In a new year where established music companies are bound to be even more worried about digitally distributed music, and the difficult ways to “monetize” such technology, one L.A.-based company is betting that the music biz in particular and entertainment in general isn’t quite finished making judicious use of an “old school” delivery platform: DVDs.
The company is Broadcast DVD, which bills itself as a publisher of “digital video magazines,” according to its vice president of marketing, Scott Epstein.
Launched in September of ’98, most of the company’s efforts have so far been focused on Film Fest, a compilation of shorts, clips and filmmaker interviews put together at various cinema crowd gatherings notably Sundance and Cannes to give movie cognoscenti a way to keep up.
Now, on Jan. 2, the company greets 2001 with the release of 250,000 copies of 750mph, another “digital magazine,” this one geared toward music “very focused,” Epstein emphasizes, on metal and hard rock. Which, he notes, is also “the music behind a lot of the PC games.”
This is important because it explains both the strategy and functionality of 750mph. More than just a DVD to watch, part of the disc’s hoped-for allure is that it is also “Web enabled” anyone watching it on a DVD device that’s also hooked up to the Internet can move from the disc to the Net and back again.
The Film Fest DVDs boast some of this cross-platform capability mostly taking viewers to advertiser Web sites but 750mph plans to take the platform-hopscotching to a whole new level.
“Thirty bands, 70 links,” is how Epstein summarizes the first edition’s contents. Most of those links either take you to a given band’s Web site, or a to a place where the music can be purchased with a few swift mouse clicks.
Playstation connection
The connectivity, Epstein maintains, “is a very relevant portion of what we’re doing,” because the launch date coincides with what Broadcast DVD imagines to be a recently expanded base of Web-enabled DVD devices, all of which have been passed out under the Christmas tree or Chanukah menorah: Namely, a whole slew of new Sony Playstations.
Suddenly, the emphasis on speedy, young guy-friendly, game-familiar metal as a choice of music for 750mph makes sense. And the Playstation 2 users are in addition to “the 12 million DVD players and 12 million DVD ROM” equipped PCs that Epstein observes are already out there.
Copies of 750mph aren’t for sale. The plan, Epstein says, is to give them away in record stores. Initially, The Wherehouse chain will be using the DVDs as a free promotion to customers who purchase over $25 worth of metal or alternative rock music.
One of the benefits in positioning it as a giveaway, Epstein points out, is that it saves them lots of legal headaches. “This is a very music-intensive magazine,” he says, and “there were some barriers we had.”
Namely, licensing and residual barriers that would’ve kicked in if Broadcast DVD was actually selling the music.
So with promotional sponsors, Broadcast DVD will be able to distribute its music “magazine.” (Indeed, Toshiba will announce in about a week that it is bundling the Film Fest disc with all its new DVD players.) But is it something an audience will want?
Consultant’s assessment
According to Mike Sullivan, president and founder of Silicon Valley-based GoTools, a consulting and marketing firm which helps offline companies develop Internet strategies, with “search engines becoming less effective,” concepts such as the one behind 750mph may be the only way to bring attention and users to Web sites. Trying to get online sites noticed through online channels is less and less viable; often the only way to do it, Sullivan maintains, “is through other media.”
Hence, he feels the connected DVDs are “using existing infrastructure” the installed base of players, the Web fairly well.
“They’re taking advantage of their little niche,” Sullivan says. Further, he adds, “you could easily argue that we’re moving away from PCs into appliances (that will) connect people to the Web in a variety of ways.”
Add that to Epstein’s observation that widely available broadband is still “a pipe dream” for most people, and you have the fact that DVDs, delivering anywhere from 3.5 to 9 megabytes of information per second (vs. 1.5 for the average DSL line) may be the only way most people will have a full-motion audio/video experience on their “Web appliances” for some time to come.
“We’re going to deliver that broadband experience directly to people,” Epstein says, calling his discs “a portable broadband model.”
In the meantime, after 750mph launches, Broadcast DVD hopes to enter negotiations, some with traditional paper-based publishers, for possible joint ventures in sports, fashion and other new areas for digital magazines.
