DVD.com

DVD.com

DVD was launched in March 1997 by Hollywood , the driving force obviously was theatrical movies, which could be presented in ways previously unavailable to the average consumer. First and foremost is picture quality, which is excellent.

DVD.com

DVD’s relative quick success can be attributed to the fact that it won support from not only the Hollywood studios, but also the consumer electronics manufacturers and the computer industry.

Nearly 70 million

DVDcom

movies and music video titles shipped in the first three months of 2001, more than double the number shipped in the same quarter last year.

DVDcom

Hollywood holds onto its DVDs and hopes that MP4 wont make movies the latest contraband casualty. With each passing day, more toys pop out of the technological toy chest, delighting digerati and challenging established industry players.

How important is sound to the experience of watching digital content? Renowned French director Jean Luc Goddard is purported to have claimed that “sound is 60 percent of cinema.” This may strike some as inappropriate, but try this experiment. Go out and rent the scariest, most shocking horror flick you can find, pop it in your DVD player, and start it up. Now turn off the sound. Are you as scared as you would be with the sound on? I’ll bet you’re not.

DVDs are a rich opportunity for digital content creators. In journalism there’s an old adage that the only free press belongs to those who own a printing press. And for video content creators today the same could be said in terms of the production, storage, and distribution advances provided by DVD technology.

DVDcom In addition to its relatively young track record as the fastest growing consumer electronics product in history, according to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the DVD format’s applications lie far beyond DVD-Video players showing Hollywood movies in the living room. (A misperception is that DVD stands for digital video disc; it can also mean digital versatile disc, thus indicating that the same optical medium can be read in a computer’s DVD-ROM drive as well as by a DVDVideo player.)

The flexibility and interactivity that DVD presents is a far cry from the linear, static nature of VHS, which admittedly has become ubiquitous over the past 25 years and is fairly easy to duplicate. But when compared to the superior picture quality and interactivity of DVDcom there’s little reason not to immediately take advantage of this readily available new technology. Now that the hype of Internet distribution of video has died down some (did anyone think of coming up with a business plan?), a low-cost piece of physical media, such as DVD, is looking much better than the intangible, ethereal domain known as cyberspace.

From a producer’s perspective, DVD provides an opportunity for an interactive experience accessible via a remote control or a computer mouse. Furthermore, the same disc can hold multiple language tracks—a boon for international-minded productions, as well as multichannel, surround sound.

Since the inception of the format in 1997, U.S. software shipments of DVD have reached more than 380 million units, according to figures released in April 2001 by the DVDcom Entertainment Group (DEG). Based on retail and manufacturer data, hardware players sold to U.S. consumers have reached more than 16 million units.

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WHAT YOU WANT IS WHAT YOU SEE | WHAT YOU WANT IS WHAT YOU SEE 2 | THE TOOLS REVOLUTION | THE TOOLS REVOLUTION 2 | A NETWORK OF NETWORKS | INTELLIGENCE, INTERACTIVITY, INTEROPERABILITY | THE RIGHTS ENVIRONMENT | THE WEB EXPERIENCE TODAY | THE CONVERGENCE EXPERIENCE | ARE CONTENT COMPANIES READY TO LISTEN? | PURGATORY OR NIRVANA? THE DIGITAL DECISION