DVD-Audiobahn New DVD-Audio music releases and talk about the latest players.

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RE: Am I missing something here?

Posted by Charles Hansen (M) on May 30, 2007 at 10:19:42

In Reply to: DVD video standard posted by vinjonman on May 30, 2007 at 05:12:47:

<< Am I missing something here? >>

No. The people that were missing something were the idiots who dreamed up DVD-Audio in the first place. If they had left well enough alone and not mucked up the market place with DVD-Audio and SACD, there *might* have been a shift to the DVD-Video format for audio releases. You have to remember that there are two factors at play here:

a) What the public will actually pay for.

b) How much money can the software companies make.

In the case of DVD-Audio and SACD, the software companies never had a prayer of making any money because there never was a large enough installed base of players. It's about as much as a pipedream as selling pre-recorded reel-to-reel tapes.

The real driving force behind DVD-Audio and SACD was the fact that the patents on CD were expiring. Sony/Philips were making around $1,000,000,000 per year on CD royalties before the patents expired, and most of that was from software (not hardware). They didn't want to see that source of free money go away, so they invented SACD. The other hardware companies wanted to own the money stream, so they invented DVD-Audio. Both sides were hoping to replace CD altogether. Both sides were smoking crack cocaine.

On the other hand, DVD-Video has a large enough installed base of players that condition (b) could be satisfied. It also offered some advantages for the software companies, principally the fact that it is quite a bit harder (though not impossible) to duplicate a copy-protected DVD-Video disc than a CD.

There were two factors working against this shift. First is that for most people, there really isn't any compelling advantage for the extra capabilities of DVD-Video over CD. Most people don't really care about higher resolution or multi-channel music. Second is that it costs around $0.25 to mass-produce a CD (including the case and insert). It costs about twice as much to mass-produce a DVD. Since the buying public didn't really care about the extra features, they wouldn't pay more for a music DVD than a CD, therefore there wasn't any way for the software companies to make extra money by shifting to DVD-Video. By their calculations, they would lose more money from the added manufacturing costs than they would gain by reducing copying.

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