Target the right market to produce successful DVD

Jeff Sunderland, managing director of DVDTECH in Sydney and founder of one of Australia's first DVD authoring facilities, share his views with APB on what goes into producing a successful DVD medium.

Can you explain why DVD is the convergent medium of the future?

Sunderland: DVD as a medium crosses many boundaries at both industry and application levels. Movies have games; games have sections of video from the movie; and TV commercials for ad agencies have print and collateral material on the DVD-ROM side of DVD Video. Conference DVDs have collateral that would normally be a CD-ROM distribution that rides on the back of the conference DVD for free. If we take hundreds of TV commercials as an application, are they for storage? Are they for database? Are they for a campaign to pitch for new business? The answer is all of these things. DVD is really only limited by your imagination.

If broadcasters, production houses and so on were thinking about setting up a DVD production studio, what should they consider?

Sunderland: Think about what market segment you are targeting. Quality is paramount. It differentiates at what level you are playing the game. Say, you are targeting at corporate applications, think about the speed of the set-up, how to deal with change quickly and effectively, and how to keep your customer informed without necessarily being on the phone all the time. Your capital decisions fall on this process. Think about what your strengths are. Do not necessarily try to do everything [but] think about strategic alliances to fill the gaps. Visit other production studios and ask about their tools. Use the resources of the DVD Association and read the DVD list - these are two great information sources. Place your order with software/hardware vendors on a 30 day trial basis.

Can you elaborate on the current role of DVD within interactive media?

Sunderland: While DVD is perfect for interactive media, it is somewhat under-utilised. Most of the major studios [producing] DVD titles are simply releasing their catalogue of VHS titles as DVD titles. They will add some interactive menus, behind-the-scene commentary, and a few other bells and whistles, but the main programme is still basically a two-hour movie that you watch from beginning to end without any interactivity. I think, once producers and directors start making movies with DVD delivery in mind, we will see more use of the interactive features of DVD. I also think the educational market is an excellent one for delivering interactive titles.

What do you think is the most successful DVD development studio and why?

Sunderland: That is a tough one. I have not visited every DVD authoring studio, so I am in danger of missing someone. The why is different for different types. One of the studios that impressed me a lot was the WEA authoring studio at Olyphant on the east coast of the US. You have this huge manufacturing plant and a relatively small team of 15-20 people feeding them with DLTs (digital linear tapes) every day. What impressed me about Rob Seidel's crew was communication. They had a timed daily meeting where the asset-management people would talk to those from graphics, audio, video, etc. They were very cohesive and that is very important because, when all of the disciplines come together, ultimately, the project flows. You could go on for days mentioning names but they are all good at what they do for different reasons. I hope that answers the question.

Developing a DVD requires many different stages - planning, production, authoring and even marketing. Can you describe the most successful DVD development story?

Sunderland: At the production/authoring stage, one very successful story was a disc that we did for the Australian National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour. It was complex because it had 5,000 points of interactivity. Its equipment base was more than 10 years old, such as the 19-inch rack [equipment] driving multiple laser discs in a PC which keeps things cached in memory. So, it appeared responsive to the user and touch screen. If you went behind the touch screen, you had this rack from floor to ceiling. Now, documentation on how this thing worked was scarce so we relied on people's memory.

What was rewarding from an authoring point of view was that the eventual DVD worked from a single Pioneer 7300D industrial player and replaced all of that old equipment. The speed was faster than using the old set-up. We even improved the interface design to have a fresher, more modern look and feel.

At the marketing stage, and from a marketing point of view, I would have to say Blair Witch, the movie. There was so much Internet-based activity around its release, the the AD website got literally thousands of hits in the first weekend of being live. It generated so much commercial business from a title that only cost a low five figures to produce.

One of the new applications for DVD is Web move to DVD. What do you think is the best example of a powerful Web DVD application?

Sunderland: I do not think we have even started to scratch the surface here. However, one of the things I saw recently was a DVD training, developed by a university for a biology lecture. The top quarter of the screen [showed] the lecturer doing what she did every day - teaching with the blackboard. Underneath was the actual text from Line 21, giving students the ability to search video.

The cool thing was the support materials occupying the right side of the screen such as the textbook, handouts, illustrations, etc. These were both on the disc and online so that as things change, they can be updated. This is a great step forward using the best of worlds: Broadcast- quality, searchable video and the changing world of the Internet.

What future does DVD have once the world becomes fully broadband?

Sunderland: You know, people said to me back in 1988 that if you were going to put a business together based on CD-ROM, you had better be quick because there would be fast lines of data communication to everywhere on the planet. Well, now in year 2000, Australia is a relatively forward-looking nation, which just got the ADSL (asymmetrical digital subscriber line) and its rollout will not take place until mid-2001. That gives every house the ability to pull down a DVD-9 movie in just over a day. Our need for storage increases faster than the speed of an affordable pipe does. As we move to HDTV and the number of lines doubles, so does our storage requirement. Corporates are just beginning to learn about the move from MPEG-1 to MPEG-2. We, the DVD community, are getting excited about high-density DVD. The answer: There will always be some kind of portable storage medium in the broadband world.

Jeff Sunderland will be one of the speakers on Designing Interactivity into DVD at the Asia Pac DVD seminar, organised by APB and which will be held from November 20-24, in Singapore.