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[Bob Zumbrunnen]

http://www.digitrends.net/marketing/13639_8796.html

Final Thoughts on DiVX
by Marshal M. Rosenthal
Contributing Writer
(posted 06/09/2000) >

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Over the last few days, entertainment industry execs have been discussing DiVX, the new software technology developed overseas that allows users to compress the contents of a DVD into a file small enough to be transmitted over the Internet, and without compromising quality. Michael Collette, senior vice president of marketing for ICTV said that he sees the issue of piracy best addressed by denying users "access" to the illegal data by having content delivered to the television, not the PC (see Move Over MP3 - DiVX is Here).

Eric Olson, senior editor for Express.com, a Web site selling DVDs, games and music, discussed why he doesn't believe DiVX will wreak the same kind of havoc on the flourishing DVD market as MP3 did to CDs (where illegally copied MP3 files of copyrighted songs ended up on thousands of Web sites for users to easily download). (See DiVX -- Not a Threat to DVD Market? http://www.digitrends.net/digitrends/dtonline/features/contrib/m_rosenthal/dvd.shtml.)

Today, read why Cat Fowler, vice president of marketing for Escient Technologies Convergence Group, doesn't see pirated copies online as being a serious threat for some time, and why Mark Ely, director of product marketing for Sonic Solutions, somewhat disagrees.

Time and Price Favor Those Selling Content
Escient Technology, LLC (Carmel, Indiana) is an incubator for high-tech companies, its current subsidiaries creating cutting-edge technologies, products, and services.

Digitrends: What factors are keeping consumers from downloading content for free online?

Fowler: First, DVDs are cheap to buy ($15 to $20 on the average), and second, there just aren't too many people willing to take the time to download a (reduced quality) version of a movie.

Digitrends: But with bandwidth increasing, won't more consumers be willing to wait to download a film for free?
Fowler: The kind of bandwidth needed for high quality video streaming is quite a ways off. For example, it takes roughly 20 hours using a 500kbit continuous broadband connection to download and store a full DVD (4.7 Gbytes). And even if using one of the better MPEG encoders (that can take the output of a DVD and recompress it as a smaller MPEG stream that approaches the quality of a VHS tape), you're still talking about several hours for downloading.

But I keep coming back to this: Are floods of people actually going to do this when the media is reasonably priced? I'm not convinced we're talking about millions of people who would go through all of the gyrations required to get pirated movies when all it costs is just $15 to go get a DVD that simply plays when inserted.

Digitrends: So you believe that consumers will continue to purchase content, rather that "steal" it because it's more trouble to deal with a pirated copy?
Fowler: Absolutely. When all is said and done, there will continue to be plenty of customers willing to buy the discs they want to play in order to get quality and ease of use. Commercial pirating (where a DVD is illegally copied and then sold to consumers without any compensation to the copyright holders) is probably the issue the industry should worry about--not the hacker looking to get his "kicks" by getting movies for free.

Read why Mark Ely, director of product marketing for Sonic Solutions--a manufacture of software solutions for DVD publishing and interactive, streaming video on the Internet--disagrees with Fowler.