Home Video Asylum

TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

your concerns are rational

Anytime the electronics industry takes a big step, it's taking a risk. It's a gamble that the direction the companies head in will either dig a financial hole too deep to climb out of or be a huge money-maker like DVD has been. And as a consumer, dealer or distributor, we all share in the gain or loss from that journey.

Your concern seems more focused on the hardware, probably due to the fact that early DVD players were somewhat less than stellar at CD playback. While I agree that's an honest concern, I don't think you have to worry about them screwing up like before. When the DVD format came out, it was pretty much the industry's first step into an optical format combining audio and video. It was a learning experience for the hardware manufacturers as well as the software designers. In effect, early adopters really were guinea pigs -- not on purpose, but because the industry was taking such a leap.

You can call me overly optimistic, but I don't think that many of the mistakes the industry made with hardware and software at DVD's inception are going to be repeated. Yes, I'm sure there will be glitches here and there, but that's to be expected when anything new comes out. There's bound to be bugs to work out, but nothing that can't be fixed in short order. And as for horrid playback of CDs or DVDs, I'm sure the lesson was learned with DVD. As I said before, much has been learned from the DVD format and even more has been learned since the DVD format's launch. Believe it or not, many of the technologies and features that will be present in the next gen format were being worked on before DVD even came about.

The next year is going to be very interesting: certainly lots of scrambling and confusion in the first few months. Perhaps the naysayers will be right and it will be a grand mess that never sorts itself out. Or maybe it will be a grand finale for what will probably be the last optical disc format produced for distribution. I'm leaning toward the latter.


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