10th Anniversary: A pioneer looks back ... and forward

As the Summit delegates made their way home through the wintry snows of Versailles in early December 1997, it was hard for them to believe that DVD would become the massive success we now know it to be. BOB AUGER, from IT consultancy Newmérique – who was there – says there are lessons to be learnt for Blu-ray.

The DVD Consortium (which transformed into the DVD Forum in May that year) had refined a single format from a diverse range of proposals and at last it was ready to be commercialised – or so we thought… As it turned out, a number of lessons had to be learned along the way.

Back then, with a few years of the twentieth century still to run, the battle of the audio formats for Europe (AC-3 vs. MPEG-2) was still being fought, DVD-9 yields were the subject of bar-room jokes, clients were few and far between and the price of a DVD player was well above the SSD line. Financial backers were starting to fear for their investment and some ‘experts’ were expressing the view that the ‘non-recordable’ DVD disc would soon give way to the all-encompassing internet.

You had to be an optimist to believe that consumers would abandon their cheap, fully-featured VHS machines for a disc that appeared to be little more than CD with pictures. CD-i, with its memorable slogan ‘You’re only using half your TV’, eventually offered Full Motion Video, without creating much impact and the blanket of snow that descended that Tuesday evening ten years ago might have augured another high-tech consumer electronics disaster.

Back then, the list of PAL DVD ‘titles in print’ barely covered a single page and forecasts of ‘over 100 titles’ within twelve months seemed a little over-optimistic.

There was some production activity in Europe: Editions Montparnasse in France had released the ground-breaking Microcosmos DVD early in 1997. Concorde Video in Germany delivered the first PAL DVD feature film, 12 Monkeys with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt and in July 1997 Abbey Road authored the first commercial DVD-10, a Queen compilation.

BBC Worldwide embarked on what was to eventually become a notable series of Natural History DVDs with the first DVD-9 in Europe Supersense – A voyage of Animal Perception, produced in partnership with Panasonic and Electric Switch.

Of the Hollywood majors, the Philips-controlled Polygram was the only active participant in European DVD title creation; it was a meagre offering, even compared to the PAL laserdisc catalogue and DVD seemed to be going nowhere.

By the time the first DVD Primer (now DVD and Beyond) was published by Globalcom, optimism had returned. European DVD production could at last be described as an industry, needing a comprehensive resource guide to the various services on offer as the new millennium approached.

Looking back through the early editions of the DVD Primer, many names have come and gone but the common thread has been the initially unexpected but very welcome year-on-year sales growth that DVD has shown. Even today, analysts forecast that the market for DVD will decline slowly over the next few years, rather than ‘falling off a cliff’, as VHS did in the early years of the 21st century.

As replication costs fell in the late 1990s, it was a no-brain decision to switch from space-consuming VHS tapes to slim and capacious DVD discs. Apart from inferior quality, video cassettes are particularly prone to jam, brek and unravel in use. Even left to themselves, cassettes became unplayable in a very few years, as the magnetic forces that sustain them gradually faded away.

But the market needed more than just an extensive catalogue of titles, and the arrival of low-cost players from the Far East (notably China) set the seal on the success of the Digital Versatile Disc as the platform of choice for packaged home entertainment.

With widespread adoption in the world of IT, the scene was set for the continuing success of the DVD-ROM format. Educational publisher Dorling Kindersley released its World Atlas – a breakthrough DVD-ROM Interactive.

New challenges spun into view with the launch of the plus/minus battle of writable and re-writable discs. DVD+R and DVD-R (never publicly acknowledged as ‘minus R’ but the name stuck) finally put paid to the mantra ‘it doesn’t record’, even though the differing media were not compatible with many first-generation players.

A spin-off from the arrival of recordable discs was the high-quality ripping and copying software that came into the hands of the consumer, aided by ‘DVD Jon’ and his collaborators, who cracked the much-vaunted CSS (Content Scrambling System). This unleashed the spectre of uncontrolled copying, a cat-and-mouse battle between content owners and would-be hackers that continues today.

Player prices fell way below the SSD line – that’s Single Spouse Decision by the way, the price point at which you don’t have to worry about the reaction of your partner to an impulse purchase. At the Dublin DVD summit in March 2002, that figure was said to be around £199; more than four times the cost of a perfectly acceptable player today. Spouses were no doubt delighted.

By 2003, Bob C. Wright, CEO of NBC Universal, was quoted as saying “DVD is a business that provides such a reliable stream of profits to motion picture companies that I have rescinded previous reservations about the volatility of the movie business.” More than five years after its introduction, DVD was finally confirmed as a success.

Ten years on, the packaged media industry is confronting a new challenge – consumer acceptance of HD video on Blu-ray discs, now that the ‘early adoption’ stage is over. On the surface, there are similarities: an entrenched format has universal acceptance (DVD) and the competition has (gracefully) withdrawn from the stage.

Now that the format has to survive on its own merits, rather than as a costly freebie in a games console, what should we do to ensure that in ten years time we will be celebrating a decade of success for the HD optical disc?

Well first, let us get one thing out of the way. By any other name, Blu-ray discs would be as sweet a piece of technology as early 21st century skills can make them, but when consumers shop for packaged entertainment, they ask for DVDs. So tell them it’s the next-generation disc that will bring out the best on their HD-Ready TVs and say it’s the ‘Blu-ray DVD’ – it’s what the Press call them anyway. Settle the arguments with the DVD Forum, pay whatever it costs and use name recognition to smooth the transition. We will all benefit from keeping it simple.

Next, focus on the sound and picture quality. When DVD supplanted VHS, it did so on the basis of convenience and quality, not on the extras that initially consisted of little more than 10 pages of text-based filmographies. At this stage in the launch of HD packaged media, the development costs, lead times and complexity of BD-J programming reflect in an increased retail price that will hold back sales for all except blockbusters, impressive though some of the Blu-ray interactive features may be.

Thirdly, if we have faith in the superiority of the medium, we need to emphasise more than its ‘HD-Ready’ connections. The Blu-ray format is capable of superb performance, much better than any consumer product to date, including broadcast HD. It delivers sound and pictures that are clearly better than the competition, as long as all the links in the chain are top quality. Ensure that the marketing of Blu-ray supports those benefits the consumer can actually appreciate and don’t let low production standards and poor quality peripherals undermine that impression.

Ultimately, it’s the attach rate that governs the long-term future of Blu-ray. Sony has given the format a launch-pad by building it into the PS3 games consoles, but this has distorted the market since gamers are not, by definition, great movie watchers.

HD titles have to be seen as a volume product for the Home Entertainment consumer market, not as a niche product for PlayStation owners awaiting the release of Grand Theft Auto V. When Blu-ray players are as inexpensive and widely available as DVD is today, the unit sales of discs will define success or failure for the format. We all have an interest in the success of that market.

The glories of Blu-ray should be the turning point in public appreciation of what HDTV from packaged media can offer, but the high initial costs of new HD copies, stabilised wet-gate film transfers and audio re-mastering may mean that corners are cut on all but premium releases, just as they were on CD and DVD. The resulting image may have 1080 lines but it certainly won’t do justice to the system and, if the disc doesn’t live up to quality expectations, will potential customers come back for more or simply to demand a refund?

Of course, you can always try to explain why it doesn’t look quite right. The three-letter ‘SPARS code’ (ADD, DDD, etc.) that used to be found on CDs tried to explain that the content may be a bunch of old 45s (A) that have been copied onto a reel-to-reel recorder (A) but at least audio mastering is digital (D).

If you were around in the early days of DVD production, you will certainly have encountered clients with ‘source’ material on video cassette, who subsequently complain about the quality of the DVD. There was even a battle to be fought with the ‘professionals’, whose library of 1” videotapes may have been ‘broadcast quality’ but who were insulted to be told that ‘broadcast quality’ composite video wasn’t good enough for DVD.

Blu-ray needs to be perceived to be better home entertainment platform, a position it has yet to achieve. Third-generation players from Panasonic and others exploit ‘1080 HD’ flat screens – also called ‘True HD’ or ‘Full HD’, at least until the next generation comes along, which will no doubt be called ‘Real HD…’. Progressive scan performance; lossless audio; connectivity; memory card slots; these babies are ready for anything, except perhaps low-bit rate digital TV, web and camcorder images.

In fact, modern TV screens prove the old saying “the wider you open the window, the more dirt flies in”. All the links in the chain, including the actual ‘content’, must live up to the system potential. Legacy TVs were designed to conceal defects in transmission and VHS playback; modern screens show every imperfection.

Sony’s announcement of the BASE (Blu-ray Authoring and Solution Europe) project, with the aim of encouraging European AV production companies and content providers to produce and release BD movie titles is to be welcomed, particularly if this initiative allows independents to enter the realm of HD production alongside the Hollywood majors.

However, there are many more hurdles to overcome than simply mastering the technology. If the avowed intention is to increase the Blu-ray catalogue, ways must be found to allow developers to create titles for European distribution without the penalties associated with small runs of nominally different versions.

It is as much a matter of providing the right information for content owners as of education for technical service companies. Video publishers took some time to grasp the commercial opportunities inherent in the DVD format and even longer to understand that re-mastered back-catalogue material could be exploited to generate substantial revenues from collectors’ editions.

Affordable DVD players engendered increased disc sales and for several years the incremental revenues kept everyone happy. By selling discs for little more than the cost of the polycarbonate, the advantages gained in volume terms were outweighed by public expectations of ever-cheaper DVDs. There has to be a commercial payback from investment in content creation and therein lies the challenge. Lessons must be learned from the DVD experience or the finances of Blu-ray title production will be hard to justify.

The future success of high definition packaged media lies in sending consumers the message that Blu-ray is a premium product that offers the best experience and is an investment for the future. If the impression is given that it is just another competitor in the HD field, Blu-ray will find itself out in the cold.

Those DVD pioneers on a winter’s night in France a decade ago managed to navigate through the storms; can the HD enthusiasts of today pull off the same trick?...

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