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An industry practitioner speaks
In a series of Q&As, professionals in all facets of the packaged media industry share their views of things past, present and yet to come. It’s the turn of ANDRZEJ MACKIEWICZ, CEO of disc manufacturer TAKT S.J. in Bolesław, Poland.
DVD celebrated its 10th anniversary last year. How many more years are we going to see DVD around? Are there lessons in the development of DVD that could/should be applied to Blu-ray?
DVD will be around many years, simply because it has become the default format in the collective memory of consumers. It had generated conditioned reflexes: I want to watch a movie so I choose a DVD! One knows how difficult it is to get rid of those habits, and to instill new comfortable and proven solutions. BD should follow its own way towards simplicity taking advantage of all of DVD’s strengths.
Do you think Blu-ray discs will eventually replace completely DVDs or will they only partially replace them, becoming a niche, albeit big?
Completely? Not very soon, perhaps never. I stick my head out risking the prediction that it is not Blu-ray that will replace DVD in the future. From the perspective of the Polish market the BD format is at the moment such a small niche that, in my opinion, it will remain this way for a couple of years at least.
The rapid fall in price of Blu-ray discs, so early in their commercialisation, makes the economics of BD authoring and replication very challenging especially given the heavy investment required. What needs to happen to make it a viable, long-term business for independents?
All our planned investments in Blu-ray production were frozen after a couple of meetings with independents. The value of potential orders wouldn’t allow us even to cover the cost of the BD training. We are certainly ready to install the appropriate number of lines and start production at any time, but only when it is economically justified.
Interactivity and BD-Live, in particular, are Blu-ray’s key unique selling propositions. Do you think enough publishers will commit extra production resources to spread its usage? Which feature do you think may become a killer app? Or will consumers be mostly interested in no-frill ‘vanilla’ film-only – and cheaper – BD discs?
I’m convinced that, thanks to Blu-ray, groups of people will come about, interested in new technical solutions like interactivity. I don’t believe though that BD-Live will increase the attractivenss of a BD disc as long as there is not enough high-value content bringing new, revolutionary ideas in interactive entertainment. Few consumers will go for a BD title that offers more than the basic content. Currently, the bonus material do not add much value to the disc. It’s just to assess the popularity of various extras with the consumers such as interviews or alternative endings.
Some say that unless the entire home entertainment chain goes ‘green’ (reducing carbon footprint) – from film production, delivery, replication, printing, packaging, retailing – there is little point in going it alone. Going ‘green’ only becomes a public relations exercise. Do you agree or disagree, and what should be done?
TAKT is absolutely a green-oriented company. We are interested in introducing any technological solutions aimed at reducing the carbon footprint. Therefore we are about to open a R&D department. One of the main tasks it will perform is the implementation of existing technologies and solutions as well as inventing new ones.
It is said that diversification is the best way of staying afloat in the face of market uncertainty. How to you see your company’s range of services evolving over the next 2 to 5 years? And do you see opportunities, if any?
Two years ago it was decided to diversify our business activity. We’ve already invested €2 millions into a modern print house which finally enables us to be independent from external suppliers and to shorten the lead time for some more technically advanced orders. A year ago we started sales of varied cardboard packaging such as clamboxes to customers, even to our former competitors. Starting the production of casebound books and also opening a brand new hand-packing department had a significant impact on our company’s income and enabled us to reach new customers not necessarily interested into optical data carriers.
Films on solid state/Flash memory, Holographic discs, 4,000-line Super high-definition, Networked TVs, 3D home entertainment are advanced technologies at varying stages of development. Do you see any of them entering the consumer market and, if so, in what time frame?
I’m not a fortune-teller, rather an observer ready to take new challenges instantly. I wish I could know Stanley Kubrick’s opinion in this matter, he’d known the answer!
Contact: www.takt.pl
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On predicting the future
Predicting the future, let alone the future of packaged media, is a perilous exercise, and possibly counter-productive, as the exercise closes doors rather than keep them open, argues JEAN-LUC RENAUD, DVD Intelligence publisher. Consider that: Apple was left nearly for dead 15 years ago. Today, it became the world's most valuable technology company, topping Microsoft.
Le cinéma est une invention sans avenir (the cinema is an invention without any future) famously claimed the Lumière Brothers some 120 years ago. Well. The cinématographe grew into a big business, even bigger in times of economic crisis when people have little money to spend on any other business.
The advent of radio, then television, was to kill the cinema. With a plethora of digital TV channels, a huge DVD market, a wealth of online delivery options, a massive counterfeit underworld and illegal downloading on a large scale, cinema box office last year broke records!
The telephone was said to have no future when it came about. Today, 5 billion handsets are in use worldwide. People prioritize mobile phones over drinking water in many Third World countries.
No-one predicted the arrival of the iPod only one year before it broke loose in an unsuspecting market. Even fewer predicted it was going to revolutionise the economics of music distribution. Likewise, no-one saw the iPhone coming and even fewer forecast the birth of the developers' industry it ignited. And it changed the concept of mobile phone.
Make no mistake, the iPad will have a profound impact on the publishing world. It will bring new players, and smaller, perhaps more creative content creators.
And who predicted the revival of vinyl?
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