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President, Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Because of his position at Buena Vista, which is responsible for the home-video products for the various Walt Disney companies, Bob Chapek has been a tireless advocate for Blu-ray Disc. He believes strongly that the format's greater capacity, interactivity, and copy-protection technology will put it in the better position to succeed the DVD.
Why should S&V's readers be excited about Blu-ray?
It's great that you're approaching the interview from that standpoint, because it's going to be the consumer who decides whether HD DVD or Blu-ray survives. And that very same consumer is the source of our bullishness for Blu-ray, which we believe will be the clear eventual winner of this format scuffle.
Blu-ray Disc will give you an unparalleled experience, largely afforded by the capacity it provides. Soon you won't need to choose between widescreen and pan-and-scan, because the standard-definition pan-and-scan and high-def widescreen signals are on one disc. And while a lot of your readers might not be interested in it, there are still people who want standard pan-and-scan for the 13-inch TVs in their kids' rooms. So Blu-ray offers high-def widescreen, standard-def pan-and-scan, 7.1-channel lossless audio, interactivity the likes of which we've never seen on a movie disc before, and Internet connectivity — an experience that outdoes DVD in so many ways that until you see and experience it, you can't comprehend it.
You've been very outspoken about the need for 50-gigabtye Blu-ray discs, but only 25-GB discs will be ready for the launch. Are bigger discs still a priority?
Absolutely. To fully exploit all the technology available on the Blu-ray side, it's going to take all that capacity. Some of the things we have in development right now from an interactivity standpoint are going to chew up a lot of space.
Can you give some examples of that interactivity?
In perhaps its most mundane incarnation, we'll have picture-in-picture, which means you can have several things going on at once. You have not only the movie rolling, but you have options tracking at the same time inside PIP windows. Interactivity also lets you take different segments of the program and put them in whatever order you prefer. And it gives you a gaming ability — which I'm very excited about, because we've tried to utilize the relatively limited ability to have games on DVDs, and it's resulted in a lot of stops, starts, and pauses. Blu-ray's greater processing time results in more fluid game play. So, not only can you have a lot on a disc, but the speed at which it's accessed — the twitch factor — should be very good, which is also why it makes a great platform for PlayStation 3.
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Then there's connectivity. For example, let's say someone has one of our Princess discs, and they want to hook up to a tea party over at Disneyland scheduled for 2 o'clock Eastern time on Saturday. They put the Blu-ray disc in, and, because the player is already connected to the Internet, they're suddenly having a live Princess party. Cinderella, who's hosting the party live from Disneyland, says, "Okay, we have three activities we can do. Pick which one it's going to be." You vote online, it's instantly tabulated, and you see that today you're going to do something with Jasmine.
When we joined Blu-ray, we were very excited about its potential. And now that I see it play out in our development labs, it's absolutely outstanding. But it's all based on having enough capacity.
Many of our readers have bought the same movies in multiple formats over the years. Why should they replace their collections yet again?
To get somebody to invest in a new library, you have to make a monumental leap forward, and Blu-ray makes that leap. I liken the situation until now to being "all dressed up with no place to go," with all these high-def-ready systems out there. Well, we're giving them someplace to go, with a very exciting visual and sonic experience.
The studios can choose to down-rez the video from a player's analog outputs. What's your stand on that?
We have no intentions of doing that in the short term, and would do it only if we had an egregious situation where it was necessary to protect our content. As a zealous consumer myself, I don't want to have to replace my plasma TV just because it's not HDMI-ready. So — as with everything in our business these days — with new technology, we're going to have to strike a balance between protecting content and enabling people to do what they want.
Will the competition between the formats cause many people to hold off on buying a high-def player until the dust settles?
It's unfortunate that the situation is going to be unsettled, but I believe the market power and superior technology behind Blu-ray will make this issue very short-lived.
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Stephen Nickerson
Senior VP, Marketing Management, Warner Home Video
Steve Nickerson is no stranger to format launches. As a Toshiba executive in the '90s, he helped shepherd the introduction of the DVD. Warner Bros. was one of the earliest and most vocal supporters of HD DVD, believing that the format's similarity to standard-definition DVD technology would allow the easiest and most cost-effective transition to high-def discs.
Why should we be excited about HD DVD?
Having been involved in high-def for many years — with the emphasis on "many" — it's good to see that it's really coming into its own as a consumer product, and that people are finally seeing in their homes what has been the promise of HDTV for so many years. The picture and sound quality and everything else that high-def discs deliver are fantastic.
Most people will probably buy into the new formats because of the improved video. How does that change the home theater experience?
High-def images allow you to participate in a way that's different from DVD. Movies are all about escapism — for some period of time, you escape into whatever you're watching. And the clearer and more lifelike that picture is, the less work you have to do to lose yourself in the movie.
Many HD DVD titles will be encoded in MPEG-4 AVC or VC1, while many of the early Blu-ray releases are being encoded using the older MPEG-2 format. Will we be able to see the difference between the newer and older codecs?
It's really a matter of how familiar someone is with the codec they're using, and what work needs to be done to maximize it. But at the end of the day, hopefully, companies will put out products that fulfill the promise of high-def discs, regardless of what kind of compression is used.
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Is this similar to how some DVDs look better than others, even though they're all encoded with MPEG-2?
Absolutely. We're going to initially use a number of different kinds of encoding due to various circumstances that require or allow for that. But no matter what, at the end of the day, we still have a certain benchmark that says, "Either this product is acceptable to put out in the marketplace or it's not." And that's what's most important — what the consumer sees, and not necessarily how they see it.
Does it take a while for the creative people to understand how to optimize software for a new format and take full advantage of its capabilities?
There's no question there's a learning period for the studio community as a whole — and that includes us in the home-video division, as well as the people involved in the making of the film. That happened with DVD as well. But there are certain things that go be- yond the picture and the sound that we'll do from the beginning with all of our titles. For instance, the new formats allow for much simpler menus than you have with DVD, but they provide a much greater experience. No matter where you are on the disc, you can access the menu — for Warner titles, it will be a menu bar across the bottom of the screen — as well as submenus, all while the main feature is playing. [The menu from the Batman Begins HD DVD is shown above, right.] It's just such an improved experience that people will quickly ask, "Why wasn't it like this all along?"
What else can you tell me about HD DVD's interactivity?
We divide the interactivity into three buckets, if you will. The first is the ability to interact with the main content on the disc, which you access through the menus. That interactivity with the main content will include all the things we'll be able to do that we couldn't with standard-def DVDs. Along with doing commentaries where you can see the talent talk about the project while the movie is playing, we can do things similar to the telestrator drawings you see on TV during a football game. So while a director is talking about a certain part of the film in the commentary, he can suddenly highlight the portion of the screen that he's talking about. The second area is the new interactive things, such as more sophisticated games, we can put on the disc along with the movie. People won't be able to see that with the early releases, but it's something that will be available on future discs. And the third area of interactivity, for both HD DVD and Blu-ray, is the ability to use the player to hook up to the Internet and engage in content that's not on the disc.
So I take it you're looking forward to the launch?
This is a very exciting time. Just think about the 25 to 30 million homes that will have high-def sets by the end of this year. As an owner of an HDTV, you will now be able to go out and buy a player that will help maximize your use of that set in a way you've never experienced before. It's incredible, and it's something we think will quickly raise the standard of how people view entertainment in their homes.
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