OTHER TECH

The Videosseurs

What are your thoughts on DVD?I think it's interesting what CD, DVD, and videocassette collections say about people. Take the guy who's really organized, who has bought blank tapes and taped things off the air and has them all in alphabetical order. You gotta wonder how often he puts on North by Northwest. Or does he have people over and says, "Look, look, I have every Hitchcock movie!"

I think that there are collectors, watchers, lenders, and educators. I have a friend who actually just bought her first television. She's a 45-year-old doctor, a single woman busy as hell in her life, and she finally got around to buying a monitor so she can watch movies. She's not even going to get cable. She's out all the time, and when she comes home, she reads. I asked her, "What movies are you going to rent?" And she says she has a friend who's going to educate her. So here's a guy who has a huge collection of movies and he's going to start educating her.

Point is, there are a million different scenarios out there. And everybody, in a world where there are so many things competing for our eyeballs, has a different way of managing this stuff. I've got a lot of videocassettes here that I've collected through the years that I either bought or was given through the studios or whatnot, and every few years I have to clean 'em out. As my kids get older and older, there are some that you keep and some that you don't. But I'm not sure how often my kids will go back and watch a movie they saw three or four times five years ago. Now they rent the movies.

I guess it's the box-set world now: The complete, three Godfathers. When The Lord of the Rings comes out in its final incarnation with all of the bells and whistles for however many hundreds of dollars, it'll be an expensive stocking stuffer.

Some movies actually come out with two different versions, a "regular" and an "expanded" set, the latter often just in time for Christmas. But some people will buy everything.Right. What it's created are so many different options for the owners and distributors of these properties to repurpose them in different forms that they've created several alternatives for consumers. I think that's what dictates the relative success of them.

One of my favorite things is when you go into somebody's house and you see they've still got some LPs, some 8-tracks, and some videocassettes. It's interesting to see the evolution of audio and video technology and how different formats have rendered certain products useless.

My grandfather was an audiophile in his day. He's long since passed away, but my grandmother still has his Akai open-reel tape machine in the dining room. It's an interesting curio. Nowadays, it's like, you blink, and we're on to the next format.Well, people still have VCRs that are functioning, and you look at the workings of a cassette with moving tape and all those parts and levers, and it's ridiculous compared with stamping out a little platter of digital music or visual images.

Several years ago - I can't remember exactly when, but it's gotta be 10 or 12 years ago - the doorbell rang, and there were two enormous boxes of videocassettes with every SCTV episode on them. And I've never opened them. They're still sitting in my locker downstairs in my building. I guess I can finally get rid of them because it's all coming out on DVD.

Or you can transfer all that videotape to DVD.The problem is, there aren't enough hours in the day.