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An industry practitioner 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 STEFAN BOCK, CEO of msm-studios, a premium service provider for mastering, post-production and media creation, based in München, Germany.
DVD celebrated its 10th anniversary last year. How many more years are we going to see DVD around? Are there lessons in the development of DVD that could/should be applied to Blu-ray?
I guess, DVD will be around for another 5-10 years. The lessons that we should have learnt is that DVD prices fell too quickly leading to a loss of value in the consumers’ eyes. This lesson is already forgotten. Blu-ray’s price is dropping even faster than with DVD!
Do you think Blu-ray discs will eventually replace completely DVDs or will they only partially replace them, becoming a niche, albeit big?
Blu-ray will not replace DVD completely. Because content owners are not in a position to split their budget between DVD and Blu-ray, they might eventually go for BD only. But this will take a while. You can already notice that DVD players no longer sell, because people tend to buy BD players instead.
The rapid fall in price of Blu-ray discs, so early in their commercialisation, 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?
It is not only the BD disc that fell in price, but also the authoring work. It’s hard for the authoring houses to cover their costs, and on the long run the quality will suffer. This might damage badly the image of Blu-ray. The consumers should be made aware that low retail prices have damaging consequences on the final BD product on the long run.
Interactivity and BD-Live, in particular, are Blu-ray’s key unique selling propositions. Do you think enough publishers 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?
To enable BDs with BD-Live features is not only a challenge to be implemented into the disc, it is also a big effort to keep BD-Live content up-to-date. I can’t see an infrastructure at most studios to deal with this. I can’t think of any application being a killer application, but there might be some interesting concepts that relate to individual discs. End-users of course want to have all the features for no extra money!
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. Going ‘green’ only becomes a public relations exercise. Do you agree or disagree, and what should be done?
It seems to be a big marketing issue. The reality seems to be more sobering. When it comes to money, it doesn’t seem to be so important.
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? And do you see opportunities, if any?
We have set up a wide range of services around authoring. This enables us to react quickly on the different developments in the market. Our customers need many more services that just the pure C&A job.
Films on solid state/Flash memory, Holographic discs, 4,000-line Super high-definition, Networked TVs, 3D home entertainment are advanced technologies at varying stages of development. Do you see any of them entering the consumer market and, if so, in what time frame?
The only system that could succeed would be Networked TVs. Everything else is too far away. I can’t see any of these entering the consumer market before 2015. People have just heavily invested in their new TV sets. They won’t replace them so quickly.
Contact: www.msm-studios.com ...
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Do you own what you bought?
Do you own all the discs in your collection? Be honest – aren’t there a few that you ‘borrowed’ from friends and haven’t yet got around to returning? What about those DVDs that you always meant to give back to the neighbour, but now she’s moved away…?
You can play discs, watch them, even copy them, without anyone stopping you. Of course it would be illegal, but is it really likely that the Serious Crime Squad is going to break down the door and confiscate your library of Bob the Builder DVDs because you made copies to give to the kids?
We are used to physical media ‘just working’, regardless of where it came from, how long you’ve had it and what technical standards it uses. Sure, CD-i players are hard to come by these days, but in the main, once acquired, most hardware lets you access the original content forever.
Imagine then that you put your disc in the trusty player you bought in 1994 and a message appears “You don’t have the rights to play this disc”. The player is right – you picked it up at that party you gatecrashed in the 1990s and ‘discovered’ it a week later.
Guiltily you try another disc, and another, and realise that all the discs in your collection, paid for or not, are blocked.
Not only that but all your friends are experiencing the same problem – none of their CDs or DVDs work anymore, every unit in the player park is revolting rather than revolving.
Wow, that was a nightmare you’d rather not have again. You wake in a sweat and make a coffee, grateful that this was only a bad dream. Selecting the Music Video you downloaded last week on your Media Centre PC, déjà vu spoils your view: “You do not have the rights to play this track.”
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