Out of the box August 30, 2006

Published on Page A12 of the August 30, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

THE future has a way of creeping up fast. A few years ago, I was telling people I had read somewhere that "techies" were predicting that we would soon be having DVDs that could contain as many as five movies. The reason for that being that the industry was experimenting with making discs with bigger capacities. I myself didn't think that would happen so soon – not commercially anyway. I figured that even if they could produce discs that could hold that many movies, they would be very expensive.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

If you've been to your favorite pirates' lair recently, you'll know what I'm talking about. Your friendly neighborhood Moro trader is now selling a special kind of DVD that contains multiple movies or the entire seasons of TV series. The disc in fact contains not just five movies but all of eight movies. It's expressly marked "8 in 1." The same disc can contain the whole season of your favorite TV show. The entire "CSI" series is in five discs I think. The discs go for P60 to P100 per depending on which part of Metro Manila you buy them.

The quality isn't bad. Any compression, of course, degrades video quality, but the Chinese (from whom these things apparently come) seem to have found a way of compressing the contents at this intensity without reducing it to the kind of junk we had during the first days of the Betamax. Remember that dodo? The quality is not unlike a rented VHS, one that went from hand to hand, or eye to eye, before it got to you. Not bad if you're not finicky about video quality, bad if you invested in a plasma TV.

More awesomely, the Chinese seem to have gone where their Western counterparts feared to tread. They are now mass-producing dual-layer DVD, or DVD 9, and selling it at single-layer, or DVD 5, prices. (The cheapest blank dual layer DVD, as far as I know, costs around P250 to P300 locally.) I didn't believe it at first when I saw the discs advertised as DVD 9. But I scanned it in my PC, and, lo and behold, the thing was truly,certifiably, genuinely a dual-layer, 9-gig DVD. No wonder it could hold that much data, albeit in compressed form.

We can look at this development in two ways:

One is through the same blinders of the IPC, seeing it as an exponential leap in piracy, a bigger threat that needs an equally bigger response to stop. That is how government, with no small prodding from the United States, has always looked at it, responding with the Videogram Regulatory Board, the Optical Board and whatever other boards it has gone overboard to create.

At the very least, it's useless. Take it from the Borg (if you are a New Generation "Star Trek" fan): Resistance is futile. Might as well bid the waves hold still. With the way digital technology, like the nuclear one in the past, blasting out in all directions, the possibility of government stopping "piracy" (that word deserves whole new forums by itself) is about as bright as the "old pirates," or sellers of single-layer one-disc-one-movie, stopping the invasion of the double-layer "8-in-1s."

But it isn't just that it's futile, it's also that it's unenlightened. There is another way to look at the development, and that is to view its enormous potential. We are in fact merely seeing the tip of the iceberg. Thinking out of the box, what this means is not that we will soon have more movies or TV shows than we can hope to watch in our lifetime, what itmeans is that we will soon have more information than we will know what to do with. The rapid strides in technology have now given us more access to information than we had always thought possible. Think of the possibilities of that for education.

Not every Filipino has a PC (though I still think government and the private sector should aim to get one to as many kids as possible, or we will widen the information gap between us and other countries), but most every Filipino has a TV. And given that DVD players particularly from (where else?) China are now going for a song, probably a DVD player as well.

Now, what if we made the "8-in-1s" offer not just entertainment, not just movies and TV shows, but educational material as well? What if the BBC's "History of World War II" (a fantastic documentary, which used to be 25 discs but which can now be compressed in 4 or 5 discs) were suddenly available to students? What if "Sesame Street," which was where some people I know swear they learned their English from, complete with the accent, were there too from as far back as when it started? What if "Batibot," "Kasaysayan," "Peta Presents," "CCP Presents," "Sic O'Clock News," and all the other educational local shows the networks trashed because they couldn't compete with their more commercial fare were recycled in this form?

I know those things would have problems competing with the movie and TV fare offerings of Manila's Quiapo area and elsewhere, but what if public schools gave them away free to students the way they used to give away free powdered milk and vaccination shots? Educational TV you can't always watch because you have to adjust to its time (and because of competing fare), but DVDs you can always watch at your leisure. Who knows, maybe the parents of the kids who are required to watch "Batibot" and "Kasaysayan" as part of their assignment can pick up a thing or two from it, too.

The technology certainly makes it possible. I would earnestly suggest that the money that funds the anti-piracy agencies -- which is taxpayers' money being used to protect multinational interests -- be used for this instead. Or generally to projects that rethink how best to educate this desperate country.

The question may not be how to bring the kids to the classroom. The question may well be how to bring the classroom to the kids.

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