Firewire originally was developed by Apple Computer as a high speed serial bus. When it was developed, many thought it was actually too fast, and some lower speed interconnect like USB would be cheaper to implement. Firewire pretty much lay dormat for a couple of years. Then in 1995, a tiny connector showed up on the first DV camcorders shipped by Sony. In late 1995, Firewire was accepted as a standard by the IEEE, henceforth called IEEE 1394.

In 1997, The Digital VCR Consortium, consisting of more than 50 manufacturers of consumer electronics firms has adopted the IEEE-1394 High Performance Serial Bus as the standard digital interface between consumer DV products. Sony's release of three moderately-priced DV camcorders with 1394 digital audio/video input/output and device control is a major step in the widespread adoption of the High Performance Serial Bus for digital audio/video interconnection. Matsushita recently joined the 1394 coalition with the Panasonic NV-DE3 DV camcorder. Other Japanese camcorder and VCR manufacturers are certain to follow the Sony and Matsushita lead. The Digital Audio/Video Interoperability Council (DAVIC) and Europe's Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) consortium have adopted the 1394 bus for set-top box and other broadcast-related applications. DBS set-top box manufacturers for the U.S. market appeared to adopt 1394 in third-generation satellite TV receivers.

However, Firewire does not address several other problems. The single most important one is that content providers (movies studios, etc.) fight a seemingly never ending war to block video and audio advances without copyright protections. A new standard has appeared in the last couple of years called the  High Bandwith Digital Content Protection System (HDCP). This standard appears to be only deployable using the Digital Video Interface or DVI.

For this reason alone, Firewire will die out and is being replaced with DVI. Buying a new digital video product without a DVI connector, would be a mistake.

Some News Group and/or Discussion Group "experts" have referred to the last statement as "untrue" and or suggested we are "Hollywood's Henchmen". Intech Labs is a service and repair company. Commercially, we have been involved in DTV/HDTV since about 1993. Denying that copyright protections will occur in the near future would be denying reality, (Ask Napster). As of this moment, we are unaware of any HDCP integration with firewire, but that's not to say it won't happen.  We were not suggesting that you not have a firewire connector, what we were suggesting is that if you purchase an HDTV product you get both.