EMedia Professional - Standard Deviations, February 1997

My Reality Check Bounced

Dana J. Parker

EMedia Professional, February 1997
Copyright © Online Inc.

From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain. Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned. --Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)

To all of those people who attended the conference seminar, or forum at which I spoke, I must apologize. It does get more stupid. My DVD reality check just bounced.
Within a three-week period last fall, I spoke at a forum, a seminar, and a conference, all of them focused on compact disc technology. At all three, I was asked to provide a "reality check" on the topic of DVD. I thought and said, each time, that I found this ironic and rather scary--ironic the very idea of doing a reality check on a technology that is not even real yet, and scary that I was supposed to be able to provide it.

As it turns out, it wasn't so hard after all. I have been following the progress of DVD as long as anyone not directly involved in its development, and even a reality check that says that DVD is not real yet, and here's why, and here's what it might look like when it becomes real, is better than nothing. In fact, the responses from audiences to Hollywood's Machiavellian plans for copy protection and regional encoding--"But that's stupid!" was a good example--served as a reality check for me. "Yes, what they're planning for DVD-Video is stupid," I found myself replying, and then adding, "The reality is that DVD-ROM still has a lot to offer, and it can't get any stupider than this."

To all of those people who attended the conference, seminar, or forum at which I spoke, I must apologize. It does get more stupid. My DVD reality check just bounced.

It wasn't COMDEX that bounced it. I didn't go to COMDEX this year; I just said no. COMDEX has nothing whatsoever to do with reality, and I have proof. COMDEX is held in Las Vegas, and nothing in Las Vegas is real. The instant an object or idea enters Las Vegas city limits, it too, by definition, becomes unreal.

So I knew that the objects that appeared at COMDEX with the label DVD would be illusory. Early reports from victims in the unreality zone have supported my theory; what is being shown are flaky prototypes and dropout-ridden, buggy demos. I suppose it could be argued that these objects are real DVD, as it exists in this early stage. Other products shown in bug infested, prototypical versions at COMDEX have gone on to become real, after all. But even the reports from Japan, where DVD players have been on sale since November 1, proved me right. What few titles do exist over there are non-compliant with specifications, and early reports are that some have been recalled for failure to play on DVD players.

But that's not what bounced my reality check. Those who faithfully make the pilgrimage to Las Vegas in the middle of November each year may wonder what the other 12 people in the computer industry do while the COMDEX goers wait two hours for cabs and sleep in hotel rooms "off the strip" with mirrors on the ceiling and shag carpeting on the walls. The idea most attendees have is that business comes to a halt, phones do not ring, deals are not made, products are not sold, and those of us who do not go to COMDEX lounge around the office, drink coffee, and play solitaire. They are partly right, but the folks who would otherwise be playing solitaire sometimes call journalists and chat about new technology and how lucky we are that we are not at COMDEX. Some of the people who are intimately involved in behind-the-scenes DVD developments are among these lucky few, and some of them called me.

What they had to tell me is what bounced my reality check. It concerns the most mythical and unmentioned of the DVD books, DVD-RAM.

DVD-RAM, according to unimpeachable sources, is the subject of a silent but deadly little format war among the same folks who brought us the year-long soap opera over read-only DVD.
DVD-RAM is projected to be the ultimate in DVD: it will supposedly be rewritable, large-capacity, and compatible with DVD read-only players of all kinds. Let me amend that: it has been assumed that DVD-RAM will have these properties. It has been assumed that the DVD-ROM drive we plan to buy in 1997 will be able to read the DVD-RAM discs that we will be able to record on DVD-RAM drives that will appear sometime before the year 2000. Assumption has produced the time-tested and axiomatic result for you, and especially for me.

DVD-RAM, according to unimpeachable sources, is the subject of a silent but deadly little format war among the same folks who brought us the year-long soap opera over read-only DVD. There are two proposals, each of which has been adamantly adhered to by its proponents for most of the past 12 months. Neither side will budge. A compromise between the two was proposed by a third party, which combined the best features of both. It was rejected because it would not be compatible with existing DVD specifications. But the real kicker, and the one that turned my grasp of reality into rubber, is that none--not one--of these proposals defines a medium that is compatible with existing DVD specifications. It seems that in the rush to finalize the specification in order to get hardware to market, the considerations for future compatibility with DVD-RAM were ignored. That means that when and if DVD-RAM does appear, those who wish to use it will have to buy new DVD-RAM compatible drives to read it.

The case can be made, of course, that the situation is somewhat similar to that of CD-Rewritable, which is not readable on existing CD-ROM drives. But the CD-RW non-compatibility situation exists because CD-RW is a very late development in CD technology, which was never designed or intended to be rewritable, or recordable, for that matter. Compact disc was designed around 1980 as a vehicle for read-only digital audio, and it's not surprising that CD-R took eight years to be developed, and CD-RW took 16 years. DVD grew out of CD, however, and was created with the expectation and intention that someday--within two or three years--it would be recordable and rewritable.

I am not so naive as to think that corporations are in business to sell us what we want; they are in business to make money. But I have always had this Pollyanna-ish idea that business, reduced to its essence, was about making products that people will buy. If you want to make a lot of money, you make products that lots of people want and that people will pay a lot of money for. If you make products that will work with what people already have, or with other products that people are likely to buy, so much the better. If you make a product that people do not want, or that people will not pay a lot of money for, or that does not work with anything else, you go out of business or you make something else. Simple.

From what I heard during COMDEX week, that's not what is happening in those ethereal regions where the electronics demigods make decisions about what technology they will sell us. What is happening is greed; reality has been abandoned.

The check, it seems, may be no good.

Dana J. Parker is a Denver, Colorado-based independent consultant and writer and regular columnist for Standard Deviations. She is also a Contributing Editor for EMedia Professional. She is the co-author of CD-ROM Professional's CD-Recordable Handbook (Pemberton Press, 1996) and is at work on a DVD book for Prentice Hall.

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