RE: [TCLUG:12994] Local Media and DVD Stuff..

["Eric Hillman" <ehillman@cccu.com>]

> > It could be easily argued
> > that the MPAA/DVD consortia are not unlike Microsoft in that they have
> > been promoting huge deals to get DVD off the ground.
>
> The difference is that DVD actually is a development -- a piece of
> hardware.  Further, it is a consortium (or cartel if you prefer!<G>) which
> is not a monopoly.  Microsoft has simply done the marketing thing of
> differentiating their product so that it is *believed* to be the best, and
> become the king of the bottled air market.  The size of the DVD thing is
> so huge, that they can force feed the market into buying the product, need
> it or not, and there can never be a critical mass of "no" voting consumers
> to kill it in the marketplace.   That's what's so scary!


  I have, somewhere in my vast archive of periodicals, an excellent article
on the secret history of the Compact Disc, written by one of the members of
Negativland.  (http://www.negativland.org)

  Essentially, the story goes something like this...  A huge consortium of
companies had invested a great deal of money in the new technology.  Whole
plants had to be built to press CDs, new mastering technologies were
developed, etc.  And the technology was not really taking hold in the
market.  Remember, the CD, like the answering machine and the Space Shuttle,
is 1970s technology.  As of, I think the year was 1983, maybe 1986, CD sales
were minimal, barely even competitive with cassettes.  Ordinary folks
couldn't afford the players, and high-end audiophiles tended to sneer at the
soulless, over-crisped digital audio format.  Then, suddenly, practically
overnight, CD sales skyrocketed.  One year they accounted for something like
10% of the recorded audio format, the very next year it was well over 50%.
And why was that?

  Not because everybody had suddenly become convinced that CDs were a great
idea.  The record companies simply announced that they were no longer going
to produce many major-label artists on LP any more, and they enacted,
essentially, financial penalties on stores that continued to insist on
stocking LPs.  The stores, and the consumers, had no choice but to go with
the trend.

  In itself, there's nothing overwhelmingly evil about that -- certainly
it's not the first time technological advancement has needed a little push
from the keepers of the invisible hand, and I'm no analog loyalist.
However, this deal had some side effects that changed the music industry
forever.  Among other things, royalties structures changed -- artists used
to be garner royalties on a  per-LP-side basis.  With CD, artist earnings
went down.  At the same time, once the initial investment in CD plants has
been made, CDs are much, much cheaper to produce than LPs.  Quality control
becomes easier, and mass-production is possible on such a scale that it
costs Sony a fraction of a cent to press a single CD -- yet the average
retail price of a CD was almost 3 times an LP, and never really came down
again.

  Similarly, with DVD, the record companies (who are now also the movie
studios, and the TV stations, and the newspaper and magazine publishers, and
the cable companies and, of course, the #1 on-ramp to the Internet) have a
lot invested -- production costs go down, price per unit goes up, and they
have a host of new options for encryption and copy protection.  I expect
they'll pull exactly the same stunt with DVD they did with CD, and the
choice will be simple: you'll either buy their damned players and discs, or
you'll have to start making your own movies.


--
Eric Hillman
UNIX Sysadmin
City & County Credit Union
ehillman@cccu.com

---BEGIN PBP SIGNATURE---
Version: Pretty Bad Privacy v0.23

10
----END PBP SIGNATURE----