Divx, Titanic and THX

Well, as you can guess, I have a little more to say on the Divx front.

Divx died a quick death as of last Wednesday, June 16th. Good riddance. The death of the format came much sooner than expected, most industry watchers expected Circuit City to hang in there for at least another year before pulling the plug.

I personally never saw much use for the format. It would've been a good idea if it had come along ten years ago, before Pay-Per-View became such a popular item and before Blockbuster had a rental shop every ten feet. As it is, the format was too little, too late, and way too confusing for the average consumer.

I personally didn't think the format was the Anti-Christ, as so many others did, but then again I live in Canada, and Divx never did make it up here. I remember my wife seeing an ad for Divx in Entertainment Weekly, and she asked me what it was (obviously concerned that the $800 I had just spent on a DVD player may go down the tube). I explained the format to her, and her response was one of complete bewilderment. Like so many other people in the world, she just couldn't see the purpose of such a format. She didn't see the "evil empire" so many other people did, but instead saw a product which didn't really have a market. Obviously, her initial reaction was correct.

I know that Jay and several other people merely saw Divx as another way to rent movies, but it was more dangerous than this. Divx represented a fragmentation of a product which was already a fragment of the market. The best comparison I can think of is the Sega Genesis (Mega Drive in the UK and Japan) video game console. At the time the console was released, Sega was king of the hill. They had beaten Nintendo's 16 bit console by several years, and of course Sony was nowhere near the video game market yet. As the years progressed, the Super Nintendo arrived and the Sega Genesis was beginning to show its age. In an effort to prop up their flagging machine, Sega came up with a few "expansions", first the Sega CD, and the Sega 32X. The Sega CD, as the name implies, added a CD ROM mechanism to the Genesis. Sadly, all the CD-ROM drive managed to do was show how severely limited the console's abilities really were. The 32X was an effort to correct this, but effectively bumping up the processor and graphics power of the unit. The problem is that these two devices represented a fragment of a market segment which represented half the market. It also represented increased developer costs. As a result, very few developers actually developed games for the Sega CD or 32X, and the Genesis died a slow and painful death while the Super Nintendo (which suffered from no such market fragmentation) went on to be a huge success. A year or so after the 32X, Sega introduced their Saturn video game unit, and though the machine was incredibly powerful (even more powerful than Sony's Playstation), the developers and consumers had been burned by Sega before, so the format was never adopted. The Saturn died a very quick and very painful death. This fall Sega takes another stab at the video game crown with the Dreamcast. If this one fails, look for Sega to get out of the hardware game and simply become a software company (after all, the games are what they're best at).

I see Divx very much in the same light. It represented a small portion of an already small market, and as such there was very little support for it. The support that Divx did have was bought and paid for by the company (in the way of direct cash payments to the studios), and we all know that Hollywood execs don't turn down free money. Sadly, only Warner Brothers and Columbia/Tri-Star were smart enough to see that short term cash from Divx meant a slowdown in mid-term profits from DVD because of consumer confusion. Divx definitely put a damper on DVD for a while there, and DVD sales did not ramp up as quickly as they should've because of the format. Now that it's gone, look for DVD to simply skyrocket.

Now, the other thing I've always seen Divx compared to is the Beta vs. VHS wars of the late seventies and early eighties. This is a completely different ball of wax. Betamax actually had distinct advantages over VHS at the time of its release (including a better picture), but the mistake Sony made was in not licensing the product in an open enough manner. For the first number of years, the only company making Beta machines was Sony, while everybody and their dog had licensed VHS. Also, of course, Beta and VHS were completely incompatible with one another. The one thing that was the same was a corporate parent's ego. Like the over-confident Circuit City people, Sony figured that everyone would just naturally go with a Beta machine because all the broadcast studios were using commercial Beta equipment. Obviously, Sony was wrong. When given a choice between two formats, the consumer invariably goes for the more "open" of the formats.

The last bit on Divx that I'm going to cover (I promise!) is this ridiculous notion that the death of Divx will drive up DVD software prices. Mass acceptance of a product never does anything except drive prices DOWN. Look at VCRs for a prime example. When they first appeared, they were hideously expensive, and you only rented movies. Now, there are millions upon millions of VCRs out there, and new ones are dirt cheap (less than a hundred bucks for a lot of them these days). The mass acceptance of the VCR has also created a market for sell-through video cassettes, and so you see relatively new movies available on VHS for less than twenty dollars. This is the same thing that will happen with DVD, especially when you consider that DVD was designed as a sell-through format. As more DVD players are sold, expect the prices of DVD movies AND players to drop with the increased competition. My only concern with DVD going "en-masse", is that the general buying public is not interested in widescreen transfers or bonus features on the disc. My hope is that the DVD acceptance cycle and the HDTV acceptance cycle will work hand-in-hand to create a market of widescreen televisions at the same time as the DVD market is being built. This should help ensure not only widescreen DVDs a future, but also anamorphic enhancement (more on that later).

In other news, last week I reported a rumor that future THX certification would mean that THX certified discs would not be anamorphic. This is incorrect. What IS true, however, is that the THX certification process does not REQUIRE discs to be anamorphic. Now according to the THX people themselves, their DVD mastering program is designed to produce the best possible picture and sound from a theatrical feature. In other words, to bring the experience of the movie into the home with as much accuracy as possible. To quote their website: "The final image is checked against the original to insure faithful reproduction through every step of the DVD authoring and mastering process."

Why in the world, then, doesn't the THX stamp require that a disc be anamorphic? This means that a non-16x9 THX certified disc (like, for example, Die Hard), will look great on a 4x3 TV for now, but will look like crap on a high-definition set in ten years. Not to mention how it looks on a computer with a DVD-ROM drive at this point (computers don't have to "downconvert" like stand-alone DVD players, due to the higher resolution of the display). I would suggest that everyone do as I've done, and drop the THX people a line about this issue. You can reach them at http://www.thx.com/contacts/suggestion_box.html. The more people who contact them, the greater the likelihood that anamorphic enhancement will be added as a requirement for THX certification. As always, remember to keep it short and sweet (polite letters are less likely to end up on the trash bin).

As a last DVD-related note (I'm on a roll this week, I haven't managed to go waaay off topic!), and in direct relation to the above mentioned THX stuff, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox have confirmed that the upcoming release of Titanic will NOT be anamorphic.

This is, in my not so humble opinion, absolutely ridiculous when you consider a few things. First, an anamorphic transfer of this movie would look amazing on a 16x9 television or a computer display (and if nothing else, the movie deserves to look great). Second, a high-definition anamorphic transfer of the film ALREADY EXISTS, and has been displayed on high-definition HBO! This means that the decision to release a 4x3 non-anamorphic transfer is actually DELIBERATE, and is caused by no other factor except greed. If Paramount and Fox manage to get us suckers to buy a 4x3 transfer now, then we all will have to buy the 16x9 transfer a few years down the road when we upgrade our televisions. I guess the $1.8 Billion the movie did at the box office isn't enough, they want to milk us poor consumers for a few billion more. I'm surprised they aren't releasing a pan-and-scan DVD first, followed by a widescreen 4x3 transfer a few months later, and then an anamorphic transfer in a year's time. Hell, it works for Disney, right?

I still haven't received any suggestions for what to entitle this column, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to email me at ken@dvdfuture.com.

Last week's quote was guessed correctly by a number of people, but the first one was George Walden. The quote was from, of course, James Cameron's classic sci-fi/action flick, Aliens. On a quick side note, I'm happy to see that each time someone has guessed the quote of the week, it's been a different person. I'll take that to mean that there are a fair number of people reading these days. I hope to hear more from you all (and if you have any comments for me, by all means, feel free to contact me at the above email address...I won't bite...hard...).

This week's quote is from a movie which will be appearing on DVD next week (and if that's not a big hint, I don't know what is!).

"Why worry? Each one of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back."

As usual, if you know where the quote is from, email me at ken@dvdfuture.com

Until next time, don't let the Divx bite!