The 3rd Annual Discus Awards for Creative Excellence honoring technological and creative achievement in the DVD industry was the highlight of the DVD-PRO industry conference held near San Francisco this week. The Best Consumer DVD-ROM award went to Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment’s The Abyss Special Edition DVD, which connects fans of the nautical sci-fi classic to a unique Internet-enhanced experience when played on computers with DVD-ROM drives. Three other nominees were similarly web-enhanced, including (in award placement order): Warner Home Video’s The Matrix, New Line Home Video’s Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and Saturn Home Video’s Grey Owl. A panel of industry experts chose the finalists from a field of twenty-six nominated titles, representing the most advanced application of DVD-ROM technology. InterActual Technologies“ PCFriendly software was the common underlying technology that enabled the special Internet and ROM features for all the winners in the category.

”We’re delighted to have won,“ said Peter Staddon, Senior VP of Marketing Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. ”The Abyss Special Edition enabled people not just to see the movie, but to experience it in their homes as they have never done before. We look forward to working with InterActual to continue pushing the envelope of possibility for web-connected DVD.“

Scott Bates of Click Active Media, the content developer for the DVD-ROM portion of the winning disc, agreed, saying, ”InterActual enabled us to create a fully immersive multimedia experience that incorporated actual DVD Video. They took us well beyond what we could have achieved with streaming video, and the difference was really noticeable to the consumer. InterActual works with web-based development software we already know, like Macromedia Flash, allowing us to extend our creativity in new areas.’

The Discus Awards were presented just one day after InterActual announced the next generation of its flagship software, InterActual Player 2.0, for multi-platform support of DVD and the web. The successor to the popular PCFriendly(TM) software, InterActual Player 2.0 includes support for both the Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems, and also provides a common platform for the design of Internet-enhanced DVDs and CDs for use on upcoming web-connected DVD consumer electronics players and appliances. InterActual Player 2.0 is the first software application to bridge the worlds of DVD and the Internet in a single, cross-platform environment.