The Shiny Godsend’s Past, Present and Future

By Robert Newton

Oh, those shiny little platters. How we all do adore them so. I speak, of course, of DVDs, those revolutionary 120mm platters that bring us untold joy, tears and terror. It’s hard to believe that they have been part of our lives for 10 years now, but it’s true.

Introduced in the U.S. in 1997, the format was initially treated with skepticism by most of the movie studios, which adopted a “wait and see” stance. Trendsetter Warner/MGM released the first titles, which included Blade Runner, The Mask and Twister, at a time when dual-layer technology had not yet been perfected, so a 2+ hour movie like Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas was a “flipper,” meaning it had to be broken up over two sides of a disc. Dual-layer allows over 4 hours of programming on a single side.

However, the standard 4.7 gigabytes of information (8.5 on a dual-layer disc) is a fraction of what can be stored on a disc this size. The next generation of DVD, which hit stores in 2006, can store up to 50 gigabytes, necessary to store the massive amount of data of a high-definition (HD) program.

Unlike the standard DVD format, which was a decade in the making and coordinated behind-the-scenes (and before its public launch) by competing manufacturers to avoid another costly Beta/VHS format war, the HD format war now raging is a public one. Toshiba’s backwards-compatible HD-DVD, a $200 external add-on version of which is available for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console, stores 15 GB of data, or 30 GB on a dual-layer disc. With the competing Blu-ray’s 25/50 GB capacity, an entire season’s worth of TV shows can now be put on a single disc (in standard DVD format). In that Sony’s PlayStation 3 comes Blu-ray ready and all the major studios have committed to producing titles for it, it would seem that the odds for Blu-ray, which is presently outselling HD-DVD, are much better. Add to that the fact that the adult film industry is embracing Blu-ray (the time-tested “So goes the industry” axiom) and its success seems a lock.

Not all variations on DVD have succeeded, though. Early on, a company called Divx manufactured a player that played a proprietary, limited-play disc that was designed as an inexpensive alternative to rental. Video stores everywhere cheered its embarrassing death, as they (and folks like Al Gore) did when the self-destructing Flexplay disc failed to catch on and pollute the world’s landfills. People want the freedom to watch what they want when they want, which is part of why rent-by-mail vanguard Netflix just shipped their 1 billionth disc.

Despite how cool DVD is shaping up to be, tech-watchers look to the future, when companies like Optware hope to capture the market with their 3.9 terabyte (TB) Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD). With 1 TB equaling 1,000 GB, that is enough to store nearly 800 standard DVDs. That’s twice the number of movies that Hollywood produces every year, and while that kind of capacity seems like a lot today, we will surely find ways of packing discs that large up to the very last kilobyte ~ and considering the 150″ screens they promised us on “The Jetsons,” we’re going to need every last one.