2008 VIDEO HALL OF FAME PROFILE: DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group
Home Entertainment Industry Promotion Group
By Jennifer Netherby -- Video Business, 12/8/2008
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2008 inductees for Video Business' Video Hall of Fame |
But instead of merely fading away after it helped make DVD the fastest adopted consumer format ever, the DEG proved itself indispensable to members and broadened its mission to focus on emerging formats and business issues facing the home entertainment industry.
“It started out as a sleepy publicity effort, and it has grown to be one of the most powerful trade groups around,” says Bob Chapek, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment worldwide president and current DEG chairman.
Formed by DVD pioneer Warren Lieberfarb in 1997 to bring the industry together to push the fledgling format, the then-named DVD Video Group was instrumental in educating the media and the home video trade about how the shiny discs worked.
“It has become a very essential organization, where instead of having format wars for every product launch, we hopefully alleviate it by coming together on standards and getting to the market faster,” DEG president and Warner Home Video president Ron Sanders says. “That’s really the crux of what it was created for.”
Before DEG, hardware companies were working together through their industry trade organization, the Consumer Electronics Assn., but there was nothing similar on the studio side and no way for hardware companies to work together with the major studios. The Entertainment Merchants Assn., then the Video Software Dealers Assn., was always a retail trade organization first, though studios are members.
Summit Entertainment's home entertainment president Steve Nickerson, who has been involved with the DEG both on the consumer electronics side, during his time at Toshiba, and on the studio side while at Warner Home Video, says it was critical that the DEG brought all sides together to launch DVD and to keep messaging to consumers consistent.
“That was important in the early days,” he says. “As successful as DVD has been, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t a slam dunk in the beginning.”
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DVD started out as a sell-through product. It was the DEG that helped push it out to rental retailers, launching an education campaign and creating a rental toolkit to garner shelf space.
Once DVD was firmly established as the home entertainment format of choice, the group proved its worth to members beyond just pushing DVD.
Not only did the DEG allow members to pull together resources by collectively doing consumer research, it also continued to provide industry research to journalists worldwide.
More importantly, it became a way for people from different studios and hardware companies to get together and discuss industry issues that impacted everyone.
While Chapek was president, the group expanded its mission beyond DVD, rechristening itself The Digital Entertainment Group and delving into all parts of the business.
Over the last few years, the group moved into operations and supply chain management issues as well as sales, IT and other parts of the business that all members deal with, Smith says.
Chapek also pushed to get more senior level executives involved so the group could move faster on issues and expand its agenda.
For Disney, one of the areas in which the studio has seen payback has been DEG’s environmental initiative, which combined research from studios on how to be more efficient.
“At one point, there were half a dozen studios researching efficiency savings,” Chapek says. “Why do you need six or seven entities coming up with the same solutions?”
He points out that the studios share replicators and ship to the same retail vendors. “We have to compete where we compete,” he says. “The green movement, that’s where we can have some shared research.”
Despite its ability to bring studios with different interests together, even the camaraderie at the DEG wasn’t enough to bring studios and consumer electronics companies together to prevent a high-def format war. Rather than take a side with HD DVD or eventual victor Blu-ray Disc, the group chose to broadly promote high-definition.
Nickerson says both sides realized during the format war that they “still needed someplace that is Switzerland,” a neutral place where everyone could continue to talk about issues affecting the industry. “It’s a sign of a good trade when members can walk in and check their hat at the door,” he says.
Sanders agrees. “They had to remain neutral,” he says. “Instead of completely regressing into different camps, we still had a forum where we could still have meaningful conversations about issues the industry was facing.”
Now that Blu-ray has won the battle, the DEG is putting its promotional heft behind pushing that format, the same way it did with DVD. For the fourth quarter, it launched a $25 million “Tru Blu” ad campaign pushing some of the season’s biggest releases.
The DEG also is helping to create industry standards for BD Live. That’s one area in which Warner has benefited already. The studio has been able to work through technology kinks on Blu-ray extras by talking to those at other studios who are dealing with the same issues. Sanders says the studio wouldn’t have been able to pull together the live connected features for its Dark KnightBD release without information gleaned through the DEG.
The group also is working to create standards for 3D home entertainment and exploring the transition to digital content. For the latter, DEG pulled the studios together to establish the “Digital Copy” logo for packaging so that studios were all referring to it the same way and consumers would immediately know what it was.
But the key is keeping all the studios and hardware suppliers involved.
“These are busy people, and they’re not going to participate if they don’t see value,” says Smith.
