Studios want to do it all
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Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium star Zach Mills was named best emerging actor at the KIDS FIRST! award show in Malibu on Oct. 7.
Arts Alliance America recently held a screening of Run Granny Run with film star Doris “Granny D” Haddock in Keen, N.H.
Sony and Reef Check celebrated the DVD release of Surf’s Up at Malibu Bluffs Park in Malibu, Calif., on Oct. 6.
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By Dan Glickman -- Video Business, 5/4/2007
The following is an excerpt from Motion Picture Assn. of America chairman and CEO Dan Glickman’s remarks to the LexisNexis and Variety Digital Rights Management Conference, co-sponsored by ContentAgenda, in Los Angeles April 23.
Glickman
Technology’s potential to enhance the consumer experience touches every piece of the movie business. Theater owners have an extraordinary opportunity with digital cinema. We’re at about 4,000 screens now—mostly in the U.S. We’ll come close to doubling that figure this year. Studios are releasing more films digitally, like Meet the Robinsons, using the latest 3-D technologies … and audiences are responding. This is good news for the movie house—and for movie lovers who value that communal spirit of the cinema.
We’re also committed to the smallest screens, making increasing amounts of content available for mobile distribution, through services like MobiTV and Verizon Vcast.
Online, all of the major studios have licensed content to a variety of digital distribution sites.
On-demand streaming sites are now offered by all of the TV networks. There are rental and download sites, like Movielink, iTunes—now even Amazon and Wal-Mart … peer-to- peer systems like BitTorrent …subscription sites like Starz Vongo … even gaming system downloads, like Xbox. The choices are increasingly limitless.
MPAA has been working with senior executives from each of our member company studios for about a year now to help make these choices possible. We’ve been quietly working to identify ways to enhance the consumer experience with digital media. Our goal is a diverse, high-quality, hassle-free consumer experience—one that makes the most effective case possible not merely for the legitimate content marketplace, but for its vast superiority.
Overall, we are committed to delivering entertainment to consumers whenever and wherever they want … in flexible ways … on their preferred platforms and devices. We eagerly embrace every commercially viable entertainment delivery method, so long as it incorporates reasonable protections against the misuse of filmmakers’ creative efforts.
We wholeheartedly support allowing consumers to make authorized copies of the content they purchase. We expect to be able to make this happen for HD DVDs hopefully this year.
Standard-definition may take a bit longer since we need to work with the technology community to unleash its full potential. But we are in agreement on the outcome we wish to see: Consumers should be able to enjoy authorized DVD content on their home networks … on portable devices … at their convenience.
Next, we fully and wholly embrace interoperability. We believe that consumers who come by their content legally should be able to enjoy it on any device. It’s an attainable goal and certainly one we share with many across the consumer electronics, technology and entertainment landscape. MPAA and its companies are active in a number of groups working on this issue, including the Coral Consortium. We are committed to making interoperability a reality.
And, we collectively affirm our ongoing support for digital rights management. DRM, at its heart, is an enabling tool. It makes possible the ongoing contributions of American filmmaking to our nation’s culture and commerce. It makes possible all of these diverse consumer choices. It is essential to continually improving and expanding the consumer experience.
A world in which technologies, including DRM, empower consumers to have access to any content they legally acquire—anytime, any place—is an exciting world—one that is ripe with potential. Read the full text of Glickman’s speech on www.mpaa.org.
