Digital Video Dud?
Authors: Bruns Axel 
Published: October 2020

As the Next Big Thing in consumer electronics is introduced,
Australia is once again feeling the tyranny of distance from the world's
major markets
DVD (Digital Video Disc, recently rechristened 'Digital Versatile Disc') has
long been hyped as the next step in the digital revolution of home
entertainment. A good decade after the audio CD began to replace LPs as the
premier sound carrier medium, it is now video's turn to become digital. DVD,
which in many aspects constitutes the next generation of CD technology, has
inherited many of its ancestor's features -- the handy and robust physical
format of the individual CD-like discs, superior picture and sound quality
(especially when compared with VHS tapes) which doesn't degrade with
multiple viewings, and the convenience of direct access to particular tracks
and sections of the disc, without rewinding. As a second-generation medium,
DVD also adds the enhanced gadgetry that was still beyond the CD's
technological horizon -- DVDs offer multiple versions of a movie on one disc
(e.g., standard and director's cuts, pan-and-scan, letterbox, and 16:9
editions, PG- to R-rated versions, alternative endings), up to eight
alternative soundtracks (Dolby Stereo, Dolby Surround, various
foreign-language overdubbed versions), a total of 32 sets of optional
subtitles, and further interactive control options for the viewer.
Such enhancements are partly due to the much-increased storage capacity of
the DVD when compared to CDs: in addition to a sevenfold increase in
capacity per surface area, DVDs can also double and quadruple that increase
by carrying data on both sides of a disc, and by offering two surface layers
of information per side. In keeping with the general trend towards an
integration of various entertainment and computing technologies, then, DVDs
will also gradually replace standard audio CDs (most DVD players can also
play audio CDs, making the transition even easier) and CD-ROMs (DVD-ROMs,
which are able to read older CD-ROMs, are already on the market).
It is the consumer video market, however, where DVD has been expected to make
its biggest impact -- and more than a year after its market introduction in
the U.S., the signs there are positive. Around 350,000 DVD players have been
sold, over 600 DVD titles are now available, video stores are setting up DVD
rental sections, and even the major LaserDisc and video Internet mail-order
stores like Ken Crane's or Movienow! are offering DVDs. Comparisons with the
triumph of CDs over vinyl break down quickly, however, since those two
technologies were fundamentally similar read-only media -- by contrast, the
technology DVD has set out to supersede, VHS, is also a recording medium
(recordable DVDs are still some way into the future; even recordable CDs are
only now appearing at affordable prices). DVD, therefore, is targetted more
at the growing 'home cinema' market, that is, at consumers who value quality
vision and sound over recordability (they are likely to own a hi-fi VCR
anyway). The satisfactory, but ultimately limited market LaserDiscs have
been able to carve out for themselves in competition with VHS serves as a
caution against overestimating the inevitability of success for the DVD
campaign.
In the course of that campaign, it is now Australia's turn, and the
technology's move beyond the borders of such unified, self-contained
national markets as North America points out a number of mostly
self-inflicted problems which may very well reduce DVD to a digital video
dud, for the time being. The availability of DVD hardware is unlikely to
present much of an obstacle, but it is software choice which will ultimately
determine the acceptance of any new entertainment medium. With Village
Roadshow having jumped the gun for the official Australian DVD roll-out that
was slated for Easter '98, there were originally only a total of nine titles
available in Australia -- mixing the Australian flavour of Shine, Priscilla:
Queen of the Desert and an ABC production of the opera La Bohème with an odd
assortment of international movies: Dumb & Dumber, The Crow, Wild Rhapsody,
Evita, The Mask, and Seven.
That merely such a handful of titles are available (the entry of other
distributors into the Australian market has not significantly increased the
volume) is due to a particular arrangement of the future world market for
DVDs into various zones -- these are:
1. North America

2. Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, Japan

3. South East Asia

4. Middle and South America, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea

5. Russia, the remainders of Asia and Africa

6. China
On the surface, such a division makes sense for various reasons: movie tastes
will differ markedly from region to region, and differences in video
standards (the use of PAL or NTSC systems) also mean that DVDs from one
region may not play on another region's players. (With the growing market
share of dual-system TVs, such technical distinctions are beginning to lose
importance, though.) Mainly, however, the regions soon emerge clearly as
instruments to counteract the increasing globalisation of trade in
entertainment content -- they were demanded by Hollywood's studios, designed
specifically so that DVDs of recent movies would not enter a particular
region before the movie had run its course in the region's cinemas, and they
exist to protect the status quo of video distribution rights which has come
under threat from globally operating mail-order video stores. Europeans
wanting to buy a copy of Armageddon on DVD, for example, would have to wait
until the disc was available in their region, and couldn't simply get the
U.S. release that came out after the movie had finished its theatrical run
there, months ago.
To ensure that they indeed would not order DVDs from another region,
technical barriers have been implemented in players and discs: in essence,
Australian-made players will only play Australian-made discs, for example --
a DVD that was made for the American 'region one' will simply refuse to play.
Only die-hard movie fans, the DVD producers hope, will make the effort to
also buy their DVD player in the U.S. (this would force them to buy all
their discs there, too -- Australian-made discs wouldn't play). This strange
form of inverted protectionism (a protection of the local market from
imports, put into place by a transnational consortium), then, is the reason
that despite the relative abundance of DVD titles in region one only such
few are available in Australia -- none of the overseas ones would play on
the local region four machines.
The prospects for Australian DVD consumers appear bleak, then: having been
included in the wildly heterogeneous 'rest of the Western world' group of
region four, Australia seems unlikely to enjoy a great influx of major
titles anytime soon -- while the Middle and South American markets within
the region are too large to ignore for DVD manufacturers, they are likely to
encourage a selection of DVDs that is significantly at variance with
Australian movie interests. At the same time, the English-speaking component
of the region is simply too small to make any great effort addressing: in the
immediate future, the combined markets of Australia and New Zealand are
likely to produce a few hundred DVD-equipped households at best. Australia,
then, is once again about to feel the tyranny of its distance from the areas
with which it feels the greatest cultural affinity, is once again about to be
overlooked as a small player amongst the larger markets of North America and
Europe, and is this time even technologically restrained from attaching
itself to these markets.
At least in Australia, then, the industry's decision to counteract the
growing trend of market globalisation that has led to consumers' increased
use of international mail-order services, particularly with the help of
computerised shopping on the Internet's World Wide Web, may come back to
haunt it. Should DVD in Australia turn out to be a digital video dud in the
next few years, in fact, distributors may want to seriously rethink their
positioning of the country in region four, moving it instead to the
better-suited, larger-market regions one or two. In any event, the
continuing convergence of home entertainment and computer technology also
offers some hope for Australian movie fans: the regional division makes much
less sense in DVD-ROM drives for computers (which will also play movie DVDs),
since the software market is a global one, and so those drives are more
likely to offer ways of overriding regional coding -- as the computer
becomes the central element in the home entertainment system, then, it may
remove the regional barriers which the movie industry has imposed on us.

Citation reference for this article
MLA style:

Axel Bruns. "Digital Video Dud?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.1
(1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/dvd.php>.
Chicago style:

Axel Bruns, "Digital Video Dud?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no.
1 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/dvd.php> ([your date of access]).
APA style:

Axel Bruns. (1998) Digital video dud? M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture
1(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/dvd.php> ([your date of access]).