Score One for the Good Guys
For me, movies have always been ephemeral. While I like to
collect music and the written word -- my house is crammed with books and records,
magazines and tapes -- I've never felt the same about films. As a result, although the
technology to build an electronic film library has been around for more than a quarter of
a century, I've never really taken advantage of it.
A quick look at the shelves tells me that I've only
accumulated a couple of dozen videocassettes over the years (and only six laserdiscs and
DVDs), although we have rented hundreds. Because there are so few of them, the movies are
familiar and we don't watch them very often, but when we do, I'm always astonished at how
far video performance has come in a very short time.
The videocassette undoubtedly revolutionized how we
entertain ourselves, and the technology seemed almost miraculous at first, but by today's
standards the performance was very poor. When I dig out one of those old tapes, I'm
immediately reminded of what our TV pictures looked like in the 1970s. Back then, tapes
didn't look much worse than anything else because the TV sets were pretty lousy, too. Now
the better sets can do justice to the crisper images of things like digital satellite and
DVD, which just makes the tapes look worse. And on HD sets, they're atrocious.
Because they have become so entrenched so quickly, it's
hard to remember that the first digital satellite service -- DirecTV -- went into
operation less than ten years ago, and the first DVD players emerged only half as long ago
as that. Both drew amazed plaudits from the electronic press when they were previewed,
because nothing outside a TV control room had made such sharp, noise-free images. Now we
take them for granted.
Even the laserdisc, once the darling of true videophiles,
suffers by comparison to the digital media. I recall the first time an A/V company did a
direct comparison of the two discs, I thought they must have rigged it somehow. They
synched up the same movie on laserdisc and DVD and played them through ostensibly
identical sets, side-by-side. The DVD looked much better, but the sets could have been
adjusted differently. First chance I got, I did the same thing, but switching back and
forth on the same screen. The contrast was considerable.
Now I look at my laserdiscs and wonder why I thought they
were so great. They were certainly better than tape, but not by as large a margin as I
imagined at the time. They were never more than a niche product anyway, accounting for a
tiny portion of the video market.
Superior technology doesn't necessarily guarantee success,
of course, as has been demonstrated over and over in the audio and video worlds, and often
the software suppliers are reluctant to embrace new formats, especially if it means they
have to make and warehouse two versions of everything.
And there's always the danger of a Beta-versus-VHS-type war
to muddy the waters. With the digital disc, there were four different standards ready to
battle it out in the marketplace until the bigwigs at the major Japanese companies got
together and decided to combine them into one.
When the first machines to sport the new technology
appeared, there was some doubt as to its future because the movie companies hadn't fully
endorsed it. When I reviewed my first player, in 1997, there were literally no movies
available and I had to reach my conclusions on the basis of a couple of samplers supplied
by the player makers.
Whether or not the arrival of DVD will kill the videotape
is probably no longer in much doubt. The recordable disc is expensive, but that's only a
matter of time; its performance advantage is immediately apparent. In any event, it
appears that for all the programming flexibility of the modern VCR, most people use them
to watch rented movies. They can do that with a playback-only DVD player, but with far
higher quality.
Looking back at some stuff I'd written several years ago,
however, I was reminded that the DVD almost had a truly horrible rival in the digital
video marketplace: Divx.
Divx -- short for Digital Video Express -- was in fact a
form of DVD, and its players could handle regular digital discs. The wrinkle was that the
discs were cheap -- $5 USD -- but they could be played for only 48 hours after they were
first placed in the machine. After that, you had to pay a fee to reactivate them for
another 48. The player was attached to the phone line, and reported your activity to a
central computer.
In all my years of reporting on this industry, I've never
seen a technology as hated as Divx. It was represented as a blatant money grab on the part
of the movie companies: until then, most of the proceeds from rental videos had gone to
the renter, but with Divx, the dealer only got the margin from that first small sale, with
any renewal fees basically going to the movie companies.
More to the point, audio/video writers and editors
fervently wanted the wonderful DVD to succeed and were more than a little annoyed that a
bunch of bozos -- Hollywood entertainment lawyers, most of them -- had thrown this
complication in the way. Perhaps the fact that the system was owned in part by giant US
electronics chain, Circuit City, also had something to do with the lack of enthusiasm on
the part of other dealers.
Ultimately, the supporters of the Divx disc pulled the plug
on the format, citing poor support by the movie companies and the electronic retail
business.
The news of Divx's demise was warmly received. You want to
see unrestrained gloating? Go back and look at the A/V mags in the summer of '99, when the
Divx train was derailed.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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