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

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Re: Another red herring

Posted by Charles Hansen (M) on March 2, 2007 at 09:57:15

In Reply to: Re: Another red herring posted by Neil Wilkes on March 2, 2007 at 03:01:52:

<< What do you think about HD video? Good or bad? >>

As an audiophile and videophile, of course I think it would be nice to have higher quality whenever possible.

But we have to live in the real world. And in the real world, people will not adopt a new format just because the Japanese majors are trying some desperate measure to boost their stock prices. So let's recap:

a) The needs of the consumers and software companies are aligned. But the desires of the hardware companies are diametrically opposed. In other words, the hardware companies make boatloads of money when a *successful* new format is introduced -- nobody has the hardware yet, but they all end up buying it, and millions of players are sold. At this point, the hardware companies sales dwindle to a small fraction of what they were as people are only buying replacement players when their old machines fail.

But this is now the glory days for the software companies. When 90% of all households have a DVD player, their potential market is huge and they can make lots of money releasing even relatively obscure titles. This is great for the consumer, as they can find anything they want -- readily available and at low prices.

b) The Japanese majors made a killing from CD in the early '80s. They were able to repeat their success on a grander scale with DVD in the late '90s. But then things shifted as the manufacturing base moved to China -- DVD players became a commodity and no significant profits could be made. So of course, they are trying to introduce another format so they can try and make another boatload of money.

c) The problem is that the general public doesn't give a rat's ass about incremental improvements. Nor do they care about higher performance at higher prices. (If they did, Ferrari would be the world's largest car company.) So trying to launch a new format right now is doomed to failure. The only way a format can succeed is if the chicken (the hardware) and the egg (the software) are both born at the same time. This is a difficult trick to pull off.

So where that leaves performance-oriented people like you and I is to face the facts. Simply put, we are much better off to try and create products (both hardware and software) that produce improved performance from an existing successful format than to daydream about what the ultimate format should be (according to our narrow, performance-oriented definitions that most people don't care about). Some successful examples on the software side are:

- Superbit DVD's
- Gold-plated CD's
- Re-mastered CD's
- Direct-to-disk LP's
- Half-speed-mastered LP's

And on the hardware side are the hundreds of specialty companies making high performance products that serve the existing formats.

So like I said, DVD-Audio certainly offered a (relatively small) performance improvement over DVD-Video. But only for a *very* small target audience. It was doomed to failure before it started, as there was absolutely no compelling reason for the average person to switch from DVD-Video.

And there was a brief moment in time when it actually was possible for us all to get higher audio quality. By 2000, millions of people already owned DVD players. The patents on CD were expiring and so the royalties paid to Sony and Philips were going away. DVD-Video offered much more robust copy protection than CD did, which would have been a blessing for the software companies. Plus the option for allowing videos along with the music existed. All of these benefits were there on a well-established format that was on its way to becoming a smash success.

So if there had been a focus on making music available on DVD-V, it could have worked. But instead both the hardware and software companies shot themselves in the foot by focusing on trying to introduce not one, but *two* new formats that never really stood a chance. So now we are stuck with CD.

And guess what? They are doing the same stupid thing all over again with HD-DVD and Blu-ray. They just never learn...

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