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It all happened so...fast.
Yesterday, you were sitting in your den, somnolent and content amid your CD collection and videotape library, awash in the glow of your 50-channel TV. Today, you're a casualty of the digital revolution, one of those odd statistics in USA Today. Number of people who haven't surfed the Net, who don't have a CD-ROM, and who in general will be left behind when tomorrow comes: You.
That's what it feels like, doesn't it? You always thought you were a well-informed, up-to-date entertainment fan. But more and more, you flip through the paper, or turn on Extra, or open up ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, and blanch. Consider the news that's come out of Hollywood in recent weeks:
In November, Steven Spielberg plans to introduce his latest project, The Dig, an epic sci-fi adventure about a team of astronauts stranded on an alien planet. His subsequent directorial effort, MovieMaker, starring Quentin Tarantino and Friends' Jennifer Aniston, will be released next year. The Dig and MovieMaker are CD-ROM games.
A high-powered entertainment consortium composed of Toshiba, Time Warner, Sony, and Philips agreed on a universal standard for the digital videodisc (DVD), a technology that enables a full-length feature film with better-than-laserdisc image quality to fit on a single five-inch CD. Alternative soundtracks, videogames, and a separate wide-screen version of the movie could also be crammed onto the same disc. Analysts say DVDs could begin elbowing out videocassettes as early as 1997.
The music industry happily noted the release of the first major wave of enhanced-CD titles, albums packaged with interactive liner notes, music videos, and artist interviews. Enhanced CDs are expected to supplant their conventional counterparts within the next few years (see page 28).
Blink twice if you're still tracking.
Legend has it that movie mogul Jack L. Warner banned the appearance of TV sets in all Warner Bros. movies, a desperate symbolic act made to ward off an inevitable sea change in entertainment. These days, you kind of know how old Jack felt. You've been defiantly ignoring the digital future in the hope that it will just disappear. But Hollywood learned its lesson from Warner all those years ago: Wishing something away only makes the eventual shock of reality that much worse. According to InfoTech, a Vermont-based research firm, there were 1.2 million CD-ROM players worldwide at the turn of the decade. Today, there are an estimated 46 million. In that same period, the number of subscribers to online services (primarily America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy) has exploded from 1.7 million to 11 million, according to estimates by the market research firm SIMBA Information. By 1999, that number is projected to hit 26.3 million.
What in the name of Bill Gates is going on? When did they decide the rainbow ended in Silicon Valley? How did high tech become high style or, for that matter, high concept? How did Rodney Freaking Dangerfield end up as a pit stop on the information superhighway (http://www.rodney.com)?
