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Industry practitioners speak
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 LEON KOHLEN, Founder & CEO of authoring pioneer i-Frame in The Netherlands.
DVD celebrated its 10 anniversary last year. How many more years are we going to see DVD around? Are there lessons in the development of the DVD format that could/should be applied to Blu-ray?
We will see DVD for another 5 years or more. Look at the VHS, it is still out there.
Do you think Blu-ray discs will eventually replace completely DVDs or will they only partially replace them, becoming a niche, albeit big?
I don’t think Blu-ray will replace DVD completely. In the next 5 years, the window of opportunity for Blu-ray to be really successful and beat online media is getting smaller and smaller. For Blu-ray to be as successful as DVD, we have to push the format harder in ways like releasing BD titles earlier (already done by Warner) and at some point just stop making DVD altogether. But look at VHS, we can still buy them. We need to start the battle for Blu-ray to survive as we did with the format war for HD DVD vs Blu-ray. More attention and education for the end user is needed.
The unexpectedly rapid fall in price of Blu-ray discs, so early in the commercialisation of the format, 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?
The unexpectedly rapid fall was, in truth, to be expected; Blu-ray prices should be the same as DVD. This means the AACS fee has to come down, made simpler or even disappear to make small numbers of replicated BD discs affordable. The cost of replication and authoring has already come down a lot. And again we need to push harder to make Blu-ray more successful.
Interactivity and BD-Live, in particular, are Blu-ray's key unique selling propositions. Do you think enough publishers and studios 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?
Most consumers will at the moment appreciate cheap vanilla over expensive BD-Live discs. The independents seem to forget that they need to have the BD-Live assets available for a long time and they might need to see it as a separate product. The BD disc is just giving access to online content what can be accessed in many other ways. What I find interesting is the possibility to make other languages and subtitles available online over time. This could mean releasing Blu-ray titles earlier in the original format and add dubbed audio and subtitles available over time.
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?
We have been involved since day one of DVD and even the years before. In 1994 I was already involved with CD-i and Video CD. This gives us 15 years of experience in digital video, encoding and authoring. We will see a shift from SD to HD in Europe. It is slowly happening and this will mean more encoding for Blu-ray, VOD and online. Services as subtitling, graphics design and java programming will be around for years to come.
Films on solid state/Flash memory, Holographic disc, 4,000-line Super high-definition, Networked TVs, 3D home entertainment are advanced technologies at varying state of development. Do you see any of them entering the consumer market and, if so, in what time frame?
It will happen, but not in the near future. We need something impressive that is new. 3D might be it, but we need one standard and real 3D content, not 2D film content converted to 3D. More lines, more storage, etc, is just more of the same and I don’t think the consumer is waiting for this. We need a new ‘wow’ factor to get the consumers to buy something new (again).
Contact: www.iframe.nl...
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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