By DVDJ Mediapar (Bruce Apar > dvdj@dvda.org)

1) HD PACKAGING INSPIRED BY BUZZ LIGHTYEAR

Lionsgate's new Blu-ray Disc packaging says at bottom of its face, "Beyond High Definition," evoking the battle cry of Toy Story's endearingly hapless hero, Buzz Lightyear, who bellowed, "To infinity and beyond."

What, you ask, is "beyond" high definition on a Blu-ray disc? Come on, stop being literal. This is Hollywood marketing, where you even can create out of whole cloth a fictional movie critic and ghostwrite superlative quotes for him about your new movie and put the phony quote in a real ad as if it's genuine praise ... like a certain studio (not Lionsgate) did some years ago. Hey, you want literal copy points in your collateral or packaging, then go into pharmaceuticals or food processing, where the labels are regulated. [CLICK ON READ MORE TO CONTINUE ...]

Blu-ray packaging from Lionsgate says 'Beyond High Definition' at bottom.

 

These menus also showcase -- through their layered, control-room motif -- the unprecedented visibility behind the scenes of epic moviemaking that clearly is a passion – and mission – for King Kong and Lord of the Rings maestro Peter Jackson.

The Post Production Diaries included on the bonus disc in this package continue a DVD saga that Universal and Jackson began last December, when the film was released in theaters. The studio and epicmaker at that time cleverly exploited the movie's mammoth marketing coverage by simultaneously marketing an elaborately boxed two-disc DVD set branded “King Kong: Peter Jackson’s Production Diaries.”

Apart from being a nod to the power of the K² franchise and to Jackson’s magnetic pull, this digital chronicle is notable for how it husbands virtually real-time online video to create value-added packaged media, complete with four production artists' prints and a high-gloss booklet of date-specific production diary stills and fluffy text.

The 131 days of production diaries documented on the two discs – spanning September 6, 2004 through April 8, 2005 – first appeared on the Kong website within a day of each diary entry being produced on set. Compiled en toto, and pressed into service as a film fan’s off-the-shelf, live-action guide to moviemaking, it is a bountiful bargain, infinitely more informative and intriguing than the ersatz backlot tours that are a mainstay of studio-owned theme parks.

BY DVDJ MEDIAPAR BRUCE APAR

DVDJ Bruce Apar

It’s not a word you see every day, or even once a year, but it’s a beaut: Schadenfreude (pronounced shaad-en-froyd). Merriam-Webster defines it thusly: “enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others.”

Schadenfreude, for example, is never in short supply during hard-fought political campaigns, especially the quadrennial U.S. Presidential primaries, which start off with a phalanx of contenders who are winnowed by process of defeat down to one candidate. Each candidate’s objective, essential to survival, is to eliminate the competition.

Apparently, Ray and DaViD, the high-def disc twins of bluish extraction who are waging a sibling rivalry that would make Cain and Abel blush, also have reached the conclusion that not only is peaceful co-existence not a viable option, but that the opposition must be humiliated as well as vanquished.

(click Read More... to see the rest)

THE NEW SUPPLY CHAIN GANG 

BY DVDJ MEDIAPAR (Bruce Apar > dvdj@dvdj.info)

If anything, shining a brighter Klieg light on the entertainment industry’s end-to-end supply chain is overdue. It’s routinely spoken of at conferences and on page as separate links, but rarely are they all connected at one time in one place, for the edification of those who must not only manage the chain but strengthen and streamline it simultaneously. No mean feat. So we’re glad to see a joint effort coming together in the form of Entertainment Supply Chain Academy, or ESCA (http://entertainmentsupplychain.com/ ).

 Cranks like me might wonder whether this shape-shifting business of ours – whatever it is or is becoming -- needs another “academy,” especially when a concept like the DVD Academy, which I admired, recently met its Waterloo after five years of existence. (I hope they commemorated the occasion with Napoleon brandy.)

 I have my own conclusions about why the DVD Academy – smartly founded by noted Variety and Video Business home entertainment journalist Scott Hettrick (who I immodestly take credit for “discovering” some 16 years ago at The Kansas City Star) – was just put out to the La Brea Tar Pits’ pasture by Scott’s former employer, but this is my blog, not my consulting practice (which is kept cloistered in a whole other wing of the ever expanding Mediapar headquarters), so I won’t bore you with a detailed, pro bono analysis.

What if they had a format war but nobody showed up?

The DVD Guy

By Bruce Nazarian, "the DVD Guy"

LIVE FROM CES - CESdate 01.08.2006- DVDJ @ CES 2006

 as reported by Bruce Apar > dvdj@dvdj.info

Visitors to this site could be among the first to order Pioneer’s forthcoming Blu-ray disc recorder, BDR-101A, due in late March for under $1000. Watch this blog the next couple days and we’ll post the contact information for Sandra Benedetto of Pioneer, who told me to direct DVD Association members and site guests to her directly if they are interested in owning the pioneering product. When her contact info is posted, we’ll provide more details on the product specs and other features.

In addition to content developers, Sandy told me the model is aimed at high-end duplication markets, but that as of this writing, there is no distribution channel that has been identified, hence the personal touch she is offering prospective professional customers. She did say there’s a possibility Pioneer ultimately will decide to sell direct anyhow.

Ms. Benedetto appeared on a panel at the Storage Visions conference co-located with CES. Also presenting were holographic recording proponents InPhase and Optware. Another journalist had told me here in Vegas that Toshiba, which has a small financial stake in Optware, told him it is keeping its options open on which holographic technology it supports, which would appear to be a minor victory for InPhase.

First, let’s get our priorities straight: Stevie Wonder was wonderful Friday night in his private performance at the Monster Retailer Awards. He had many in the crowd of 4000 in the Paris Hotel ballroom up on their feet, bopping and bobbing. There were those who could be seen nodding off before took the stage at close to 11:00 p.m., but Stevie was their wake-up call. (This CES is like a meat grinder; just making your way through the aisles of the main hall is its own stress test. My early-line handicap on final CES attendance: 142,000. Just a guesstimate; I haven’t finished counting everyone yet.)

Presided over by “Head Monster” Noel Lee, arguably the CE industry’s most inspiring success story -- a former manufacturer’s rep with polio who’s created a masterful franchise on the most fungible of commodities, speaker wire and electronics connectors – Monster could teach other industry segments a lesson in smart and profitable branding, but more on that in a later blog.

Having worked the audience into a frenzy with his startling musicianship and unmatched range of voice and genres, the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, with his daughter Aisha by his side after they sang a beautiful duet, challenged the CE industry to do all it can to find innovative ways that allow “blind people and others with disabilities to enjoy your technology as well.” Coming from someone of such extraordinary accomplishment, I don’t at all mind admitting that sentiment brought a lump to my throat, in no small part due to thoughts of my late son, who had severe dwarfism.

LIVE FROM CES - CESdate 01.06.2006 - DVDJ @ CES 2006

 as reported by Bruce Apar > dvdj@dvdj.info

Today, in the subsiding buzz of splashy CES shindigs by HD DVD Promotion Group (Wednesday at Wynn Hotel where stadium theater seating was built in a meeting room), Blu-ray Disc Association (Thursday at Mirage’s Jet nightclub, bathed in blue light and packed to the rafters with press, studio and electronics people), and the platform-agnostic industry association Digital Entertainment Group, the post-party reality is setting in like quick-drying cement: “So we’re really going to have two formats?” one industry figure, who deals directly with both studios and electronics companies, plaintively, and rhetorically, asked me. The only response I could muster was the same one proffered to the previous person who made the same ominous observation: “I don’t know anymore what’s going on. It’s very confusing, and insane.” That’s the way this long-toothed observer feels.

Like so many others, I came to the show excited about the noise anticipated from the high-def digital disc Blues Brothers, Ray and DaViD. Like real siblings, these two seem to want to get along sometimes even as they slap each other around at other times. But now, without vouching for the other industry spectators of this prizefight that will be decided either by technical knockout or by the wallets of millions of judges, my mood is turning decidedly blue. This situation is not like memory cards, which are commodities and can survive several incompatible configurations marketed simultaneously. This is a curiously sad case of an industry not learning its lesson from the DVD-Audio and SACD debacle. As is the case with high-def disc, those formats were not commodities, but incremental upgrades, and they inspired the mass-market consumer to slouch and yawn.

LIVE FROM CES 2006 - CESdate 01.05.2006- DVDJ @ CES 2006

as reported by Bruce Apar > dvdj@dvdj.info

If this isn’t the best attended Consumer Electronics Show ever, I’ll be a unified high-def format’s uncle. In 33 years, I’ve never seen the press room so mobbed, and it’s been expanded from previous years. But no operable wi-fi signal. At a consumer electronics convention. Go figure. Or just go hard wire.

For Bill Gateskeeper’s keynote speech last night (01.04.06), I was among the standing room only crowd of more than 500 … in the “overflow” room. We watched a big-screen satellite uplink selling us a Bill of goods.

And he had plenty of them too. By my notepad, 16 pages’ worth. This edition of the “Mr. Bill” show ran more than 90 minutes, but for the sake of filing this first blog “Live from CES” for DVDA.ORG ASAP, I’ll just focus for now on high-def digital disc.

For those keeping score (this means you, Da Godfather Lou Skriba!), after Day 0 of The Show, January 4, I’d call i HD DVD 2, Blu-Ray coming to bat tonight with its press reception. 

During Bill’s Variety Hour and a Half, Microsoft announced that an outboard HD DVD player for Xbox 360 will be available by the end of 2006. Thus, as one of my journalist/analyst colleagues pointed out, unlike PlayStation 3, the added cost of a high-def drive will not be passed along to buyers of Xbox 360 as it will to PS3 customers. It’s an opt-in high-def feature.

as reported by Bruce Apar > dvdj@dvdj.info

In the days of vaudeville, they'd say of lifelong performers that they were "born in a trunk." Well, my professional life was born in a CES (Consumer Electronics Show). Several weeks after being graduated from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, I landed my first job, assistant editor of Hi-Fi Trade News. After telling me I was hired, the editor-in-chief, J. Bryan Stanton, told me to meet him at the airport the following Monday.

Thus was my very first day of work as an adult -- my first week of work, in fact -- spent at the Chicago CES in June 1973. That's right -- those were they halcyon days when there were not one but two -- count 'em -- two CE Shows each year, and both were in the Windy City. It literally was baptism by fire for me, just as the two shows were tests of fire and ice for exhibitors and attendees because the Chicago Junes can be sweltering and the Januarys are positively Arctic. 

 

'Bye 2005, Hi Def (Pt 1)

Hey Santa, where's my HD DVD player?

by DVDJ MEDIAPAR (BRUCE APAR > dvdj@optonline.net)

Part I: 'Bye 2005

It’s New Year’s Eve 2005. Do you know where our HD-DVD hardware and software is?

Call me naïve … or stubborn … or a cockeyed optimist … or just dumber ‘n dirt. But I have here in front of me Exhibit A, being a press release datelined exactly 359 days ago out of Las Vegas, Los Angeles AND Tokyo, declaring that “Several companies have announced plans to release HD DVD hardware and software by the end of 2005.”

I’m a patient fellow, and we have some time remaining, some minutes anyhow, for those companies to make good on that – uh – “plan.”

Fifty-one weeks ago, Blu-ray Disc Association staged a fitfully bizarre press conference in a institutional-drab, non-descript Las Vegas Convention Center meeting room, where “Megatrends” bestselling author and futurist John Naisbitt was the featured attraction. This ink-stained wretch of a reporter, no doubt made a tad more irritable by having to stand at the threshold of the room, just outside the open doors, craning my neck to glimpse the proceedings, was mouthing off to a content executive friend of long standing, who seemed as bemused as I was by Blu-ray’s Naisbitting the press hands that write about it: “This is what you do,” I declared in wise-ass mode, “when you have no news.” I only said what I could read on the faces of other journalists in the crowd, who no doubt were thinking, “What the f--- is this about? We came here to get some juicy facts about high-def discs hitting the market, not to a Borders book signing.”

Shortly thereafter, the same complement of press freeloaders – our motto is “We never met a buffet spread and open bar we didn’t like” – repaired to a Bellagio Hotel uber-hip nightclub, where the HD DVD forces staged a razzle-dazzle show of strength in numbers, replete with a big-screen trailer of HD DVD movies coming our way …. right … about … now!

This year … or actually next year, it’s worth noting that The Inter-Galactic Forces of Blu-Ray have considerably upgraded their press bling-bling to a – natch – nightclub, Jet at The Mirage, for A Celebration of the Format that Will Revolutionize Home Entertainment. After all this waiting, and the countless coverage expended on this next generation, I would not expect anything less.

Not to be outdone, and even to outdo its own Hollywoody 2005 CES event, HD DVD Promotion Group Presents Dinner & A Screening at CES, at The Strip’s newest attraction, Wynn Hotel & Casino.

Uh-oh. With not much time left before I turn into a pumpkin with Part I of this bifurcated blog that is two years in the making, I better go post.

But, like General Douglas MacArthur, I will return, like Sidney Sheldon, on the Other Side of Midnight.

'Bye 2005, Hi Def (Pt. 2)

Hey Santa, where's my HD DVD player?

by DVDJ MEDIAPAR (BRUCE APAR > dvdj@optonline.net)

Part II: Hi Def

"MY FRIEND IRMA"

by DVDJ MEDIAPAR (BRUCE APAR > dvdj@optonline.net)

[Full Disclosure: From November 2002 to November 2005, I was compensated by International Recording Media Association as founding Editor-in-Chief + Publisher of Mediaware Magazine, for which I remain Editor-at-Large, and will otherwise continue my relationship with the trade organization as an independent contractor.]

For those swimming upstream, at the manufacturing end, in the recorded media supply chain, the week after Thanksgiving in New York City conjures two annual rites of winter: the lighting of Rockefeller Center’s world-famous Christmas Tree and the high-end management conference hosted by International Recording Media Association (IRMA, http://www.recordingmedia.org).

Over the next week or so, I’ll blog on about some of the presentations at the Dec. 6 IRMA Management Summit, offering highlights and commentary of such speakers and topics as IRMA President Charles Van Horn on the challenges of packaged media in an online universe; Sony DADC’s Bob Hurley on opportunities in Universal Media Disc; Microsoft’s Jordi Ribas on next-generation high-def disc interactivity; and Midwest duplicator Inoversis’s Melodie Gee and mid-sized replicator Denon Digital’s Brian Wilson on how they view high-def technology and what media manufacturing is like outside the Hollywood axis.

First, some background ...

 "BONUS PACKAGING"

by DVDJ MEDIAPAR (BRUCE APAR > dvdj@optonline.net)

There’ s been a lot of talk in home entertainment circles – at seminars, in print, online, and in office suites of labels, retailers and their vendors – about the growing importance of packaging in the marketing, indeed in the very future, of physical media, which these days pretty much means DVD.

Two of the most imaginative and impressive examples of what can be done to enhance the ownership quotient (OQ) of DVD come from the same motion picture company – Universal Studios Home Entertainment, now of course part of NBC Universal.

The two collector's sets are seminal sitcom Leave It to Beaver, disguised as a schoolkid's lunchbox, and filmmaker John Hughes's coming-of-age trilogy, Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club and Weird Science, marketed in a box set titled Brat Pack Movies & Music Collection. Both can be seen in the photo above, being held by yours truly in my DVDJ lair.

 

Who ever thought we'd refer to ourselves as the OD Generation? No, not THAT kind of OD. Perish the thought. (And, sadly, people have perished from a different form of OD.) We're talking Optical Disc. OD-ities. O-D Wan-Kenobi. The Wizard of OD.

Granted, reflexively presuming that you, dear reader, are part of a singular chronological "generation" would be folly on this blogger's part. After all, the age range of DVD Association membership and this site's audience is quite diverse.

So, consider "Generation OD" to connote those of us whose professional lives are in some way -- any way -- connected to the polycarbonate-based form factor the world has come to know and love, to spin and play, to write and rewrite, to copy and carry and collect. You couldn't use that exact verbiage to describe HDD (hard disk drive) or USB or Flash Memory: We don't display hard drives in a cabinet, we don't really play USB sticks, and there's more sensory value in a stick of chewing gum than in those drab plastic flash cards.

“We are so busy producing that without the DVDA, I don’t know how we would communicate.”

Changing the Face of Medicine: Profiles of Achievement is the Web DVD winner of the 2004 DVD Excellence Award.  This award was given on September 30, 2004 in Los Angeles, CA.  The WebDVD award is given to a program that demonstrates excellence in enhancing a DVD title through the use of web-enabled content, with an emphasis on the seamless delivery of content from the DVD-Video, DVD-Audio and/or DVD-ROM zones of the disc with content from the Internet.  In the words of the judges, “Changing the Face of Medicine" is simply an outstanding disc.  It seamlessly blends the use of information on the DVD disc along with the information on the internet.  One quickly loses track if you are viewing information from the disc or the web.  It is transparent.”

Changing the Face of Medicine: Profiles of Achievement is currently on display at the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health at Bethesda.  The goal of the exhibit is to encourage young people to consider careers in medicine and public health.

Is it too late to find a bridge between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc?

I'm not sure, but we can hope - the ramifications of what two formats might mean is pretty staggering - double inventory for retailers, double the authoring and replication costs for studios, and double the work for authoring companies - hey, all things considered, that actually means more work for us!
BUT...