Sterling Home Entertainment is still a very young publisher who nevertheless showed an early dedication for the DVD format. How is the company developing and for what percentage of your business does DVD account for?
DVD accounts for 5% of the company right now, but we hope to get it up to 10-15% by year’s end.

I an rather confusing arrangement, both Universal and Sterling seem to have access to the Lions Gate Film library and products. How exactly does this agreement work?
Sterling Home Entertainment has access to all Lions Gate productions, while Universal gets the movies acquired by Lions Gate.

Not even the Millenium edition of “Legionnaire” - a new $35 million movie - contains a 5.1 channel Dolby Digital soundtrack or a 16x9 enhanced transfer. Why is that?
Due to time constraints we were not able to put the Dolby Digital soundtrack on the disc. We are however going to put that on with future releases of other titles.

Sterling’s releases only contain English language tracks - is there a chance we will see other language tracks in the future? Any chance to see English captions or French and Spanish subtitles?
Some of Sterling’s releases have Spanish subtitles. Legionnaire did not have them due to the fact that the film had not been released in other countries and we clearly did not want our discs to be shipped overseas.

When do you expect Sterling’s website to be fully operative? Will it allow direct orders and/or orders for merchandise? Will people be able to submit requests there?
Sterling’s website should be fully operable in the next 4-6 weeks.

Which one was Sterling’s most successful title on DVD so far?
Legionnaire has been the most successful one by far.

Sterling is releasing a large number of direct-to-video titles, hence the usage of fullscreen transfers - are there any theatrical films lined up at this point? What films can we expect to see in the months to come?
All Millenium series DVDs will be available in widescreen formats. Some upcoming releases include “Money Kings”, “Space Truckers” (Millenium), “The Base”, “Gunshy”, “Murder Of Crows” (Millenium) and “The Confession” (Millenium).

The spines of Sterling’s DVD cases are printed upside down, to be read from the bottom up, while everyone else is making them readable from top to bottom. Is there a history to that?
We deliberately did that in the beginning to get noticed, to stick out from other DVD titles. Now our DVDs read from the top to bottom.

 By Guido Henkel

March 13, 1999