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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 STEFAN BOCK, CEO of msm-studios, a premium service provider for mastering, post-production and media creation, based in München, Germany.
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?
I guess, DVD will be around for another 5-10 years. The lessons that we should have learnt is that DVD prices fell too quickly leading to a loss of value in the consumers’ eyes. This lesson is already forgotten. Blu-ray’s price is dropping even faster than with DVD!
Do you think Blu-ray discs will eventually replace completely DVDs or will they only partially replace them, becoming a niche, albeit big?
Blu-ray will not replace DVD completely. Because content owners are not in a position to split their budget between DVD and Blu-ray, they might eventually go for BD only. But this will take a while. You can already notice that DVD players no longer sell, because people tend to buy BD players instead.
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?
It is not only the BD disc that fell in price, but also the authoring work. It’s hard for the authoring houses to cover their costs, and on the long run the quality will suffer. This might damage badly the image of Blu-ray. The consumers should be made aware that low retail prices have damaging consequences on the final BD product on the long run.
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?
To enable BDs with BD-Live features is not only a challenge to be implemented into the disc, it is also a big effort to keep BD-Live content up-to-date. I can’t see an infrastructure at most studios to deal with this. I can’t think of any application being a killer application, but there might be some interesting concepts that relate to individual discs. End-users of course want to have all the features for no extra money!
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?
It seems to be a big marketing issue. The reality seems to be more sobering. When it comes to money, it doesn’t seem to be so important.
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?
We have set up a wide range of services around authoring. This enables us to react quickly on the different developments in the market. Our customers need many more services that just the pure C&A job.
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?
The only system that could succeed would be Networked TVs. Everything else is too far away. I can’t see any of these entering the consumer market before 2015. People have just heavily invested in their new TV sets. They won’t replace them so quickly.
Contact: www.msm-studios.com ...
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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