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.

Still, it’s too early in the life of ESCA to carp on nomenclature. “Academy” sounds scholarly, for one, and that term doesn’t put it at odds with industry “associations,” namely those chaperoning it into existence: Media-Tech Association and DEG: Digital Entertainment Group.

 Besides, any initiative claiming a braintrust of supply chain expert Devendra Mishra and media industry impresario Martin Porter Associates has my vote. Co-locating the conference with DEG’s annual membership meeting (June 20-21 in L.A.) makes perfect sense, affording the Academy a built-in base of qualified prospects to register for the educational presentations.

 IF, ANDS & BUTS

 BUT … since I just ambled over to my consulting wing, I’m in the mood to mind someone else’s business. (I’ll just bill ‘em on a deferred payment plan for the free feedback.)

 Scanning the ESCA Advisory Board listed on its website suggests a provincialism that the removable optical media industry needs to shed, not flaunt or nurture. Consider the very phrase “removable optical media.” It’s finite in an age of boundless options.

 The essence of digital media is its morph-ability, to freely emigrate from a native platform to a host of other hosts, either staying intact or deconstructing into tiny pieces. Whether by design or circumstance, for a digital media organization born in 2006 not to look beyond a single form factor is a recipe for stagnation. It’s a strategy for growth with “plateau” written all over it.

 The same admonition could apply as well to DVD Association, whose name, after all, is glaringly self-defining, if not self-limiting. Let’s just acknowledge once and for all that no form factor is an island, entire unto itself, and be done with it.

 For that to take hold, though, an affinity group such as this nascent ESCA Advisory Board is well advised to reach beyond the familiar, and very logical, optical disc executives to embrace, or at least invite into its fold, agents of related goods and services and disciplines. Reflecting the range of topics on its preliminary agenda, that includes RFID, process control, enterprise solution and logistics practitioners, as well as digital delivery professionals.

WHERE'S THE RETAILER?

 I’d be surprised if those segments already are not being solicited for representation on the ESCA Advisory Board – although the manifest of members is not asterisked as “In Formation” – because it does not yet include the focal point of all this: retail. That’s most likely not because major merchants haven’t been asked, but, giving ESCA the benefit of the doubt, because retailers are notoriously – and understandably – secretive, and reluctant to cozy up too close, outside of the day-to-day workflow, either to each other or to vendors.

 While we’re at it, and while we’re on DVDA’s website, shouldn’t “end-to-end supply chain” also include the “content chain,” namely the creation of the logical portion of the disc as well as the physical? There would be no supply chain were it not for those who author the product. Is there a place for digital media producers and developers in this ESCA conference? If there is, DVDA operators are standing by.  If there isn't, ESCA needs to be more creative in its thinking.

 It’s also sensible that a new org doesn’t try to be too many things to many people, and purposely focuses its initial efforts on a manageable target.

 That said, it also can’t be ignored or wished away that these days the optical disc has a big target stamped on it by an increasing number of digital businesses. They know that to prime their own revenue streams, it helps to milk dry the cash cow that has been DVD these past eight years.

Optical disc can go a long way to protecting, and extending, its future with an insurance policy written by analogous digital technologies for which DVD is a support system, storage device, marketing vehicle or other media partner. In the emerging eplex -- end-to-end electronic entertainment environment -- a supply chain that isolates itself to physical media alone will find dwindling demand.