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Online Inc.'s DVD Professional conference--which drew a surprisingly optimistic cadre of DVD enthusiasts into rain-soaked Orlando, Florida in early February--offered some sunny predictions for a mainstream market insurgence of DVD-Video in 1998. Microsoft Technical DVD Evangelist Peter Biddle voiced high hopes for DVD-ROM as well. Biddle's keynote even credited Jan Ozer's December 1997 EMedia column--which called Microsoft to task for its reluctance to support MPEG-2 file types in its forthcoming Windows 98 development architecture--with goading Microsoft into action it probably should have taken in the first place. With the last barrier to developing MPEG-2-rich interactive DVD-ROM titles in Windows 98 stripped away, Biddle dared to reveal his wildest dream for Christmas '98: to awaken to twenty Windows DVD-ROM titles stuffing stockings worldwide.

Either Biddle missed the first lesson of self-interested market projection--credible number inflation--or the DVD-ROM title market is bound to evolve with the near-glacial slowness that's characterized it to date. Twenty titles hardly a new market makes. If the old theory of title appeal and availability driving hardware sales still applies, 1998 may fall well short of drive manufacturers' expectations. And if the drives don't sell, developers may remain reluctant to develop for the DVD-ROM platform, while the opportunity for selling DVD titles catches up with their ability to create them.

Will DVD-Video step forward to fill the void? And if so, how effectively? Most of this magazine's DVD attention to date has addressed DVD-ROM. And for many of our readers, that focus is right on the money. Certainly, as far as database-type information publishing goes, DVD-Video doesn't apply, and where other market segments have held back from taking the DVD-ROM plunge, producers of formerly multidisc, information-rich titles like SilverPlatter and PhoneDisc have become DVD-ROM's earliest adopters.

But what does DVD-Video offer other multimedia and interactivity-hungry segments of the professional market, such as computer-based training, kiosk-based advertising, marketing, and educational applications? For interactivity, DVD-Video inherits VideoCD's hierarchical branching menu style, allowing users to navigate discs by jumping from menu to menu, or video object to video object. One DVD-Video player announced at the conference, Pioneer's DVD-V7200, highlights these formats' interactive potential to point to applications well beyond the linear movies most associated with the format. Described as an "industrial" model, the Pioneer wears its positioning on its sleeve, targeting not so much the movie market as schools, museums, libraries, and retail store demo set-ups. As the core of a kiosk system, the Pioneer player packs a lot of promise, and that promise is well supported in the application layer of the DVD-Video spec.

Movies will use the angle-switch and linear navigation buttons, but the real appeal for educational applications will be found in features like Pioneer's "video blackboard," which allows highlights, graphics, and text (using a keyboard) to be added to a given screen. The system's on-board memory can store up to 300 commands, and the built-in interactivity functions serve educational, training, and marketing applications.

The $995 sticker price is, admittedly, beyond what consumers are likely to pay for a set-top system, but Pioneer's positioning gives its DVD-Video player--and arguably its competitors' by extension--a shot at kiosk-based educational, training, and sales markets that their VideoCD and CD-i antecedents could never muster. In large measure, VideoCD and CD-i owed their failure--stateside, anyway--to their proponents' muddled marketing message, which only targeted training markets and the like well after PC-based CD-ROM had amassed such an immense installed base that the arguably better-suited alternative formats didn't have a chance.

Such astute positioning should give DVD-Video an advantage in vertical markets that VideoCD and CD-i never had. But will it sustain its share of those markets after the more versatile DVD-ROM gets on its feet? One market analyst, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research, says DVD-ROM will far surpass its video counterpart in the long term, projecting an installed base of 53 million DVD-ROM-equipped PCs by 2002, compared to just 5 million DVD-Video players. Of course, integrated system sales reflect DVD-ROM giveaways, and speak less clearly to the popularity of the format than standalone DVD-Video player sales. And vertical markets, where high-end, often customized applications will command significantly higher prices than off-the-shelf and consumer titles, represent higher-return sales. DVD-Video will improve its odds considerably by aiming squarely at corporate and institutional applications, as Pioneer seems to be doing. If that marketing trend continues, this column will bet on DVD-Video remaining a player in the vertical market game even as DVD-ROM engulfs the PC planet.

But since life lacks the handy navigation controls of DVD-Video titles, you can't jump to the next chapter to find out for sure. You'll just have to get yourself to the next DVD Professional conference--being scheduled now to take place in California this fall--to watch DVD's destiny unfold.

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