trancekr in the wonderland

소프트웨어 회사인 MS가 궁극적으로는 일반 디스크가 아닌 브로드밴드나 인터넷을 통한 배급에 훨씬 관심이 많고 그쪽을 지지하고 있다는 것은 삼척동자도 다 아는 사실인데 이 탐 아저씨의 기자양반은 무슨 새로운 뉴스인 것 처럼 호들갑을 떠는군요. 대세는 브로드밴드 라니깐...!!!

(남은 부분의 해석은 내일 보충하도록 하겠습니다)


Scott M. Fulton, III
September 28, 2005 - 13:32 EST

Redmond (WA) - 월요일, 어떤 사람들은 도시바가 HD-DVD 출시를 연기하다가 결국에는 기억에서 잊혀지게 되는 상황에 대비해서 "선 부고문"을 쓰고 있었는지도 모르지만, 어떤 전문가들에 의해서 "가망 없음(on the ropes)" 선고를 받았던 그 기술이 MS와 인텔이 HD-DVD 프로모션 그룹(promotions group)에 합류하면서 블루레이와 벌이는 전투에서 무하마드 알리가 보여줬던 컴백의 장을 시작했다.

하지만 프로모션 그룹은 기술들을 제안하고 시험하고 논의하는 표준 그룹(standards group)과는 다르다. 일부에서는 MS가 업계 표준을 지배하기 위한 또다른 방법이라고 해석하기도 하지만, Tom's Hardware Guide가 어제 알았듯이, 그들의 동기와 인텔의 그것은 어쩌면 꽤 다를지도 모른다. MS의 윈도우 디지털 미디어의 기술 전략 디렉터인 Jordi Ribas는 어제 우리들에게 MS는 꼭 HD-DVD 또는 블루레이던지 아무 상관없이 단일화된 고해상도 비디오 디스크 표준의 개발을 가장 환영한다고 말했다. 하지만 단일 표준은 우리들의 독점 인터뷰 첫번째 파트에서 Ribas가 들었던 항목들을 통과해야한다고 말했다.

"도시바와 소니는 이러한 가능성에 대해서 몇달전에 논의를 했었지만 문제는 두 디스크의 구조가 너무 달라서 접점을 찾기가 너무 어렵다는 것입니다." 라고 Ribas는 말한다. "그래서 단일화는 힘들 것 같습니다. 그렇지만 우리는 여전히 희망을 가지고 있으며 양 진영과 계속 일을 해나갈 것입니다." 논쟁을 벌이고 있는 양 진영의 회사들은 MS의 파트너들로서 이것은 MS가 그들 모두를 합치기 위한 공통의 요인이 될 수도 있음을 의미한다고 그는 말했다. "그래서 우리는 이야기를 계속 해 나갈 것입니다. 그리고 우리는 어떤 종류의 단일화가 이루어 지길 바랍니다. 그래서 모든 사람들에게 최선이 되는 단일 포맷이 있었으면 합니다. 동시에 우리는 그러한 단일 포맷이 시장에서 성공적인 포맷이 될 수 있도록 하는 요구조건을 만들고자 합니다" 라고 덧붙였다.

HD-DVD는 통과하고 블루레이는 그렇지 못했다고 주장하는 인텔과 MS의 여섯가지 요건은 우리들의 어제의 기사에 나와있다.

그러나 블루레이와 HD-DVD 양 진영앞에 도사리고 있는 더 큰 도전이 있다 - 단순히 하나가 되는 방법을 찾거나 한 쪽은 항복을 하고 다른 쪽이 승리하는 것 보다 훨씬 더 큰 것이라고 Ribas는 덧붙였다. 차세대 DVD는 이미 현세대의 DVD와 경쟁을 하고 있다고 그는 말했다. "이것을 한 번 생각해 보세요. DVD는 대단히 성공적인 포맷으로 소비자들이 좋아합니다. 그래서 소비자들이 HD 세대 포맷으로 이동해야 한다고 확신시키기 위해서는 반드시 그래야만 하는 이유를 제공해야만 합니다." 라고 그가 말했다.


Those reasons must not be merely incremental, but generational. As Joe Wilcox, senior analyst with Jupiter Research, phrased it in an interview with Tom's Hardware Guide, "It has to do with how much better the new thing is than what people already have. There's a threshold of 'good enough.' Once you achieve that threshold, then the next new thing has to be so much better for people to move to it."

As Ribas pointed out, "The way we feel now, even if the whole industry went behind Blu-ray, without these features, it seems very difficult for mass adoption to happen." Disc replication machines need to be capable of producing existing and new formats, he said, as well as hybrid discs that allow customers to invest in high-def content today, even if they're holding back to purchase a high-def player in the future. No unification would be accepted by the consumer, he said, unless "we make sure these factors are considered.

"Whatever combination it is," Ribas added, "as long as these requirements are met, I think our company would be excited to see a unification. But again, there's got to be authorized copy, hybrid [discs], low-cost replication as well as [low-cost] playback systems, high capacity, and best interactivity. So if this list is met by whatever unified standard is decided, then we'll be very happy to support that."

Jupiter's Joe Wilcox believes that, whatever the outcome of the battle, the victor or victors may find themselves having arrived too late for the party. "The greater implication is, none of this means anything," he told us. "Right now, it doesn't matter which format wins, because the consumer market isn't ready for high-definition DVD." He pointed out that neither side is ready to ship high-def players today; meanwhile, existing channels for high-def content have picked up customers at lower than anticipated rates. "So if people aren't picking the low fruit from the tree," Wilcox asked, "how are you going to get them to plant a new tree and grow some more fruit?"

Microsoft's Ribas foresees a day when Wilcox's question is moot. A day may come, he believes - perhaps in three years, perhaps ten --when the whole issue of disc-based video will have faded into history, and a majority of consumers will be receiving their multimedia content on demand through a broadband pipeline. At that time, he said, it will become important that studios and content providers have a clear migration path to transfer their existing video content to an on-demand system. Here, it's important to note that Ribas is co-engineer of the Windows Media Video 9 (WMV9) codec, which is vying to become a cross-platform SMPTE encoding standard later this year, joining MPEG-4.

"A lot of us may agree that, ten years from now, we would see maybe even optical media going away," Ribas projected. "Then, the vision we have is that the content would be delivered via Internet or via broadband lines of any type. That will be very convenient for the user to get video-on-demand, and just get any type of content that they want...at their fingertips. That's where the industry's headed. I think ten years from now, it's going to be very, very common that online distribution, or video-on-demand distribution, will dominate.

"Now, when are we going to start seeing the crossover?" Ribas continued. "It's hard to tell. I do think that both efforts will continue in parallel, and between now and ten years from now, I think that optical media will have a clear role...We do hope that, the earlier, the better, because that will be easier for the consumer and a better experience."

Since its inception, Microsoft has been a principal member of the DVD Forum, the standards group responsible not only for the current DVD standard, but for HD DVD. Beginning Monday evening, reports circulated that Microsoft and Intel had "joined the DVD Forum;" we responded by saying they had not. Perhaps I might have been clearer by stating they were already members. But since last June and up until last week, Microsoft spokespeople had repeatedly reminded us that Microsoft's membership in the DVD Forum was not to be construed as tacit support for HD DVD, or as an indication that Microsoft had directly contributed to the standard itself. Yesterday, Ribas told us that Microsoft contributed to the iHD interactivity layer and the VC-1 codec, both of which have been adopted by HD DVD, but which were also offered to Blu-ray; the latter rejected iHD but embraced VC-1. Still, it's clear that Toshiba, not Microsoft, is the technology leader for HD DVD, and will continue to be.

But Microsoft indeed has its own interests at heart - just perhaps not the ones some might think. Microsoft was a principal player in brokering the 1996 agreement between Toshiba's SD format group and Sony and Philips' MMCD format group, that led to the creation of today's DVD. The company could conceivably play that role again. But the payoff may be to help ensure the survival of a video encoding standard beyond the maximum projected life cycle of high-def DVD.

Ribas told us that maintaining at least one unified codec for disc and broadband encoding is very important in the near term "because there is cost associated with the studios having to re-author and re-encode the content." But as the disc era begins to wane - a possibility which Microsoft apparently perceives more as actuality -- then if broadband encoding were to have migrated to a different format by that time, Ribas fears, studios and content providers would be faced with the re-mastering problem again. In the meantime, existing high-def DVD players will already have been shipped with the older codec, and may not be upgradable.

MPEG-2 has had a 10- to 12-year lifespan as the primary video encoding standard, Ribas said, so it is reasonable to expect the next standard to last at least that long after its introduction, perhaps as soon as next year. Meanwhile, MPEG-2 will continue to be a factor for the next 10 years, he added. So the next encoding standard could possibly have a very significant impact not only on the next generation of video, but the next generation of people: "Maybe it's not going to be 20 years," Ribas told us, "but for the next 10 years or so, I think will have a strong impact on the industry." At that time, the issue of little round discs as a medium for digital content, may very well have become an historical anecdote.