Video Hall of Fame 2009 Inductee: Stephen Nickerson, Summit Entertainment

And after using a revolutionary strategy for Summit’s Twilight DVD and Blu-ray release earlier this year, Nickerson will see the film quite possibly become the top-ranked title of 2009, with more than 8.3 million copies sold to date.

Nickerson’s colleagues believe he is especially capable of driving growth at a difficult time for the packaged media business.

“I think that with the challenges facing the business right now, Steve’s thought process is great,” says Rob Friedman, CEO and co-chairman of Summit Entertainment. “Now is the time we need someone like Steve more than ever. His innovation is what will keep the market buoyant.”

Nickerson’s rise was fueled by his 17 years of experience selling hardware products at Toshiba and Samsung before jumping into the studio world in 2000. His colleagues often credit his grasp on hardware, unique among the current home entertainment studio chiefs, for his business success.

Nickerson began pushing the concept of high-def TV about 20 years before retail chains were regularly stocking the displays in stores. His ability to see value in advanced quality products laid the groundwork for his dedication to helping launch DVD and Blu-ray.

“He has been a transformational figure in some of the major decisions of our era,” Consumer Electronics Assn. president and CEO Gary Shapiro says. “Hardware is very brutal, where the margins are very low. But Steve was strategic in seeing the future and saw the path to profitability with the new product formats.”

While at Toshiba, Nickerson used his relationship with Best Buy on TV product to convince the chain to stock DVD products when other major chains refused. “Steve’s remarkable leadership and astute business plan allowed Toshiba to be first to market and dominate the industry, thereby increasing Toshiba’s brand image and awareness as a technology leader,” says Yoshihide Fujii, chairman and CEO of Toshiba America.

Nickerson’s perseverance with DVD caught the attention of major DVD proponent Warren Lieberfarb, then head of Warner Home Video, who brought him to Warner to market discs for the studio in 2000.

“The industry owes Steve not only this [Hall of Fame] honor but many more,” says Lieberfarb, now chairman of Warren N. Lieberfarb & Associates. “His role at Toshiba in the mid-’90s and his relationship with Best Buy was instrumental in bringing Best Buy to be Warner’s [DVD] launch partner.”

About five years later at Warner, Nickerson was overseeing worldwide high-def marketing and was again in the position of promoting something that didn’t exist in the mainstream yet.

“Having worked in the technology business, we had to do this all the time—coming up with new features and advancements,” Nickerson says. “That’s what you did; it wasn’t frustrating at all. Trying to get people to understand that there is something beyond what they love today is a challenge, and it’s an enjoyable challenge.”

Nickerson’s entrepreneurial drive led him to answer Summit’s call to run its start-up home entertainment division in September 2007. He very quickly established the unit as a new kind of DVD and Blu-ray studio player.

Summit has been early to recognize the growing importance of rental and digital, routinely streeting its titles on nearly all available physical and electronic sell-through and rental platforms simultaneously.

Historically, studios have given DVD sales a head start over lower-revenue electronic rental/video-on-demand. Yet Summit is adamant about catering to the needs of consumers.

With the release of Twilight in March, Nickerson broke ground with a controversial multi-SKU strategy, including selling a single-disc version exclusively at Walmart and the Blu-ray edition solely at Best Buy and Target. The idea was to play to the consumer, offering fans unique configurations at the best-suited locations.

Retailers weren’t so happy. “Everyone was upset with what they didn’t have,” says Bobby Gerber, Summit’s executive VP and general sales manager. Nickerson “said that he’d never been spoken to or yelled at like that by anyone. But with his tenacity, we decided we could manage through the diversity of this title. We knew what the fan wanted.”

Gerber has become a fan of Nickerson’s. “I’ve said that I would follow him blind,” Gerber says. “Steve is not afraid to take risks. We’ve done more than we thought we ever could do because of his leadership.” The two worked together at Toshiba in the mid-’90s and again at Warner before Gerber followed Nickerson to Summit.

Others praise Nickerson for his success with Twilight as well.

“He has proven to be incredibly creative in terms of how he went to market with Twilight,” Warner president Ron Sanders says. “He has done some things that have never been tried before, and he’s proving good at what he’s doing.”

Summit chief operating officer Bob Hayward is impressed by Nickerson’s accomplishment within an indie studio infrastructure. “He has a very good, clear focus of the retail packaged goods business,” Hayward says. “And this is with a staff of 20, which is a fraction of what most studios have.”

Nickerson will shepherd the DVD and Blu-ray release of two Twilight franchise installments in 2010, New Moon (now in theaters) and Eclipse.

“New Moon won’t be handled exactly the same as Twilight,” Nickerson says. “We will take the things in Twilight and improve upon them. [Innovation] is paying off in the retail community, where they expect us to show them something different.”

Summit has forged new territory with other titles, giving an exclusive DVD rental window to Brothers Bloom and streeting sci-fi theatricals Knowing and Push on the same street date, foreseeing that the two would promote, rather than cannibalize, each other.

“We’ve begun to lay a really good foundation, but there is so much more to do with continuing to build the overall studio,” Nickerson says. “In 2007 and 2008, things have been changing with the industry. And in 2015, the business will look very different. Being part of Summit allows us to be a big part of what that is going to be.”