InterActual linking the internet world to DVD
The biggest impact on DVD culture over the last two years has been the introduction of web-linking. The ability to add more content and more selling opportunities after the disc sale itself, attracts both consumers and content owners alike. Whilst there are several routes to web-linking, few would dispute that InterActual is now king of the links. Editor Tim Frost finds out more about the strange and unusual genesis of the company and looks to its future as it releases Version 2.0 of its PC Friendly software.
BY TIM FROST
For all its impact on the DVD world, InterActual is a baby of a mere five years existence. Incorporated in 1995, the primary focus for the company was then MPEG-1 and Video CD. The name came from the basic premise that the company was going to be interested in building interactivity with the actual video.
"What we started doing was to build tools that could essentially allow you to communicate using video and we were targeting the computer based market," recalls founder Todd Collart. "We were finding all these same issues with MPEG-1 that we have today."
There was no single way of playing MPEG-1 content, creating a mire of half-working MPEG-1 software decoders and cards. Instead of getting embroiled in the decoder side, InterActual concentrated on the application layer. It was the application layer that could show off the capabilities of the decoders and give the decoder people a resource to show off their products, at a time when there was little in the way of attractive MPEG-1 video content available.
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InterActual's California HQ |
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The InterActual's Team |
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"The original PC Friendly" |
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Lost in Space found on Player 2.0 |
"We went to all the decoder manufacturers and said 'Here's what we are doing and we'd like the opportunity to demonstrate all these cool decoder technologies', because there wasn't really any content," says Collart.
With Video CD falling at the first fence, Collart found that the interest was centring firmly on MPEG-1 files on CD-ROM and this directed the company further down the route of PC-based interactivity.
"We started to work that way and to fund the company we decided to do some titles and so we created this thing called Video Saver. This is a video based sequencer of video player and screen saver which shipped around six to eight million units with a lot of bundling with computer manufacturers. This was early in the life of the multimedia PC, at a time when people wanted to have ways of demonstrating that the computer had this cool thing where you could play full screen video."
But an OEM business is not one where you make a lot of money, and from a tools perspective InterActual was way too far ahead of its time in terms of the manipulation it was trying to do with the stream.
"We were trying to do things in RGB and YUV space in a real time basis with 3D, and the technology couldn't support it at that time. And so what we had done is to grow this core expertise in MPEG format and we were also starting to integrate with the Internet. For example, with the video saver product, it would go down to the web and load additional clips for your player - so we started to put these things together."
InterActual was full of ideas on how a CD-ROM program and on-screen video
could creatively be used stand-alone or linked up with the web. One idea
was to link to the web for the weather forecast which also calls up a
suitable weather video clip off the PC to use as a background to the text.
Collart's commercial sense encouraged him to continue with the Video Saver products as a revenue stream for the company whilst working on new ideas. By 1997, the decision had been made to cease further releases of the Video Saver and concentrate on the MPEG-2 world.
"We made the decision that we would support what's in the field but stopped any further development in the MPEG-1 space and shifted everything into MPEG-2, which then became the DVD-Video space. We started thinking that creating general-purpose tools was going to be a difficult challenge, so why not focus on a more vertical market segment in terms to tools and applications?"
In one of the wiser decisions that a company could make, InterActual hooked up with Warner at the time it was developing DVD-Video and what come out of that connection was PC Friendly.
Until very recently, the complexities of getting linking to work on PCs at all has been a huge challenge, so its been hardly surprising that the bulk of InterActual's work until now has concentrated on the computer world.
"In fact until this January, our focus has been on the computer space. Remember, a couple of years ago, there was no such thing as Direct Show - instead there was this thing called MCI which had no constructs in supporting the navigation layer. So what we started doing was all in order to give PC support customers like Warner, where we had all these great relationships from our MPEG-1 days."
Naturally enough, InterActual's contacts were primarily with the technical world; the semiconductor manufacturers, the software decoder manufactures, the browser developers. They were not with Hollywood - the people that would drive the use of PC interactivity on DVD-Video.
"So we are a fish out of water; we're Silicon Valley going into Hollywood with no creative talent and trying to go directly to the president of Buena Vista and the president of Warner," says Collart, who still finds a way to punch above his weight.
"So while we did go
to those people directly we also went to the people doing the content
creation. We started providing them with these rudimentary tools templates
and documentation and we started to train them on this and more
importantly, trained them on how they can make money on this. So from our
ten people at the time, we ended up getting a very large developer
community on the LA area starting to build this and starting to say 'Hey,
this is something we can make money at', and push it out to the studios."
Launching PC Friendly
Adding weird and wonderful software hooks to a mass-market release can be a dangerous game. To prove the technology, Intel did a trial that led onto Warner creating a sampler disc, which showed that the system both worked and seemed not to generate any glitches with the PC world. It should be remembered that, at this stage, the whole testing and QC process centred around the PC, since PC Friendly was in the legal ROM space on a DVD-Video, the idea that it could cause problems with a consumer player was not heavily pursued.
In 1998 New Line took the leap of faith and put out Lost in Space which put PC Friendly on the map. "It's a great example of a product that wasn't the most successful release of 1998 but it was the most successful DVD in that time period and that's what they wanted to accomplish by adding the ROM capabilities to it," observes Collart.
MGM followed shortly after with Ronin and after that it really started to take off. In 1999 approximately 150 PC Friendly DVDs titles were shipped. And in the US, Collart says that they achieved about a 17% market penetration in installed computers and that of the 100 million DVD-Video units that shipped in the US, 25 million were PC Friendly enabled.
InterActual is building on that success and is trying to spread the word that PC Friendly can be applied equally well to 'normal' releases as well as the blockbusters.
"There is always a branding opportunity online and it doesn't actually mean you have to do The Matrix or The Mummy every time. On catalogue product where you don't have the funds to do that big sort of job, you can put our software on there and it acts as a transceiver and it can tell you information relating to that property. The online site is maybe not specific to that title but it may be specific to that genre. That's where you get into the heart of what we do - getting people connected."
No guarantees
PCs in those days were even flakier than they are now, regularly falling over when faced with multimedia content linked with communications. The industry was also still smarting from the early 'CD-plus-video' problems where customers bought audio CDs with additional MPEG-1 video content and found that their computer couldn't play the video content. So the focus was on whether the PC could access and use the PC Friendly material and Collart knew that it was not possible to guarantee full playability.
"It's computer and we can't guarantee 100% compatibility even
today. So we told the content owners that, but we also told them that if
someone has trouble they should contact us and we will supply that
back-end support mechanism as well.
"Once we had made that decision, by default we had made the decision that we were going to do this on a mass-market basis. That was very successful and the support for Lost In Space was quite small. I'm not saying it was nothing, but support rates were far less than we had experienced in traditional software product and a lot of that was the fact that these went through a lot of QC."
The Matrix
They say that there is no such thing as bad publicity. It could be well be argued that the very publicly aired problems of some DVD-Video players falling over when trying to access PC Friendly content in The Matrix not only increased the market's awareness of PC Friendly but also demonstrated to the whole DVD industry that software and hardware could no longer be developed in isolation from each other.
"The Matrix was the turning point of strengthening the collaboration between the content creation community and the hardware community," explains Collart. "The reality is that DVD is a great specification, and DVD Video is a fantastic specification, but the implementation of it is not standard.
"It is incumbent on the hardware and the content guys to make sure they are qualifying and certifying together. Up until The Matrix we spent 99.9% of our time the ROM components and actually in The Matrix, on the computer side, support was less than for other titles. However on the consumer electronics (CE) side it was quite different."
In the US, the home theatre press immediately locked onto the fact that The Matrix was a 'hybrid' disc, missing the point that ROM content is perfectly allowable on a DVD-Video and, more basically, that DVD-Video is a subset of DVD-ROM and not the other way around. Collart gives a carefully worded view of what went wrong - ascribing the problems to 'multiple issues'. The complications were very much down to the lack of experience of the player manufacturers and content publishers, in assessing each other's needs. The immediate cure to the crash however, was a player modification.
"Samsung did a great job in the US by immediately saying that they had a problem with the buffer size where the files on the disc overran the buffer and they did that the next day after we talked to them."
As those working in
authoring are well aware, there are always new problems cropping up, where
a piece of authoring produces unexpected and unplanned results. When there
was a relatively small number of DVD players, the authoring system
developers such as Panasonic, Toshiba, Sony, Daikin and Sonic created
workarounds for the anomalies. But as the market matures this solution
cannot be sustained, says Collart.
"You can't do that any more. There are now so many DVD players, that the authoring system manufacturers can no longer be held responsible for doing that. So what this has all done has put more of a responsibility on the CE guys."
Up until that point InterActual did not see CE as part of its responsibility, says Collart. The company provided support for the computer side, but after The Matrix he started providing support for the consumer electronics side. The QC process has been changed to better understand what is happening in the video zone so they can be more proactive on those issues.
InterActual is now creating test tools to hand over to the DVD test equipment companies, so that QC'ing for the PC Friendly elements gets integrated into the general test procedures rather than as a separate activity.
InterActual has steered a careful path of independence with the various authoring system developers. Every authoring system can integrate InterActual technology and still offer differentiation between the functionality and operability, he says.
"We offer the technology blocks, but how they integrate into their user interface, how they present it and what they can do from a template point is their choice. Of course we have lots of ideas and they should be able to differentiate their products. We have done a really good job of providing the technology blocks and let them tailor it and specialise it."
The tools are getting considerably more sophisticated. The content
authoring tools are integrating the on-disc and web content more closely
without having to deal with the client software, writing HTML or Java
script. The idea is that the authoring package automatically generates the
DVD-Video zone and the DVD-ROM zone with all the binaries for Windows
and Mac playback.
"We are providing the glue between content authoring and creative and we have been trying to productise or templatise that glue so you don't have to have InterActual there, but if you use our software or technology components it starts to manage that glue process for you."
New lessons
The original PC Friendly playback software package betrayed its PC roots and has its own set of quirks. InterActual has been working on an upgrade for a while, and by the time you read this is will have been formally released. Collart explained some of the issues involved in developing version 20 of PC Friendly - now called InterActual Player 2.0.
"We went out to get feedback from the users and that has
resulted in what you see in Version 2.0. One point was that PC Friendly
took over the entire screen stopping users doing other things as well as
watching a movie. Another complaint was 'why do I have to install my movie
every time?'
The reason we did that was that the content owner may want to copy some assets locally, so we were not copying software but essentially doing version control. We are now explaining to the content owners how they can leave the assets on the disc which makes for a faster environment and there is no installation."
The new playback software is more compact, and offers different 'skins' so users can select the way the user interface looks. InterActual also recognises the fact that users don't always want to take advantage of all the web/ROM content - they may just want to watch the movie on their PC.
"This player starts to mimic our philosophy of the set-top consumer players as well.
So you can launch the player immediately into enhance made which is what PC Friendly does, or you can go into 'Movie' mode when you just want to watch the movie; but it's always just one button click away from this cool movie enhancement type of content."
Working towards the converged player
The traditional way that users access ROM and web content on a DVD-Video is to play it on a PC. But inevitably that is going to change. The next generation of DVD players will include games replay capability and modem facilities. The Nuon is a prime example of the direction that DVD CE products will go and InterActual is very aware that it is in a strong position to help develop converged content to work on these converged players.
"I do think there is a huge opportunity there. As of late we have been trying to make sure developers are very focused on the computer market because that is here today and there will be a 20 million installed base of PCs in the US by this Christmas. So the first thing we are saying is: 'Don't ignore that opportunity, don't wait for the living room to come because you have that high installed base now'.
"But what we have been also doing is making sure that what we are creating for the V2.0 Player is compatible with the future and we are really excited about bringing a lot of these features into the living room. Especially in the video industry, where there are still comments about 'Well, who watches movies on their PCs?' from many people."
The personalised DVD
Although not wishing to resurrect DivX, InterActual sees a huge opportunity available to use the individualisation technology developed for the ill-fated format. After production any DVD disc can be given its own individual serial number, burnt by laser into the Burst Cutting Area (BCA). The BCA can be read by any DVD player, enabling a veritable torrent of conditional access options that are specific to a disc or group of discs.
"For example," says Collart, "you can have a series of discs which are differentiated by sell-through or rental. The content owner my choose to make the extras available only on the sell-through copies and not on the rental. Of course the rental disc could be upgraded so you can get the cool ROM content.
"Take it to the next level; we can track the disc on a retailer basis, differentiating between a disc bought from a Best Buy, a Good Guys or an Amazon. If I bought this at Good Guys, that can be recognised online and if that disc generates another purchase then the content owner can do a deal with Good Guys to send that transaction back to them. What you can also start to do, is something that is very interesting for the retailer industry. Instead of differentiating on price points, which are killing the Internet retailers, what if you can differentiate on content? We have had several retailers who are very interested in sponsoring the next Matrix-type online event, but then you would only have access to it if you bought the disc, for example, from Best Buy. That's what this sort of serialisation enables - and these applications are just the tip of the iceberg."
InterActual is
working with a number of replicators on the BCA project and will set up a
single repository for the BCA serial numbers that will remain under the
control of the content-owners. The limited number of BCA machines also
restricts the potential for individualisation in the short term, but this
is no bad thing as it does allow the company time to set up the
infrastructure, technology and process solutions. The view is that the
personalised DVD is not for the major titles this year, although there may
be some corporate discs that use the system as it develops in the near
future.
Back to the Future
Collart also reveals his plans for a new approach to the music market - going back to CD and adding InterActual software to the old-fashioned 650MB disc. Well, why not? The problems of mixing ROM and Red Book content have been solved for years, there is a continuing demand for MPEG-1 video on CD singles and, let's face it, the CD audio market will continue to outstrip DVD-Video for many years to come.
"Believe it or not we are focusing very heavily on the CD audio industry," discloses Collart. "With the concept of enhanced CD already established, these next-generation Internet connected DVD players will all be able to play CD, so it all becomes very interesting.
"We have already licensed this on a grand scale to two majors. We are also getting a lot of excitement from the audio mastering groups. We provide them with utilities to put this on the disc and they work with the artists on a daily basis."
Collart sees the 'enhanced CD' approach as something that could spread quickly and cheaply and encourage the development of enhanced CD/DVD players. "This is more motivation for the consumer electronics manufacturers to add that step-up feature which they want to build into new players. They want to make sure that there is going to be content value so that consumers will be willing to pay for those extra functions on the player.
"There are many albums that have of space for additional material and there are lots of applications for the CD single. This is ideal for that, you can promote the album and there are lots of opportunities for promotion for the sake of value rather than just for advertising. You can put MPEG-1 on there, HTML, or more or less any content."
Less than 100% take up
There is very little research on who uses DVDs on PCs and why. According to Collart, New Line believes that only half the people who use DVDs on their PCs actually take the next step and go online. The key to it, he says, is content.
"We do know how many people go online with the disc but we don't know how many people watch on their computer and don't go on line. There has to be compelling content to go online. This compelling content is growing, but it takes time as well. The first step is getting ROM on there then the next step is 'How do I extend that to going online?' And it's not necessarily intuitive."
The natural move for the 'business brains' is to believe that online activity should be all about getting more money out of the user, but this has limited appeal, certainly at the moment, says Collart.
"We are focusing less on e-commerce right now, although there are revenue models that have yet to be explored or exploited. Our focus is back into consumer education. We need to extend the entertainment experience. If we can get people going online with the product, some of these other market opportunities will flow out of it. It is not the time to be greedy when you are trying to create the market."
InterActual is
taking on the role of events hosting, simply because it is often easier
for the content owner to have InterActual do it, rather than maintain the
online activity themselves. It also means that the site is geared up for
the differing demands of PC and set-top box access.
"You must remember that coming off a computer and coming off a TV requires two very different display mechanisms and that is one of the things that really hurt Web TV. What we are doing with the tools in our developer programme is 'forcing' people to think about so they have to make a conscious decision if they don't want to support the TV platform. We are going to give them all the utilities and the verification tools to tell them whether they are going to have problems, and that a particular piece of content will not display on a Nuon device or an iDVD device, as well as the PC.
"Ultimately the consumer won't care if we've done our job right and we can serve it up based on whichever device is being used."