The year is slowly coming to an end and I think it was a very good year for DVD. Not only are finally all the studios on board, spoiling us with a seemingly endless supply of films on our favorite home video format, but also many of the fears of the year before have literally vanished into thin air. There are still a number of highly anticipated films that are not available on DVD at this point, but as we evaluate the current market, it is merely a matter of months until we will also see these films on DVD. The player sales have by far exceeded the 1 million mark, making DVD the most successful launch of any home video platform ever, and this Christmas season, we have seen a dramatic increase in player and content sales. Over the past weeks player sales have almost tripled compared to previous months, which is a good indication that many a happy camper will find a new DVD player under the Christmas tree. Putting these numbers in perspective with the estimated 40,000 DIVX players that have been sold to date, even DVD’s arch-nemesis looks like a relict of the past. It only makes you wish that someone at Circuit City would wake up one of these day and pull the plug on this still born toy of some of its executives. With all the bells, whistles, lies and hype, DIVX has miserably failed to wow critics and attract potential customers, and the big threat it had been touted to be, has turned out as a mere wait for something to happen. As long as shareholders allow people like Richard Sharp to nurture his hobby-horse, we will see a lot of distraction from DVD and even worse, a lot of confusion in the market. Since DVD has accumulated and exceeded its critical mass however, this is nothing we should overly waste time or energy on. DVD is riding high and has all the support it could ask for.

In the year to come, we will see surely some absolutely amazing releases and we will also see a number of those currently “out-of-reach” titles, like “Star Wars” or “Titanic”, I am sure. Others, like the “Indiana Jones” and “Alien” trilogies are rumored to be scheduled and hopefully already in production. Fox certainly has a lot to make up in order to build a solid catalog like the Universal’s or Warner’s, but I am sure in 1999 we will see some mind blowing releases out of that studio. If the first release batch was any indication about the quality to expect, get ready for a serious hard-hitting strike when the “Die Hard” trilogy hits your living room in March.

The studios and authoring houses are slowly getting more used to the capabilities of DVD and they start making efforts to push this technology a little above what we have seen so far. Take a look at the recent New Line releases, for example. Not only are those discs packed with supplemental features, the way they are presented and how they make DVD a more interactive medium are absolutely fascinating. If you are owner of a PC-based DVD-ROM drive and you take a look at the extras on releases like “Lost In Space”, you can spend endless hours, browsing the extras, linking up to the Internet to unlock even more information. It takes DVD way beyond how home video has been perceived historically. This technology and these features take us safely  and adequately so - into the next millenium. Kudos go out at this point to the visionary people at New Line’s DVD development department and the authoring facilities who put them into practice, like EMA Multimedia, who have been responsible for some of the most mesmerizing DVD releases this year! Without people like EMA‘s Michael Pace, DVD Video would probably still resemble a flat, shiny version of a video tape, and would have nothing in common with the extravagant presentations we have seen on the products he has been working on. Keep up this kind of work and attitude, Michael!

Other people and companies are just as important, though. If you have seen the new “Tomorrow Never Dies” Special Edition, you have got a mere glimpse at what to expect from MGM next year. The way MGM present the bonus material on this disc, and the way the user interface is integrated in the actual Bond experience is frightening and makes the disc itself resemble more of a Bond gadget than a home video release. It is stunning and most of all refreshing to see that a number of these absolutely fantastic releases have popped up especially ver the past two or three months and they stand notable and proud to take us into the next year.

After talking to a large number of studio executives over the past weeks and months, I can also safely say that almost every studio is taking DVD extremely serious at this point. There are still some of those sitting on the fence, considering it a by-product to their VHS releases. These studios might find themselves out of luck if their not careful, though, because other, more ambitious publishers might snatch away the rights to the best films just under their noses, while they are snugly dreaming of their spectacular VHS sales figures. Luckily, the majority of publishers have read the signs of the time. A great number of them are making stronger efforts for day&date releases of DVD and VHS and a few of them even give DVD the benefit in certain cases, by releasing these day&date titles with supplements on the DVD version only. Artisan for example is releasing all day&date releases with a Special Edition treatment. Artisan’s Jeff Fink calls it the “Day & Date Treatment” and hearing him say this, makes you wish a few more people in Hollywood would share his mindset. Artisan’s day&date releases usually contain commentary tracks, bonus materials, 16x9 enhanced transfers, multiple language Dolby Digital soundtracks and much more. Features, many other discs can unfortunately only dream of. But believe me, things will change. With every DVD sold and with every player installed, the power of DVD grows and as it grows, so will the pressure on the studios to supply the consumers with products that are worth buying. In a market where hundreds or thousands of releases compete with each other every month, only the fittest can survive. And the fittest are those that cater best to the audience.

With this I would like to wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. It has been a great year and we would all like to say a sincere “Thank You” to you, our readers. You have helped making “DVD Review” the leading source of DVD information on the Internet and we will continue to bring you this information in the year to come, together with some new columns and new features.

We will take a slight break of Christmas however and take some days off until the New Year. Of course we will try to continue to bring you the daily news, but editorial content and updates of our release schedules will be somewhat limited. We hope you understand that we, too, need some time to relax, some time to refuel our energy so that we can bring you more information of the kind you won’t find anywhere else in the New Year.

Merry Christmas to all of you... wherever you are.

 December 21, 1998

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