb 1996. You can read a preview of that meeting and a review of that meeting.
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