Justin Thorn

I am here to tell you that as far as Im concerned the DVD is dead. It is hard to believe that the DVD is eight year old technology now. I can see some of you stopping to count on your fingers right now to do the math and it is not adding up because 1998 just doesn’t seem right. To most of you DVDs are only four or five years old because you couldn’t afford to part with your ancient VCR and VHS tape collection until recently. That may be the case and for you the DVD may live long and prosper for a few more years in your entertainment rack. However for me that just isn’t the case. I have always been one to be on the bleeding edge of technology and push the boundaries of its limits as well as my paychecks limits on occasion. When I graduated school in 98′ the first thing I did was custom order a top of the line monster PC with the works from ABS computers. (This was before Dell was a household name). That bad boy was loaded down with the latest of everything like a TV capture card for recording broadcast and cable shows to my hard drive (shortly before the world met Tivo). I also made sure to get a CD burner to cash in on the upcoming MP3 craze and my growing digital music library (yes even before Napster was introduced a year later). I bet your seeing a pattern here. Of course I also had to add the $300 DVD drive upgrade, which was still a bargain over the $800 stand-alone DVD players at the time. I remember seeing the first couple DVD movies show up at Wal Mart that year tucked away on an obscure shelf in a sea of VHS tapes. I didn’t hesitate to purchase the only two in the collection worth owning. Lethal Weapon 4 and the original Austin Powers. I remember me and my friends running home to watch them on my new computer that was hooked up to my surround sound and new 27″ TV in my bedroom. We weren’t sure what to expect but after reading all the hype online we knew it was going to be a step up from VHS tapes. We were literally blown away by the crisp details and sharp sound that we were not accustomed to yet. Eventually a few years later the rest of the world caught up as the players and the movies came down to more reasonable prices. Slowly VHS was phased out and everyone had finally made the switch.

Four years ago in 2002 after growing tired of just watching DVDs I had developed the urge to try my own hand at authoring discs. My creative talents were waiting to work on new projects using this new media called DVD+RW. Recordabe/Re-Writable DVD discs. The catch being you needed a dvd burner in the computer instead of just the standard dvd drive that came with the computer. Time for an upgrade. $300 later I was off and running except I didn’t know what I was doing. I quickly learned, at that time, you could not make ‘backup’ copies of your purchased dvds. No one had cracked that protection just yet. Instead I used my free time to help my friends convert some of their old VHS movies to DVD format. Then I began using my personal digital television recordings to create custom music video playlists for on-the-go MTV without all those nagging commercial breaks and reality tv wasteland shows. This led to creating TV series sets of shows my friends were interested in but unable to catch all the episodes when they aired. JeromeERome Productions was booming. All of this for free of course. I wasn’t stupid enough to try and make money off of any of these projects. They were merely a hobby I enjoyed partaking in during my free time. With each new project I raised the bar on myself and made it more challenging by increasing the level of professionalism that went into each project. By the time the studios were regularly releasing TV shows to DVD I had outdone them in menu designs and interactivity on some levels. Eventually I scaled down those projects and picked up paying jobs on the side using slideshows of friends photos and videos to create ‘digital scrapbooks’. Some even set to music that I produced myself on the computer. After four years in this dvd creation game I have grown bored with it. The challenge is gone and newer technologies are coming to replace the DVD. Video-On-Demand, IPTV, possibly HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs which offer high definition videos that rival anything a standard DVD could dream of.

It is time for me to move on to bigger and better things. Next on my list is the video iPod of course. This is pretty evident after the founding of iVideoBlast which aims to become a very important player in offering the best video content out there for iPods and computers in general. Stay tuned next week as we launch Phase II which incorporates video podcasts into our library. The DVD authoring game has been a lot of fun and I am proud of the many successful projects that came out of my studio over the years but quite frankly after eight years of dealing with DVDs I say good riddance. They no longer hold enough content to satisfy me and they have always been prone to easy scratching. I have already begun the process of moving all my DVD movies to my iPod. I carry the iPod around to friend’s houses now whenever it is time to watch a movie. It looks just as good on the TV and there are no stupid 50 disc wallets to carry around! This is JeromeERome officially retiring from the game. Im sure the rest of you will live on with your DVDs for the next couple of years. I don’t blame you. It is the cheapest route. Just don’t look for any new additions from me on your shelves. Thanks for all the great projects I got to provide for you all. Here is to a brighter future with the iPod and whatever else follows it. Life on the bleeding edge…..