DVD suitable for multimedia convergance

Touted to be the next convergent medium of the future, DVD was the theme that was preached to the participants at the AsiaPac DVD conference held on November 20 and 21 in Singapore. Daphne Lee attended the event to find out how DVD can be an effective and wealthy medium for consumers as well as the broadcast, production and education industries.

A BETTER understanding of the digital versatile disk (DVD) technology has brought the participants and speakers from the broadcast, production and education industries closer together at the AsiaPac DVD conference and workshop.

The event proved that DVD is a versatile technology suitable as a storage and playback medium, and that it can deliver high bandwidth content to consumers connected to the Internet via low bandwidth.

Organised by APB and sponsored by A.C.E. Daikin and Ngee Ann Polytechnic's Digital Media Authoring Studio (DMAS), the conference presented a distinguished panel of speakers, one of whom was Ralph LaBarge, an award-winning DVD-Video, DVD-ROM and Hybrid DVD title developer.

Other speakers were Jim Taylor, author of DVD Demystified; Jeff Sunderland, founder of one of Australia's first DVD authoring facilities; Nick Tay, lecturer and manager of the DMAS training centre, and Harry Chua, general manager of Daikin's digital media division.

LaBarge said DVD is the key to multimedia convergence, because it is suitable to handle interactive multimedia programs. Its high-quality digital video and audio can be used in the next generation of consumer electronics products, replacing the existing VHS players as well as CD-ROM, CD-A and CD-R devices.

"DVD's strength is its ability to deliver high-quality multimedia content and to offer large storage capacity, even though its content is difficult to update once it has been published," he pointed out.

To overcome such difficulty, DVD can make use of the Internet to deliver real-time, updated content over long distances and from a wide variety of sources.

DVD is defined as a digital optical disc storage technology suitable for storing large amounts of data required by multimedia files. DVD comprises six official formats: DVD- Video, DVD-Audio, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD-RAM and DVD-RW.

For digital video, DVD supports nine camera angles; normal, pan-scan, letterbox and wide-screen aspect ratios; interactivity; still shows and slide shows with moderate-quality still images; parental control; and multiple story lines.

For digital audio, DVD supports linear PCM, Dolby AC-3 and MPEG-2 formats.

For delivery of digital multimedia convergence, La Barge recommended WebDVD because it has compelling attributes of DVD and the Internet.

Finally, he urged participants to update their knowledge on the DVD-Video and WebDVD formats because these formats are gradually being used in desktop video publishing and home DVD recording products so that consumers can publish their own content for playback on PC, DVD and game systems.

Consider incorporating Internet to DVD

THE Internet plays an important role in DVD by ensuring that the content remains updated.

"The problem a lot of people have is that you might buy a disc and then after watching it once or twice, it becomes like something on a bookshelf," said Harry Chua, general manager of A.C.E. Daikin's digital media division, at the AsiaPac DVD conference. "By continually having the Internet things to do with your disc, you can come back and re-use it. The Internet takes the old DVD content, repurpose it and give it a new angle."

If a DVD title is Web-enabled, there is also the dual benefit of the user communicating with the publisher and the publisher keeping track of its users and updating them with value-added content, added Nick Tay, lecturer and manager of DMAS training centre.

"If your customers love your product, they will look forward to your future products. Which means that you have established your own niche market," Tay noted.

According to Jeff Sunderland, founder of one of Australia's first DVD authoring facilities, he believes that WebDVDs and enhanced DVDs will proliferate in the marketplace and so, it is important that publishers learn how to author such DVDs as soon as possible before more publishers jump on the bandwagon in a year or two, thus toughening the competition.

When authoring a DVD title, a publisher has to consider compatibility and cross platforms of applications, Sunderland said.

Tay added that the biggest problem he encountered in creating a WebDVD title was the lack of a similar format or standard. As a result, a DVD title can react differently to different computer platforms.

But Chua pointed out that most people will not create Hollywood titles and so it is not critical to achieve 99.9 or 100 per cent compatibility on all DVD players.

He further admitted that numerous manufacturers of DVD players in the market has made it difficult to control or standardise the DVD format.

"In terms of supporting these different platforms, I don't think, in this day and age, that we will be able to do it, unless we are willing to author one simple title or spend lots of time trying to fix the manufacturing problem so that the title will work," said Chua.

"So we just make the title and make sure that it will be compatible with 89 per cent of [DVD] players," he conceded.

The other suggestion to achieve broad compatibility was to place most of the content in the DVD video space and to keep the HTML side of things simple, the panellists said.

Furthermore, to incorporate interactivity into DVD, the publisher should take into account his target audience and how familiar he is with the interactive technology.

Sunderland explained: "There are things that you can do on the WebDVD that are so much easier than you could ever do on DVD video. So what you do is that you put the elements on the DVD video, screen programs and chapters, and use the website to organise them."

The panellists also said they did not foresee prices of DVD titles to drop drastically in the future, but there are price differences around the world and high capital cost in DVD authoring.

Ralph LaBarge, award-winning DVD-Video, DVD-ROM and Hybrid DVD title developer, said DVD players sell for US$70 and catalogue titles for $10, and there is pressure to drop prices in the large mass market in the US.

"The difference [with the US] is that in Asia, DVD is expensive due to the availability of VCDs and pirated CDs," Tay added. "The price point is not so much the authoring process but rather what consumers are willing to pay for. At this point, it's all about marketing."

Chua said that as a content owner, it will be more sensible to put the content on DVD because the profit margin received by the publisher is four times more than that of the VCD and DVD piracy market.

Asia: A goldmine for DVD business

ASIA has great potential for creating business opportunities for DVD, said panellists during a discussion on opportunities for DVD developers in Asia. "I think Asia has a fantastic opportunity to some extent ... because the languages that exist in the region is set up to Zaps do that," said Jeff Sunderland, founder of one of Australia's first DVD authoring facilities.

DVD publishers can target major corporations that have multi-lingual ties, specifically aiming at applications with corporate space or business-to-business communication. DVD publishers can look towards museums or replacing traditional devices such as laser discs to increase the volume of the DVD sales.

He acknowledged that archival is another area where "there is so much content and it's just a matter of finding it and looking at the business model to prove that the works are planned".

One area that the audience was advised to steer clear of is that of feature films, where the DVD market has already hit saturation, but more profitable areas would be education and WebDVD, said Nick Tay, lecturer and manager of DMAS training centre.

DVD's growth potential here in Asia is also prompted by the relatively new influx of DVD in the region. "The infrastructure is built from the ground up and you bring in the technology, you teach people, you build new areas of revenue flow and the sky is the limit right now," said Michael Thomas, director of sales for Zapex, Asia-Pacific.

As many countries in Asia do not have broadband for a long time and opportunities for introducing content on DVD are more than in the US where broadband is readily available, said Thomas.

In order for DVD authoring houses to be profitable in Asia, Sunderland suggested picking up on the areas that Hollywood has not picked up.

"We have some advantages being a PAL region and everything that comes out of here is pretty much NTSC, so you can use the PAL as a niche market to concentrate on," he said.

The Hollywood market, with its high capital infrastructure, is a difficult market to break into, Sunderland admitted, unless one can establish some connections and local acquisitions in the Hollywood market.

Instead of focusing on the Hollywood market, Tay suggested taking content created within Asia for the Hollywood market.

"No one said we cannot reverse the situation and the large size of the US market warrants the demand especially for content in the Chinese language," he noted.

A publisher who tries to distribute his title should also consider the Internet. If a local title is to be distributed to an international market, the publisher should send the content to Hollywood to make the appropriate changes in order to suit an international audience.

Harry Chua anticipated that the demand for content would increase with Asians living overseas because they would want to continue to have ties with their home countries.

"They are not going to find titles in the retail stores. For example, for a niche market like the Philippines which has lots of its own people outside the country, the link back is critical," he said.

As for the future of DVD, Sunderland said his business opportunity will derive from the corporate market in Australia, in areas such as business communications, corporate presentations and TV commercials.

A DVD publisher can target his content specifically at a certain market. "You can localise the video, transfer it outwards to the region and then internationalise it," Tay explained.

Royalties and rights were another issue that was discussed among the panellists.

"When you are looking to acquire rights for content, there are two main models you can use. One is if you have a bunch of money to go out and purchase. Some of the rights for films may be relatively inexpensive," said Chua.

The other alternative, according to him is to look for an official content producer who owns the rights to negotiate for a royalty base.

DVD bridges all platforms

DVD takes a content jump from CD and as far as video quality is concerned, Taylor said that it "brings us into a new generation, first medium that bridges across all different platforms that works equally well in [TVs] and computers".

DVD will supplant a lot of existing formats as the medium of the new millennium, he added.

DVD can act as a bridge for many types of transitions from standard-definition TV to widescreen TV and high-definition TV, as well as from videocassette recording to digital recording: "DVD is digital but it works on analogue TV, it can have both 4:3 and widescreen, it can be interlaced and progressive, passive or active for recording.

As more people make the shift to HD, they will require sources of HD content and DVD will be one of the best sources of pre-recorded media, he added.

"As a producer of content, making sure that you put the highest quality of video onto a disc now means that as the world of HDTV grows larger, your content will be a prime candidate for those disc players [because] people will be looking for something better than VCS or VHS and DVD is one of the best options for that," Taylor noted.

"You can design a disc and make it interactive, bring up additional information, jump anywhere in the disc, create games and rich interactive environments," said Taylor.

Stories or movies can be told on the traditional linear manner and with DVD, you can create an entire background behind the movie like a screen play and create history for the characters in the movies.

"You watch a movie and there's a character that does certain things and acts in a certain way and often times the director actually have in their heads this entire history of the character which you never get to experience in the movie. They would like this content to be available to the viewers," Taylor said.

"We will be able to connect video and audio content to information that are available on the Internet from the education, government base side and databases and online encyclopedias and so on," said Taylor.

"We will be able to connect video and audio content to information that are available on the Internet from the education, government base side and databases and online encyclopedias and so on," said Taylor.