Russ on The New DVD craze.
How true the words of Santayana: “Those who do not learn from mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.”
Case in point: The new DVD craze.
DVDs
have been around for more than a few years, but only in the past year have
they become a major force in the consumer entertainment market. It wasn’t
until the manufacturers started dumping DVD players on the market at barely
above cost that consumers started paying interest in a big way, and even then
with considerable suspicion. The fact of the matter is that VHS tapes are much
more versatile, useful, and dependable than DVDs are, not to mention cheaper,
no mater what Sony/Warners/MCA tell you. It’s still expensive to get DVD
recorders, and with all the copy protection thrown on this digital technology,
you probably couldn’t record much anyway. The entertainment oligopoly is so
scared by the idea of people being able to make endless perfect copies of
their favorite films that they’ve made copying digital material the realm of
hackers. But one of the great boons of home entertainment during the VHS years
was having the freedom to record your own stuff the way you wanted it --
customizing your raw material, if you will. In the digital Brave New World,
you have to take it as it comes down from the corporate hierarchy, and pay a
hefty price for it to boot.
This
is one of the reasons why it’s taken so long for DVDs to catch on, and why
VHS will continue to capture people’s imagination for a long time to come.
The companies are trying to put all kinds of bells and whistles into the mix
to make you feel that you’re getting something extra going digital, but
while some features are nifty (widescreen, subtitles/dubbing on demand,
director’s commentary, slide shows and outtakes and extra camera angles)
they are hardly essential, and some features are downright dumb (chapter
selection, choppy fast forwarding, endless confusing menus). They’re pushing
“Digital 5.1” or “DTS” so that you can have the 360º sound
experience, but you have to buy tons of speakers and have an acoustically
inviting room to get much advantage from them. The law of diminishing returns
kicks in pretty quickly here, unless you’re a home theater maniac with tons
of money to burn.
It’s all so reminiscent of the way the market moguls manipulated the world in the late ’80s to make it safe for CD technology. And perhaps their greatest weapon then (as now) is the simplest: snob appeal. They are portraying VHS tapes as they did 8-tracks way back in the late ’70s, as big, clunky, awkward, inconvenient. They are trumpeting that DVDs deliver better picture and sound more reliably than any analog formats. It all sounds so alluring, but after having to suffer through a rented DVD that had scratches rendering sections of GOSFORD PARK unwatchable, I have a greater appreciation of VHS tapes (as I do 8-tracks) as being jerry-riggable if not fully fixable when problems arise. Scratched CDs and DVDs are just plain junk, but a broken VHS tape or 8-track is a workable inconvenience. That makes all the difference in the world to me, since I like to think of my entertainment purchases as becoming part of an archive with some sort of longevity.
The
snob appeal button works with plenty of people, though. I’ve been thrust
into the world of DVD with my own film and video work because distributors and
a lot of potential customers won’t accept VHS tapes anymore. (By the way, SO
WRONG THEY’RE RIGHT, my 8-track feature-length documentary you can read
about elsewhere on this website, just came out on DVD as a freebie with the
August 2002 issue of an industry mag called TOTAL MOVIE AND ENTERTAINMENT,
mainly because I thought it was such a ridiculous idea to have an 8-track
movie in such a pro-digital-tech publication.) So I’ve had to bite the
bullet and get serious about going DVD with all my visual media work, just to
make it possible to be seen in the ever-widening circles of tech snobs. It’s
a dilemma for me, but as long as I can fire up my own Beta player in my own
personal goofy analog world, I guess I can live with having to provide digital
drink coasters for those who have bought into the Corporate Digital
Conspiracy.
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