Europe's online source of news, data & analysis for professionals involved in packaged media and new delivery technologies
Features
Towards a new world order in mobile content
Social networks and mobile applications are putting immense pressure on content owners to quickly roll out mobile content services that provide affordable and exhaustive content selections over-the-air. Screen Digest analyst JULIEN THEYS analyses the challenges. Read More...
Get those glasses ready - 3D is headed for your living room
A by-product of the migration to digital projection in cinemas is a re-emergence of a 1950s phenomenon... 3D movies. Hollywood now wants to bring the 3D experience into your home. BILL FOSTER, Senior Technology Consultant at Futuresource, explains. Read More...
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. Read More...
The view from a systems reseller
Systems resellers are the glue that ties toolmakers with creators. Cambridge-based ROM Data Ltd is such a company. STEVE POWER, its CEO, shares his view of the market he is serving. Read More...
Industry practitioners speak
HARALD GERICKE, Managing Director of platin media productions, a German authoring and post-production studio, shares his views on things past, present and yet to come with JEAN-LUC RENAUD, publisher of DVD Intelligence. Read More...
Industry practitioners speak
NEIL GOODALL, CEO of Testronic Laboratories, the leading quality insurance provider for the home entertainment industry, shares his views on things past, present and yet to come with JEAN-LUC RENAUD, publisher of DVD Intelligence. Read More...
Industry practitioners speak
ANDREA SOLTESZ, Managing Director of authoring and production company Media Vision Ltd in Budapest, Hungary, shares her views on things past, present and yet to come with JEAN-LUC RENAUD, publisher of DVD Intelligence. Read More...
Filtering & graduated responses against online video infringers
With France’s so-called HADOPI law just voted, JIM BURGER, Partner at law practice Dow Lohnes, takes stock of the various measures for suppressing illegal Internet file sharing, considered or already implemented around the world. Read More...
Online movies: The cost of domination
Consumers are spending more and more on buying and renting movies online. But the sector is dominated by hardware companies prepared to sell content at a loss to add value to and promote their core businesses, making it all but impossible for standalone movie stores to survive, explains MARIJA JAROSLAVSKAJA, research analyst at Screen Digest. Read More...
Packaged media's ecological awakening
The packaged media industry is awakening to ecological concerns. TRACY SHELDON, Marketing Director, AGI Media Europe, clarifies some of the macro issues at play, distils how they relate to the industry and looks at how packaging plays a role in this complex puzzle. Read More...
Patently speaking
The DVD format has grown at a pace exceeding any other consumer electronics format. MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License played a small, but vital role in the DVD format’s success, says MEGUMI KOMIYA, Feature Editor at DVD-Intelligence. Read More...
Assessing the online threat
That the future of music resides in downloads is not news to video content owners, but it is only in the last year or so that they have begun to accept that online delivery is also a serious threat to their own traditional routes to market, says DAVID MERCER, Principal Analyst at Strategy Analytics. Read More...
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. Read More...
Mobile TV in search of a viable business model
BARRY FLYNN, Principal Consultant at Farncombe Technology, sees no reason to review the conclusion he reached in these pages last year, namely, that concerns that the growth of mobile TV might cannibalise the DVD business are still misplaced. Mobile TV is yet to find a way of becoming a mass-market proposition. Read More...
Memoirs of a DVD virgin
When DVD appeared in UK high street stores in 1998, MARK SAXE was Production Director of BBC Video, responsible for the end-to-end creation of all video products. So the task fell to him and his team to fast become the in-house DVD expert. Here is his kiss-and-tell account... Read More...
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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