The humble DVD player, fresh from running rings around your VCR, seems poised to take on your PC, too.
New standards being developed by technology companies and Hollywood studios promise to turn DVD players into interactive devices that can play sophisticated games, connect to the Internet and exchange e-mail.
Many DVDs are already packed with interactive features, but you have to plug them into your PC to access them.
"We look at the money we spend to put (sophisticated interactive features) on our discs to have a relatively small portion of our consumer base enjoying it," said Benn Carr, vice president, technology for Walt Disney Pictures and Television. "We want to obviously expand the customer base."
Disney has already slapped games on DVDs for Monsters Inc. and Pearl Harbor and plans more for Lilo & Stitch and an upcoming re-release of Beauty and the Beast.
Warner Bros. and its New Line Cinema unit are also busily selling Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings DVDs that include games and interactive tours of the fantasy worlds they describe. An upcoming Scooby-Doo DVD will allow buyers to access material on the Internet that people who haven't bought the DVD can't.
At Digital Hollywood this week, chip companies Cirrus Logic and LSI Logic demonstrated the chipsets they plan to sell to DVD manufacturers. Enhanced DVD software and service provider Interactual Technologies demonstrated a prototype enhanced DVD player that pulled up filmographies and demonstrated how online voting on favorite scenes in DVD movies might look.
For studios, these types of features offer the possibility of establishing personal relationships with consumers who are used to passively watching Hollywood material.
"You can do all kinds of things you could never before do with packaged media," said Jim Wuthrich, vice president for worldwide interactive marketing at Warner Bros. "That gets consumers coming back."
Some DVDs already allow users to interact in limited ways with their DVD players, rather than their PCs -– although users are usually restricted to arrows and enter keys on their remotes.
The enhanced DVD players that emerge over the next few years won't necessarily be stand-alone devices. Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all either have or will soon have DVD capabilities for their game machines. And DVD players are increasingly being incorporated into other home devices such as TVs, tuners and jukeboxes.
The enhanced DVD player's future isn't assured. Studio executives acknowledge that most of the interactive features on DVDs work best in a broadband environment -– and only a minority of consumers have broadband Internet in their homes.
Consumer electronics companies have yet to announce they're making DVD players incorporating the technology. If the players end up being too expensive, consumers won't buy them.
And most importantly, studios and consumer electronics companies will need to create a buzz about the features they're adding, or consumers won't care. Even with millions of PCs capable of playing enhanced DVDs now on the market, Wuthrich noted, "the biggest issue is that people don't know it's there."
