How much does it cost to produce a DVD? Isn DVD much more expensive than videotape, laserdisc, and CD-ROM?
These can’t be compared in a straightforward manner. There are basically three stages of costs: production, pre-mastering, and mastering/replication. Production costs are not much more than for existing media, unless the extra features of DVD-Video such as multiple sound tracks, camera angles, etc. are employed. Pre-mastering costs are proportionately the most expensive part of DVD. Video and audio must be encoded, menus and control information have to be authored and encoded, it all has to be multiplexed into a single data stream, and finally encoded in low level format. Authoring and encoding systems currently cost from $100,000 to over $2 million. These prices will drop very rapidly in the next few years to where DVDs can be produced on desktop computer systems using additional hardware costing less than $20,000. The current estimate for producing a two-hour DVD movie is about $25,000. Videotapes don’t really have a mastering cost, and they run about $2.40 for replication.
