Put the right spin on DVD-Rom

Some of you are growing impatient, so here's some good news: DVD will happen. The majority of resellers and distributors want it to happen as soon as possible, but it has proved to be difficult.

That's perhaps because as an industry, we're making it hard for ourselves: DVD isn't about technology, it's about what ordinary people can do with it.

Many of us thought price might drive DVD-Rom, but the price difference between a CD-Rom drive and a DVD-Rom is down to around #30 retail already.

There's also the convenient myth that DVD-Rom will be driven by the availability of feature films. Watching Top Gun on a home computer might satisfy a small section of the population, but only a very brave dealer is going to base a business on that idea.

Then, of course, there's the possibility that the business will grow when the DVD drive becomes a standard feature of every home computer.

That will be great for us, because it encourages people to think about a DVD as a standard item and will drive others to upgrade. But although some companies have committed to incorporating DVD drives in their standard range, it's not going to create a mass market for upgrades.

Which leaves one thing: applications. Please, please, let's have some decent applications for DVD. We've seen too many CD-Roms bundled with upgrade kits that wouldn't even make decent coasters. The industry can't go down that route again with DVD. A duff game is still duff when it's spread over 4Gb and these days we're dealing with an audience that knows there are only one or two encyclopaedias worth using. Shovelware is not the answer.

But good applications take time. And as long as developers hold off from releasing them because there isn't a huge installed base, there won't be an installed base. The lead has to be taken by the software houses.

There are two ways this can happen: first, there's a set of potential DVD applications out there already. When, for example, Wing Commander IV is supplied on seven CD-Roms, we don't have to go back to the drawing board. DVD is just solving a problem that already exists.

Developers have been bursting to generate better graphics and bigger games for years. Now they have the chance. It will take only a few compelling, media-rich productions to make a DVD-Rom drive a must-have.

The second solution: give the developers confidence in our ability to sell drives. It doesn't help that CD-Rewritable has been such a success, and it doesn't help that the DVD Forum has managed to get itself into a standards war with DVD-Ram and its variants. But if we can move DVD up the list of software houses' priorities, there's a bunch of developers waiting to take advantage of the medium.

This means we have to provide a compelling reason to buy - something to make consumers demand, rather than accept, DVD. If we can't create a mass market overnight, we can create confidence that there will be one soon.

So far, the industry hasn't done a great job of this. What should the message be?

'Your DVD-Rom is backward compatible' sounds as if there will be nothing to use it for except CDs. 'Your DVD-Rom is the future of the multimedia industry' might play to the anorak audience, but not to the mass market, which has been broadly ignored by DVD marketing. 'Your DVD-Rom drive lets you watch films on your computer' will work only for the terminally sad.

We've reached a situation where we might be spinning the CD as fast as it will go. How do we match the customer's expectations? By giving them a DVD-Rom drive instead. Yes, it has a great data transfer rate. Yes, it's going to spin faster over time. Oh, and by the way, there are these great applications that you can use your drive for, without having to swap CDs every few minutes. It's the sort of sales pitch that sells 56Kbps modems or Zip drives; but with DVD we've created a mystique and made it artificially hard.

Within the next year, DVD will become as natural as riding a bike.

Julia Duthie is marketing manager of Creative Labs.