We live in the era of the shiny little disc. Over the past decade, consumers have purchased well over 10 billion CDs and DVDs. And if you believe the electronics makers, optical discs are now entering their golden age. In the coming months, you're going to hear a lot about two new disc technologies, Blu-ray and HD-DVD, and the powerful coalitions that aim to bring them to market. With Sony and other device manufacturers on one side and Toshiba and Hollywood on the other, the fight has the makings of a brutal VHS versus Betamax-style war.
Only this time, neither format will win. And the battle will end up hurting early adopters, as well as the companies slugging it out. And the worst part is, the fight doesn't matter. These technologies aren't the future of home entertainment. What is? Online distribution, bolstered by increasing bandwidth and more efficient data compression.
Blu-ray and HD-DVD are just discs. And while discs have been a great distribution mechanism for the past few decades, as a plan for the next few they stink. Manufacturers and content providers have to pay to produce and ship them as well as make sure consumers have the hardware to use them. By hardwiring manufacturing costs into the system, discs obstruct market evolutions like flexible pricing or small-profit releases that appeal to niche audiences.
From a consumer perspective, discs are terribly inconvenient. To rent or buy them online, you must deal with the postal service, shipping fees, and multiday waits. Or you can brave the local Blockbuster, with its limited inventory and lack of modern digital filters - like user ratings.
Building a better disc isn't going to solve these problems. Just look at the audio world. Right now there's a similar war going on between high-quality music disc formats. Super Audio Compact Disc and DVD-Audio both offer sound far superior to standard CDs; each has pluses and minuses, supporters and detractors. But the competition is hardly high stakes. In the first half of 2004, DVD-Audio and SACD makers together shipped only 600,000 units - exactly the demand for vinyl records during the same period.
And while you probably don't have any SACD or DVD-Audio discs in your collection, odds are you either already have - or have been tempted to get - an iPod. Apple has sold more than 10 million of the portable players. Now, here's the important part: Digital music files, even encoded at high bitrates, come nowhere near the quality of songs on plain old CDs, let alone SACDs. Yet consumers buy 1.25 million digital singles a day from iTunes alone. Downloading - not a fancy new kind of disc - is the winning model in music. People care even more about flexibility than they do about fidelity.
A few years ago, the future of high-capacity discs would have been guaranteed nonetheless, thanks to high-definition television. Digitizing hi-def video, after all, produces a ton of data, which is tough to move around on networks. That's where compression and bandwidth come in. Both Apple and Microsoft are developing new codecs, compression-decompression algorithms that squeeze hi-def video and then unpack it for viewing. Apple's newest will be the core of the MPEG-4 compression standard and should be released by mid-2005, with the next version of OS X. And Microsoft's Windows Media 9 technology already crammed a hi-def version of Terminator 2 onto a DVD and should continue to improve with new generations of Media Player. A third contender, a codec called DivX, can compress a 20-Gbyte hi-def feature down to as little as 2 gigs, less than half the size of a standard DVD.
If you wanted to stream a compressed hi-def movie from the Internet to your TV with these codecs, you'd still need pipes fatter than today's broadband. But in January, Comcast cable announced that it will double the speed of its Internet service, depending on how much you're willing to pay. Video compression will further increase home Net speed. As broadcasters upgrade to the streamlined MPEG-4 codec, each channel will need less pipe to offer a better picture. That in turn frees up bandwidth in existing coaxial cable lines.
This isn't the only improvement on the horizon. Over the next year, Intel plans to roll out WiMax - a wide-area wireless technology that can theoretically handle 70 Mbps. At this year's Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, filmmaker David LaChapelle screened his new hi-def movie, Rize, by streaming it from Oregon and then transmitting it through a WiMax station in Salt Lake City. It worked flawlessly - soon even theaters won't have to rely on physical media anymore.
Imagine what all this means for someone who wants to find, rent, or buy a hi-def flick from home. A 2-Gbyte hi-def movie is small enough to download with less delay than using Netflix or TiVo. This has already started - iFilm, the go-to service for video clips, boasts 6 million unique visitors a month. Microsoft has partnered with companies like CinemaNow for on-demand movie downloading direct to Media Center PCs. Yahoo! is also getting into the download game, offering streamed versions of Fat Actress. And how about an iTunes for movies? Apple spokespeople say they "have the opportunity, but haven't announced anything yet." These are tectonic rumblings.
Eventually, someone will build the sophisticated business plan and technology that will make getting hi-def movies online even easier. The possibilities are myriad. Users, for example, could log onto Amazon, shop for movies, and instead of having them shipped, simply download the title - to own or to rent for a few days - directly to their hard drive. A high-quality piece of streaming-video hardware, developed by some consumer electronics company with foresight (and either built into a television or sitting on top) would then pull the file to the TV. It's not crazy to envision future TiVos or cable DVRs with access to every movie ever made - complete with a community of viewers generating ratings and recommendations - allowing consumers to rent a flick from the couch with a remote. At first there will be download delays, but it will still be faster than renting via US Mail. Service will get better every year, and at some point Hollywood and the major gear makers are going to notice. And then they're going to feel awfully stupid about having stepped into the Thunderdome for yet another format war.
Robert Capps (robert_capps@wiredmag.com) is products editor at Wired.
credit: Michael Gillette
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