ESCA Europe keynoter:
“you can’t get better than Blu-ray”

Jim Wuthrich, president, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, was the keynote speaker on Day One of ESCA, and shared his views about the industry and the ongoing Warner initiatives to navigate changes from physical to digital. It is not, however, he stressed, about the format but about the content. While the physical to digital transition is slower than expected, a major trend is the cloud, he told attendees: “That is having a tremendous impact on entertainment and will spur ownership.” These days, he pointed out, it is virtually impossible to buy a CE device that isn’t connected – “that will have big impact on our business”.

Read more

Collaboration and waste elimination are key

At ESCA Europe 2011, Day One was marked by some tough-talking panel discussions; not least of these was a panel on 'Supply Chain Efficiencies - The Pressures Intensify'. Moderated by Alison Casey of Futuresource, there were two key areas that require closer examination and harder work: collaboration and waste reduction. For Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, fewer vendors and deeper relationships were key, said Aodan Coburn. True, agreed Steve Brown of Cinram, but that was only part of the story: "Collaboration is key but content is still king - if we divide consumers' ability to buy content we dilute sales. Blu-ray is doing well but there are too many digital methods of delivery - we need to narrow that down."

Read more

Disaster recovery planning

At ESCA Europe 2011 the theme of collaboration was summed up poignantly by Thomas Irnberger of Sony DADC. He outlined how the company was able to start rebuilding its distribution business within hours of the fire that destroyed the London distribution warehouse during the August riots. There had been a great deal of support from the industry, he said, from messages of sympathy through to the logistical assistance provided by Cinram. "A big thank you to the entire industry," he said, pointing out that one of the positive things to take away from the experience was the highlighted fact that collaboration is the way forward for the entire industry.

Read more

Anti-piracy – the fight continues

Paul Chesney of Universal Pictures provided the crossover between the ESCA Europe conference and the co-located Content Protection Summit with a look at anti-piracy in general and the initiatives being carried out by Universal. “The fight continues,” he said.

Read more

Fingerprinting, watermarking and legislation

The Content Protection Summit in London, co-located with ESCA Europe, moved on after the keynote by Paul Chesney of Universal Pictures with a presentation by Spencer Mott, CDSA chairman and CISO of EA. Mott provided an overview of content protection technology and implementation, and was followed by a panel that discussed watermarking and fingerprinting. Panel moderator, global anti-piracy expert Richard Atkinson, set out the differences between them, what they do, and how they can both help to grow the content business by providing both copy protection and user tracking.

Read more