Final agreement over a DVD standard between two warring industry camps came in early December when the Toshiba-led consortium of Matsushita, JVC, Pioneer, and Hitachi agreed to merge its technical standards with those of the Phillips-Sony group.
In reality, most of the compromise came from Phillips, which agreed to give up the 1.2 mm thick substrate currently used to make Compact Discs and instead use Toshiba's 0.6 mm substrate which facilitates a higher data density. Given that the only remaining major patent held by the Dutch company that falls within the DVD umbrella involves the laser optical pick up, the compromise will have a direct impact on the royalties Phillips can expect to receive from the DVD industry.
According to a senior industry source working in the Digital Video Disk industry, Toshiba is the largest holder of DVD patents, followed by Matsushita and then Phillips.
The only significant compromise on Toshiba's part was the adoption of Phillips' signal modulation technology that is used to "iron out wrinkles" in a DVD's output signal. This also led to a small decrease in the capacity of the Toshiba Super Density disk from 5 Gbytes to 4.7 Gbytes - still a far cry from Phillips' and Sony's initially proposed DVD system of 3.7 Gbytes.
Although the DVD acronym has seen "Video" dropped and replaced with "Versatile", few in the industry expect Digital Versatile Disk to become the official name for DVD. In fact, given Japan's liberal use of the Roman Alphabet, there is no reason why Japanese industry won't end up calling the new video system just DVD, with the letters representing nothing.
Product names aside, the focus for the industry is now on licensing issues, with the main players eager to get the media industry pressing out disks sooner rather than later. As a result an offical said, "We expect royalty charges to be very moderate."
With at least 10 makers expected to pump out up to 30 different DVD name brands, DVD is set to be a major OEM industry with companies vying to introduce innovative designs packed with different features for the multimedia age.
Industry strongman Toshiba Corp expects to ship its first consumer DVD players to the US by September at the latest, and October in Japan. A unit for installing in Personal Computers, called SD-ROM is expected to ship by October at around 1.5 times that of today's name brand quad-speed CD-ROM players. Players will be fully backward compatible with today's audio-CDs and CD-ROMs.
Rewriteable DVD systems are expected to ship during the first half of 1997. Currently Toshiba is testing a system that delivers 2.6 Gbytes of rewriteable capacity per side, but is aiming for a standardized 4.7 Gbytes to enable across the board compatibility between computer-based and TV-based players.
Over time, DVD could lead to a major blurring of the lines between computers and TVs, underscored by the industry's sales projections for DVD players that forecast yearly sales of 120 million units by the year 2000, of which around 80 million units will be installed in personal computers.
1/17/96
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