An industry executive 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 TORSTEN LEYE, Marketing Manager, Optical, at Verbatim.

Where do you see Verbatim's comparative advantage in a fairly crowded market?

Verbatim focuses on quality products, a wide product range, high availability and good support. Those are our key features for success being the No.1 player. Verbatim is typically at the forefront of technical development, being among the first to introduce new products to the markets.

Amongst the range of products your company offers, which one did grow the past two years and which one was reduced?

We don’t think that any of our products or services lost importance. However, marketing support and sales support got more important.

The non-home entertainment, corporate market is a very substantial one as far as DVD is concerned, but rarely mentioned in statistics. Is Verbatim servicing this market segment as well?

The company is probably the No.1 player in this segment for recordable media due to our widespread distribution and product range like discs designed for long archival, printable media, for example.

It is said that diversification is the best way of staying afloat in the face of market uncertainty. How do you see your company's range of services evolving over the next 2 to 5 years?

Verbatim has developed its product range over the last couple of years, keeping focus on optical, but adding strong product lines in USB/Flash as well as external HDD.

Are there lessons in the development of the DVD format that could/should be applied to Blu-ray (pricing, positioning, marketing strategy, etc)?

Keys to volume sales are price and application. High pricing will inhibit volume sales. Missing applications lead to the same issues. We need to overcome both, e.g. recording options for broadcasted HD content must become available. This led to the current high market share in Japan for BD recordable products.

Do you think Blu-ray discs will eventually replace completely DVDs or will they only partially replace them, becoming a niche, albeit big?

Due to the backward compatibility of BD hardware, DVD will be around for a long time. It will never be replaced completely by BD. Probably BD will never reach the market size of DVD’s peaktime, though it will reach a significant volume. This is also due to competing storage formats like HDD, SSD and USB.

The unexpectedly rapid fall in price of Blu-ray discs, so early in the commercialisation of the format, makes the economics of BD replication/authoring very challenging especially in view of the heavy investment required. What needs to happen to make it a viable, long-term business for independents?

This is probably more a question for replicators. Prices for recordable media is still quite high though we see increased production capacity allowing lower prices in the market.

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 in the absence of a level-playing field. Going 'green' only becomes a public relations exercise. Do you agree or disagree, and what should be done?

Though it might make little difference in actual sales, going green is an important feature for the future. Verbatim looks for alternatives within all its product range, today often focusing on the packaging and power consumption (e.g. external harddisks).

3D has taken the market by storm, at least in terms of announcements. Given that Blu-ray has yet to establish a strong position in the market, with consumer having acquired a BD player and a HDTV screen fairly recently, is it your view that the industry is moving too quickly?

3D comes too early, some more technical development needs to be undertaken. Preferably only one standard needs to be implemented as consumers dislike a choice of standards.

One keeps hearing alarmist opinion about the quick demise of packaged media in the wake of online delivery. What is your view as to how long discs will be around? And how to you plan this transition?

Due to the large installed base and ease of use, optical media will continue to be around for the near and medium future. Though volumes will decline significantly, the products will continue to be around. Still many people prefer having their data in-house as ‘cloud storage’ is still regarded with a question mark regarding data integrity and safety.

Films on solid state/Flash memory, Holographic disc, 4,000-line Super high-definition are advanced technologies at varying state of development. Do you see any of them entering the consumer market and, if so, what you reckon are their time frame?

We don’t see these yet due to high pricing. For the near future they are likely to remain marketing tools, mainly....

Article Comments

comments powered by Disqus