By Bob Johnstone
I mean, how cool can you get? This new baby from JVC has got full-color, full-motion digital video from a 100-shot automatic video server, an MPEG decoder, the works. Want to take it out for a spin on the information superhighway? Well you can't, because it's a stand-alone karaoke box.
Don't scoff. Karaoke is a way of life in Japan and throughout the rest of Asia. Last year, combined sales of karaoke hardware and software added up to a far-from-uncool US$5 billion. Wherever there's that much moolah at stake, you can bet there's fierce competition for a share of the action. Which in turn means that, in the karaoke biz, technology moves fast.
Innovations have been pouring out of karaoke boxes ever since that great light-bulb moment back in the '60s, when a Kobe bar owner figured out that it'd be cheaper to fire the band and use back-up singers on tapes instead. Next thing you know, his customers were grabbing the mike, so he fired the singer, too. The big idea in Japanese-style karaoke is to imitate the song's original vocal as closely as possible. So the first great techno-leap forward was the addition of an echo chamber. Even so, some folks – the odd nondrinker, for instance – still found it hard to get up in front of people and croon. So, to take the spotlight off them, the box makers added video images of suitable scenes.
Until about two years ago, the market for karaoke hardware was dominated by Pioneer's analog laser disc players. Today, Pioneer is fighting a losing battle against the much smaller, CD-based systems, of JVC, Sony, and Matsushita, each of whose discs can hold 74 minutes of full-motion digital video. Which brings us back to JVC's latest offering, the US$8,800 KX-DV100 shown here.
Imagine for a moment that the system's video server – a high-speed robot that takes just five seconds to go from one song on one disc to another – was removed and stuck at the other end of a phone line. And that instead of Japanese pop tunes, you could dial up the latest video nasty (or whatever). Now you know why Japanese consumer electronics companies like JVC are not totally despondent about the shift in paradigm from stand-alone to networked.
Care to sing, anyone?
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