Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
DivX Networks aims to do for video what MP3s have done for music. Can it please both hackers and the movie biz? First of two parts.
Mar 15, 2001 | Jerome Rota flips back his heavy-metal-length hair, clicks the mouse and retrieves the first file he ever encoded with the software program known as DivX. A Hugo Boss advertisement appears on his computer monitor. Bass-heavy music starts to pump in the background as a computer-generated graphic of the Boss logo flashes from left to right and a dark-haired model stares seriously at viewers.
The software "wasn't for movies," says Rota, a French graphic artist and hacker who goes by the name "Gej." "It was just a good codec. I made it for me, for my infographiques."
Microsoft made him do it, Rota says. He had originally used a piece of Microsoft software -- namely the Windows Media "codec" (short for compressor/decompressor) that enables users to compress digital video -- to shrink the size of the ad he had created so it would fit snugly onto a CD-ROM. But in September 1999, Microsoft released an upgrade of Windows Media that failed to play what was essentially Rota's artistic portfolio and résumé. Instead, the new program presented only a blank screen. Rather than reencoding the work with Microsoft's new codec, Rota decided to rework the codec's code.
"I set the information free," he says, smiling behind round glasses. "It only took about a week."
One week, one program and a potential revolution in digital video. DivX shrinks video to about a fifth of its original size, making it possible to download a full-length movie from the Net to your hard drive in less than an hour. DivX is to video what MP3s are to music. A year ago it was almost entirely underground; today more than 12 million people have downloaded the software. Web sites offering support, new applications or chat rooms appear almost daily, while DivX-encoded content -- hard to find and difficult to download nine months ago -- now appears all over the Net. File-trading services like Gnutella and Hotline, for example, regularly index more than 7,000 servers with DivX downloads. Pornography, the latest "Simpsons" episode, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" -- just about anything you can see on television or in the theaters you can now get online and for free. "It's unbelievable what's out there," one trader says. "I download a movie just about every day."
Rota left the French Riviera last summer and moved to San Diego to found DivX Networks. He now spends most of his time behind an uncluttered desk in an office filled with beanbags -- an office, incidentally, just one floor below where another potentially revolutionary Net start-up, MP3.com, first housed its headquarters.
The juxtaposition is more than just an amusing coincidence. Rota's dream is to make DivX the MP3 of movies, and like MP3.com founder Michael Robertson, he also wants to build a profitable business on top of a format. He intends to make DivX the worldwide standard for digital video, putting the code in set-top boxes, televisions and even movie projectors while making money through services and fees. Ultimately, he wants to pull off an elusive new-economy magic trick: transforming an underground movement into a legitimate, profit-earning venture.
There's scant precedent to offer him encouragement. MP3.com is in hock to the major record labels for hundreds of millions of dollars -- and the company has lost every legal confrontation with the record industry it has faced so far. And Napster, by far the most high profile of the ambitious start-ups looking to mine gold from the new realities of online entertainment distribution, is also reeling under a fierce assault from the recording industry. The companies have won headlines and the hard drives of millions, but their bottom lines still run red. Their chances for survival look dim.
DivX Networks faces similar hurdles, both legal and financial. But Rota and his international band of movie-loving geeks may represent the best chance yet for a bridge between copyright owners and consumers. The company has at least two things working for it: an open-source development model and a surprisingly conciliatory stance from the movie studios.
It's a unique two-pronged approach. On the one hand, DivX Networks is going to the people, opening up the code in its codec so that software developers all over the world can take a look and make their own additions or changes. But DivX is simultaneously cozying up to the big boys -- to the point that none other than the normally vituperative Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, is on record as saying astonishingly nice things about DivX: It's "terrific," "great" and maybe even "a wonderful ally."
DivX Networks may be in the happy position of benefiting from all the blood that has spilled so far in the battles between the entertainment industry and the Net. "It's unlikely that history will repeat itself," says Joe Bezdek, a co-founder of the start-up. "Napster could have been avoided."
Get Salon in your mailbox!