Retro vision
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 12/9/2005
DEC. 9 | The studios are starting to suffer from severe window pains.
Under growing pressure from camcorder pirates, rising marketing costs and flattening DVD sales, the long-standing Hollywood consensus on how to release movies through the sequence of windows is breaking down.
In comments to reporters in Los Angeles last week, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons became the second top executive at a major media conglomerate to go on record predicting the “collapse” of the theatrical-to-DVD window.
“Windows are inevitably going to collapse over time,” Parsons said, according to VB sister publication Daily Variety. “I don’t know that everything will be day-and-date, but managing the transition in a way that is respectful to our distribution partners is the challenge.”
Over the summer, incoming Disney CEO Robert Iger made headlines with similar remarks, although he was later forced to soften his comments slightly in the face of sharp criticism from theater owners.
Meanwhile, Fox Filmed Entertainment co-chairman Jim Gianopulos takes a contrarian’s view, telling VB sister publication DVD Exclusive recently that the theatrical window must be preserved.
Parsons and Iger’s reasoning is that windows have become a vulnerability that pirates exploit to fill a demand for anytime, anywhere availability, and ultimately the studios are going to have to take that market back from the pirates.
As the cost of marketing movies continues to rise, moreover, moving the DVD release closer to the theatrical marketing campaign is simply a more efficient way of doing business.
Gianopulos, on the other hand, argues that a movie’s box office gross is still a critical measure for setting licensing fees in subsequent distribution channels, and the studios would only be undercutting their own business by eliminating the exclusive theatrical window.
Yet even as the studios debate whether to shorten or even eliminate the theatrical window, behind the scenes they are pushing DVD hardware makers to adopt new technical measures to protect it.
In a series of proposals over the past six months to the DVD Copy Control Assn., the organization that oversees copy-protection measures for DVDs, the studios, in conjunction with Microsoft and other technology companies, have pressed hardware makers to configure all new DVD players with technology to detect watermarks that would be inserted into theatrical film prints.
The idea is that a camcorder operated surreptitiously in a theater would unavoidably capture the watermark and pass it on to any DVD burned from that copy. If a DVD player detected the mark, it would refuse to play the disc.
Hardware makers, not surprisingly, are less than keen on the idea. While they’ve accepted playback control for next-generation formats, they have no interest in going back and retrofitting the older format when margins on standard-definition DVD players are already paper thin.
To sweeten the pot, the studios have offered to drop the requirement that hardware makers implement region coding in future DVD players.
The irony there is that region coding is a system the studios insisted on to protect the international theatrical window. Now, they’re willing to forgo it in order to protect the domestic window.
And at any rate, the hardware makers rejected the deal. Region coding is so widely circumvented that dropping it is not much of a concession.
Moreover, even if the studios get their proposal through DVD-CCA, where they still wield influence, camcorded copies could still be downloaded and played back on computer hard drives, the new generation of portable video players and other devices that don’t have the watermark detection technology.
Retrofitting standard DVD players now would only be closing the barn door after the horses are gone.
