Views from the trenches of Digital Hollywood
In the halls and on the panels of the Digital Hollywood conference last week in Los Angeles, discussions revolved around video on demand vs. personal video recorders (PVR); DVD sales offsetting lackluster box office performance; and the long-term impact of the recording industry suing its customers.
Another topic many seemed excited, yet somewhat wary, of: the coming of the entertainment network. There were three dominant themes:
We’ve got time. Overall, the content folks — those involved in the production or distribution of electronic entertainment such as audio, video and gaming — seemed confident that putting Ethernet ports on entertainment devices won’t disrupt their businesses the way peer-t- peer software did the recording industry. The general perception was that the technical underpinnings for sending video easily around the home hasn’t arrived and will not be sufficient in coming years to create a thriving community of video Napsterites. A second notion was that by the time the appropriate bandwidth speeds, compression and other enabling technologies are available to make it easy for anyone to e-mail the latest Sopranos episode to a friend, payment and protection mechanisms will be in place to add — not subtract — to the bottom line.
The home server is coming. Most seemed amenable to the idea of the home server, so long as the device is tied to strong digital rights management mechanisms and can deliver some sort of micro-payment to the studio. But opinions differed on what form the device would ultimately take. Some envision a PVR, others a digital set top box, some combination of DVD recorder/hard disk, or a video game console. On a gaming panel featuring Seamus Blackley, who pitched Bill Gates the Xbox, some scoffed at the idea of making consoles the home entertainment hub, while others thought such convergence was inevitable. On a panel on the entertainment “super-appliance,” a Microsoft representative predicted the home network won’t be dominated by one super-box, but instead have many boxes contributing content and communicating across it.
Most in this crowd — as opposed to those at your typical data networking event — expected the home server to be a consumer electronics appliance. Little attention was paid to Microsoft’s drive to make the PC the center of the digital media universe. This was all the more ironic because the conference was held on the day Microsoft announced specifics for its Media Center PC 2004 and that Dell will build its own version of the Media Center PC.
Nobody in Hollywood knows anything. To paraphrase the famous quote from William Goldman, writer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “No one in Hollywood knows anything” about the future of digital entertainment and home networking. While most offered an opinion, in the end it was clear that consumers will decide what works and what doesn’t. Some believed it will all happen over wireless, others felt coax or power line will be the answer. Some felt the industry will soon be awash in new media revenues tied to connected devices in the home, others are taking a more cautious approach. In the end, Hollywood doesn’t know when and how whole-home entertainment networking will happen, only that it will. Sounds a little like how the music folks felt about broadband a few years ago.
