True Innovation: HP Lightscribe

HP made a big announce­ment today, and it was not its part­ner­ship with Apple. The real inno­va­tion was the intro­duc­tion of LightScribe, a new tech­nol­ogy to silkscreen CDs and DVDs.

While the prod­uct itself would have been wor­thy of its own announce­ment, the news was buried into a gen­eral overview press release.

Sched­uled for ship­ping later this year, the new tech­nol­ogy allows CD and DVD burner man­u­fac­tur­ers to add a new fea­ture that allows users to eas­ily silkscreen disks. When you think of the poten­tials, this is pretty huge. I can see a cou­ple of new areas expand­ing with this. First of all, man­u­fac­tur­ers offer­ing the tech­nol­ogy will obvi­ously tout it as an extra. Sec­ond, I could see a num­ber of com­pa­nies offer­ing soft­ware pack­age that allow you to bet­ter cus­tomize the images for your CDs. Last but not least could be the spread of pro­fes­sion­ally cre­ated images and back­grounds for such disk.

LightScribe may seem like a small thing but I think it will have a much longer impact than HP’s part­ner­ship with Apple on the iPod. How­ever, the part­ner­ship, in con­junc­tion with Real Net­works’ announce­ment that were sup­port­ing AAC in their new client, def­i­nitely puts Apple’s DRM in a strong fight­ing posi­tion against Microsoft.