DVD Demystified

DVD in Business and Education
■ Vocational skills training
■ Corporate presentations and communications
■ House video in a store, bar, or dance club
■ Theme park and amusement park exhibits
■ Closed-circuit television
■ Video simulation and video-based training
■ Tourism video on buses, trains, and boats
■ Hotel video channels
■ Media literacy
Classroom Education
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Laserdiscs were a success in education almost since day one. Teachers
quickly saw the advantage of rapid access to thousands of pictures and
high-impact motion video sequences. They began investing in laserdisc
players and discs after seeing the effectiveness of laserdisc-based instruction
in the classroom. By 1998, twenty years after their debut, over 250,000
laserdisc players were found in schools in the United States. Many are still
in use, and most are enhanced with laser barcode technology to provide
quick and easy access to video by scanning a barcode printed in a textbook
or on a student worksheet. Computer multimedia has begun to replace
laserdisc in the classroom, but the ease of popping in a laserdisc and pressing
play or scanning a few barcodes may never be matched by computers
with their complicated cables and software setups and their daunting troubleshooting
requirements.
DVD is poised to take over from laserdisc, but in a different way. DVD-
Video players will only slowly trickle into schools. DVD computers, on the
other hand, will proliferate rapidly. These computers will be able to run
existing CD-ROM programs and new DVD-ROM programs and also play
DVD-Video discs.
Educational publishers have been slow to embrace DVD-Video. They do
not see a large market, and many of them were hurt by the mass flocking
of teachers to the Internet as the new source of free educational technology.
Educational video titles require a large amount of work to develop and
must be designed to meet curriculum standards. Until more discs intended
specifically for education are produced, other titles will help fill the void.