DVD-Quality:
The New Near Truth
Over the years marketers and PR people have been faced with the problem
of trying to sell or hype products that are, shall we say, something less
than perfect, not quite this or that, or not as good as their competitor's
products. When faced with this type of dilemma the marketing department
is faced with three choices: flat out lie about their product, come up
with their own criteria, or do a little creative word manipulation. In
this last category I've noticed that recently the term "DVD-quality video"
has entered the PR lexicon and I think it denigrates DVDs.
I've been in this business (reporting on technology) for almost twenty
years now and I've seen and heard just about every pitch imaginable for
all sorts of products. Of all the companies that I've ever dealt with
only one company ever admitted to me that a particular product was anything
less than the best in that category. (It was a small struggling educational
software company that was publishing a cheesy soft-core adventure title
in order to pay some bills, but at least they were honest about it.)
Now everybody can't be the best, the fastest, or the most whatever, so
obviously somebody's not telling the entire truth. This is particularly
true for products that can be independently and objectively tested using
industry standard benchmarks. If one graphics board from company A can
get a score of 89 on the CDRS test and another board from company B gets
a score of 47, then obviously the first one is faster (at least on that
particular test).
So what are the PR people at company B supposed to do? As I said, some
companies will just plain lie about it and tell everyone they scored a
94 on the CDRS test. Then they cross their fingers and hope that the magazines
and Web sites just print their numbers and never bother to run the tests
themselves. Another strategy is to find anything (absolutely anything!)
that gives them a better score and only talk about that. "We scored higher
than our competitors in an obscure sub-set of the CDRS refresh rate test
number 3 when using the '10 pixel per polygon strip and no lights' setting."
Or they invent their own benchmark tests that are guaranteed to make their
product look better than their competitor's products.
And then there is the 'apples-to-oranges' approach (which, coincidentally,
Apple Computer is particularly good at) where you never talk about exact
numbers-to-numbers test results. If they talk about pixels then you talk
about polygons, if they talk about megabytes then you talk about megahertz,
if they benchmark with one piece of software then you use different software.
Finally, there is the 'playing fast and loose with the language' technique.
You'll see this technique used in all sorts of advertising, not just in
the high-tech industry. Phrases such as "effective speed," "virtually
indistinguishable," "professional-quality," "broadcast-quality," and now
"DVD-quality" should be interpreted as "not as fast," "cheap imitation,"
"for hobbyists," "could theoretically be broadcast if a station had absolutely
no other option," and, finally, the phrase "DVD-quality" should be read
as, "we've compressed the hell out of it."
My problem with the phrase "DVD-quality" is that it doesn't really mean
anything or worse yet, it will come to mean mediocre quality. As you know,
a DVD producer can set the bit rates to just about anything up to about
9Mbps and a disc will play just fine in most DVD players (most commercial
DVDs are encoded at about 6Mbps). But a producer could also set the bit
rates to 2Mbps or even lower and still fall within the DVD specifications.
The images might look like crap but technically it's still a DVD.
If companies, particularly streaming video, video-on-demand, and video-over-IP
companies, keep using the phrase "DVD-quality" and keep delivering postage-stamp-sized,
blocky, six-frames-per-second video with stuttering, out-of-sync audio,
then people who haven't seen real DVDs are going to begin to think that
DVD technology just isn't that great.
Hopefully, marketers and PR people will find another hype-phrase before
"DVD-quality" begins to mean "poor-quality."
Thanks to:
http://members.home.net/savorthepower/
