Mister Gates Goes to Hollywood

Cable World, Sept 9, 2002

Byline: ANTHONY CRUPI

"The next time you see me, come heavy or not at all." - Junior Soprano

Bill Gates comes heavy. When the Microsoft chairman wants to establish dominance in a given sector, be it operating systems or interactive program guides, he brings out the big guns. Such was the case last week as Microsoft unveiled its highly anticipated digital media software, Windows Media Player 9 Series, at a posh launch party in Los Angeles.

The guns in question - Titanic director and self-proclaimed King of the World James Cameron, legendary Beatles producer Sir George Martin and rapper/actor LL Cool J - were wielded by Gates in an effort to convince the rest of Hollywood that Media Player 9 is the only alternative for encoding movies, music and Internet streams.

Celebrity pitchmen aside, what the evening came down to ultimately is the Redmond dictum, "It's Bill's world, the rest of us just live in it." Gates incorporated himself in the night's video demonstration, alternately taking on the persona of Austin Powers, Harry Potter and a doomed Titanic deckhand. (When in Rome...)

Whether the lighthearted skits and free champagne actually served to put a positive spin on Microsoft's image in Hollywood - many executives see Gates as a ruthless martinet dead set on controlling how their content is distributed over coax and the Internet - the choice of Cameron as a shill was a masterstroke. The director used Windows Media 8 to broadcast footage taken from a series of recent Titanic dives and said he plans to use the Media 9 in future deep-sea webcasts.

Michael Aldridge, lead product manager, Windows digital media division, said that the Media Player 9 (formerly code-named "Corona") has been in development for over three years at a cost of about $500 million. It promises to do no less than "dramatically improve the entire digital media experience," Aldridge said.

The clips shown during the presentation demonstrated that "Media Player 9 can create video images comparable in quality to MPEG-4 at twice the speed," Aldridge said. The release of Microsoft's new audio and video codecs - which, like MPEG-4, use a smaller bit size - makes this possible. The company estimates that content creators can get 20% smaller files with the same quality they get now, a ratio which could allow for studios stuffing high-definition movies into ordinary DVDs.

Security was the other big issue of the night, with Gates noting that piracy remains a major hurdle in getting Hollywood to go digital. Aldridge said the platform's digital rights management (DRM) scheme should make studio heads breathe easier. "We've always been ahead of the game as far as DRM is concerned," Aldridge said. "With the Media 9 Series, we're offering the world's first live DRM, which will enable content providers to encrypt on the fly. Nobody has been able to do that before."

Meanwhile, rival RealNetworks announced that its Helix Universal server, which was launched this summer to support other media formats, would support Media 9 Series content delivery and playback.

Larry Jacobson, president and COO, RealNetworks, said his company's universal approach would "stimulate the marketplace," although ultimately, agnosticism is all about maintaining market share. "The more innovation we show, the more likely we'll win," Jacobson said.