Will the MiB give DVD a sense of identity?

Electronics Times, Sept 11, 2000

With cheap video and pin-sharp digital TV, has DVD been able to establish a place in the market yet? By Paul Dempsey

It is worth looking at the almost offhand way in which Paramount Pictures has been releasing Star Trek

For DVD to take off as a mass market format, it absolutely must differentiate itself from VHS and - often forgotten - digital TV (DiTV).

If someone just wants to buy a film, VHS is the familiar and ubiquitous format. The tapes are also almost 50% cheaper than most DVD discs.

Meanwhile, for picture quality, DiTV has been delivering a significant quality improvement for most viewers in both picture and sound, even though the compression ratios are a little too generous.

So DVD's main advantages of crystal clear viewing and Dolby Digital audio or DTS (also possible via DiTV) are, arguably, not the big pulls they first appeared to be.

So what is next, then, if DVD is not to go the way of the laserdisc and become essentially a medium for film buffs and technophiles?

Part of the answer lies in interactivity, tapping into the wider market's familiarity with games consoles and the like to allow the software - typically some Hollywood product - to be presented as "more than just a movie".

Here, the market has encountered another set of problems, particularly outside the US, aka Region One (R1). A large number of R1 discs have become available that luxuriate in the possibilities of the DVD format.

Fight Club, the controversial Brad Pitt-led musing on 21st century masculinity, has been issued in a two-disc boxed set, using multiple angles, commentaries, analysis of special effects sequences, on-set featurettes and a `hidden' (and hilarious) Easter egg of a merchandising catalogue.

Titus, the Shakespearean adaptation just released in UK cinemas, has received similar treatment, with director Julie Taymor outlining her unique (if contentious) vision in depth. The list of superb R1 discs goes on and on. But a major problem has been that, more often than not, the extras have not made it across the Atlantic to us viewers here in Region Two (R2).

Sometimes it is because a film changes distributor from country to country and issues of copyright prevent extra documentaries and the like from being duplicated. Another reason is that some of the disc capacity used for US extras is taken up in Europe by multiple language and subtitle options. Also Pal frames take up 15% more space on a disc than their US NTSC counterparts.

Laziness

More typically, though, the R2 discs that emerge seem to be a product of laziness and the assumption that Europeans are always happy to pay more than Americans for less.

Of course, a DVD player can be `chipped' so that it will play R1 discs. But that also involves shopping for films over the Internet and `fiddling about with the box' in a way that might not appeal to many mass market consumers. (It is worth remembering that while most UK players today are thought to have been chipped, major DVD player suppliers still believe that the market is only just leaving the early adopter stage.)

But last week, there was a sign that things are beginning to change. Columbia TriStar, part of the Sony empire, rolled out a global release of Men in Black, the Will Smith-Tommy Lee Jones sci-fi comedy hit.

Thanks to the Labor Day holiday, the UK in fact got the disc 24 hours ahead of north America. But an even more positive development for the DVD market is that the two-disc top-of-the-range release was packed with the same goodies for all markets.

Indeed, a laudable amount of attention has been paid to bringing MiB to DVD.

There are the usual extras such as documentaries, trailers and a running commentary (albeit that this one also features silhouettes of Jones and director Barry Sonnenfeld). But the disc also makes use of DVD's much-vaunted multiple angle format to allow users to strip down computer animation and special effects sequences or even to edit together their own clips from the film.

Going further, MiB is also the UK's first DVD 18 disc, adopting the simple concept but tricky process of bonding together two traditional DVD 9 surfaces to allow for higher bit rate interactivity.

Earlier high content discs, notably The Mummy and The Matrix, have played an important role in bringing the DVD concept to the masses. But even in comparison with these, MiB is a major advance.

It is, in short, the first piece of software to really try out the full breadth of the DVD hardware. It also comes into the market at a time when the brown goods market is addressing the issue of player cost.

Good DVD machines are now emerging at below the psychological #200 barrier through high street outlets such as Woolworths, Tesco and Dixons.

Just how well these entry-level machines cope with discs that have DVD- rom content - The Matrix, notoriously, will not play on some machines - is a moot point. A confluence of bumper product and cheap machines could give the DVD market the presence and impact that it has been looking for.

Paramount

But the key issue will remain a willingness to deliver the content. By contrast to Sony's work with MiB, it is worth looking at the almost offhand way in which Paramount Pictures has been releasing the Star Trek film and TV series on DVD.