[SBrooks1]

Someone posted this over at HDD and I thought it was a great read. Do you remember what it was like for DVD 2 years into it's inception? Rev up the Delorian Marty! 'Cause we're going BACK.......to the future!

Notable comparisions...

~ DVD putting Divx out of business like Blu-ray did with HD DVD
~ Blu-ray is predicted to have 10 million player sales in it's 3rd year - By contrast, just 1.58 million DVD players were sold in that format's third year on the market in 1999
~ Titanic is released as a bare bones DVD for $29.99. We see some bare bones Blu-ray's now selling for $29.99 or more.

A LITTLE DISC HITS THE BIG TIME AFTER TWO YEARS, THE DVD, WITH ITS SUPERB PICTURE AND SOUND, IS CHANGING HOME ENTERTAINMENT
By RON GIVENS DAILY NEWS FEATURE WRITER

Thursday, August 26th 1999, 2:11AM

Three little letters are revolutionizing the way we watch movies at home. DVD.

The abbreviation stands for Digital Video (or Versatile) Disc, which can deliver an entire movie with far better picture and sound than a videocassette, even though a DVD is only the size of a compact disc.

In fact, the DVD, introduced in March 1997, is already starting to affect the movie industry the way that the CD changed the music business.

DVD has already put a competing digital technology, Divx, out of business, and major movie studios have lined up behind DVD.

Last week, Walt Disney Co. announced that some of its major animated movies - including "Pinocchio," "The Little Mermaid," "Peter Pan," "Lady and the Tramp," "The Jungle Book" and "Mulan" - will be released on DVD this fall.

"We dubbed it 'the millennial gift,'" says Mitch Koch, president of Buena Vista Home Entertainment, the Disney distribution division, which decided to release the movies now because more families are buying players and discs.

In the past year, sales of DVD players have exploded. Home electronics analysts say the number of households with the units will have quadrupled to 4 million from the end of last year to the end of 1999.

"The market for DVD players is about to go really crazy - where everybody knows about them and everybody wants one," says Corey Wade, who manages DVD research for Alexander and Associates, a company that consults for the home-entertainment industry.

DVD has become the hottest thing in consumer electronics because it offers a much better way to experience movies than VHS does.

"I love it," says Robert Gall, a 29-year-old truck driver from Kenilworth, N.J., who got a DVD player last Christmas. "The picture quality is fantastic and the sound is even better. I think it brings more of the movie out."

Gall has this high opinion even though he doesn't take full advantage of DVD's ability to deliver theater-quality surround sound. He plays his movies through a stereo system, which cannot match the spatial effects that come with a fully deployed, six-speaker DVD system.

Consumers can, like Gall, get improved picture and sound using DVD without having to spend lots of money to upgrade their current home-entertainment setup. The new generation of DVD players are more affordable, selling for as little as $250, and they can plug into most recent TV models. Of course, the difference in quality between DVD and VHS will become greater if you have a bigger screen and more speakers.

DVD has other advantages over videocassettes. The discs won't wear out after repeated use. A user can move almost immediately to virtually any scene in a movie without having to fast-forward or rewind. And DVD players can be used for regular audio CDs, too.

Many DVD versions of movies also come with tantalizing extras - "Casablanca," for example, includes a documentary about the making of the movie, hosted by Lauren Bacall. The DVD for "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery" has a separate audio track where you can hear Mike Myers and director Jay Roach chat throughout the movie.

The one thing these DVD players cannot do is record programs, and consumer-electronics experts say it will be at least a couple of years before affordable DVD recorders are on sale. That means that VHS will still dominate the home-video marketplace. More than 90% of households have VCRs, compared with about 3% with DVD players. Also, there are still many more titles available on cassette (68,000) than on disc (4,000).

Gall, for one, cannot wait for there to be more kids titles for his two young ones to enjoy.

"I paid $20 for Barney tapes, and my daughter will watch them over and over again, and they'll wear out," he says.

While more studios are putting out movies on DVD, it can be hard to find older titles in stores like Blockbuster, which rents discs and cassettes for the same fee. Disney's recent move represents a breakthrough, but George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have yet to put out their blockbuster movies on DVD. "Titanic," however, will be in stores next month.

The future of DVD, however, will almost certainly go far beyond a galaxy called Hollywood. By some estimates, more than 15 million home computers have been sold with DVD-ROM drives, which can play back movies on a monitor and hook a DVD to the Internet.

In fact, that particular scenario has already come to a monitor near you. If you play the DVD for "You've Got Mail" on a computer with Internet access, it will connect you to a Web site where you can send "You've Got Mail" greeting cards or search for online romance.

"Playing movies on a DVD is using 21st-century technology for 20th-century content," says Bruce Apar, editor in chief and associate publisher of Video Business, a trade magazine.

No one knows where entertainment will go in the next century, but DVD seems certain to take us there.


SIDEBAR:

Bare-bones 'Titanic' sets mark

'Titanic" has once again sailed into the Hollywood record books, this time as the best-selling DVD to date, with more than 1 million units just shipped to retailers.

Despite DVD's main selling point as a feature-packed video, Paramount's "Titanic" DVD is devoid of the format's typical extras: The $29.99 DVD, which will be in stores Tuesday, won't have such bells and whistles as behind-the-scenes featurettes, deleted scenes, music videos and scripts.

But the lack of extra features may not hurt it. Industryites project that sales could reach the 3-4 million mark. The disaster epic is already the highest-grossing motion picture ever, at $1.8 billion worldwide, and best-selling videocassette in history, selling 60 million copies.

Home-video experts are also looking at "The Matrix" DVD release on Nov. 26 as another blockbuster seller that could easily top the million-unit mark.

The lack of extras in the "Titanic" DVD can be traced to writer-director-editor James Cameron, who rarely includes additional footage or other bonuses on the first home-video editions of his pictures, opting to wait until a year or two later to release a collector's edition.

The picture's three-hour-plus length also was a consideration in putting the picture and the trailer onto one disc.

- REUTERS