Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
10 years - ahead with DVD and Beyond
The 17,500 professionals from over 100 countries who visit our website every month will have noted its new name - DVD and Beyond. In truth, it is an amendment rather than a name change, says JEAN-LUC RENAUD, Editor & Publisher, in order to reflect what the online platform has been offering for a few years now. It is encapsulated in its tagline: "Europe's premier online source of news, data and analysis for professionals involved in DVD, Blu-ray and new delivery technologies."
The catchy DVD Intelligence identity has been a powerful tool to establish our service even as our brief expanded beyond the sole focus on the DVD format.
'DVD Intelligence' was the name of the industry newsletter we launched at the commercialisation of the format in 1997. It morphed into the current website in 2003. So, we celebrate this year its 10th anniversary with a little name tweaking that better reflects what we have been providing.
Times change and no condition is permanent. But, despite the prophets of doom, the disc refuses to die. DVD and Blu-ray remain the largest source of revenue for the movie industry. The Entertainment Merchants Association calculates that 81% of consumer spending on filmed entertainment come from disc sales and rentals. It is, thus, more timely than ever to keep doing what we have done from the start: tracking the changes in the marketplace and ascertain their impact on the packaged media professionals.
The new name and URL of the website (www.dvd-and-beyond.com) bring it into line with its annual printed companion, the DVD and Beyond magazine, now in its 15th year (in preparation for a September release). Our regular News Updates, emailed to 8,100 recipients, will also be renamed.
So, for the foreseeable future, we will remain the platform of choice, perhaps the only platform, where all the links in the supply chain - content owners, publishers, distributors, replicators, authoring houses, packagers, but also optical disc tool manufacturers, products and solutions suppliers, and duplicators, not to mention trade bodies - will find a home for independent, actionable news, analysis and perspectives.
Posted 20.03.2013
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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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