Thomas K. Arnold is considered one of the leading home entertainment journalists in the country. He is publisher and editorial director of Home Media Magazine, the home entertainment industry’s weekly trade publication. He also is home entertainment editor for The Hollywood Reporter and frequently writes about home entertainment and theatrical for USA Today. He has talked about home entertainment issues on CNN’s “Showbiz Tonight,” “Entertainment Tonight,” Starz, The Hollywood Reporter and the G4 network’s “Attack of the Show,” where he has been a frequent guest. Arnold also is the executive producer of The Home Entertainment Summit, a key annual gathering of studio executives and other industry leaders, and has given speeches and presentations at a variety of other events, including Home Media Expo and the Entertainment Supply Chain Academy.
Don’t Forget Main Street
For several years now, in the political realm, we’ve been hearing that to really measure the state of the economy we need to focus not on Wall Street but on Main Street.
The same can be said in our industry: We need to focus less on Hollywood, California, and more on Hollywood, Florida.
Our industry has been too quick to give up on formats and technologies simply because they are no longer cool or hip — and in the process we’ve left a lot of people out there in a proverbial lurch, wondering why they can’t get their favorite movie on the format they like and are familiar with.
We’ve also been so dazzled by technology that we forget the formula for success in any field that French philosopher of education Jacques Barzun happened to apply to a book on the craft of writing: Simple and direct.
When DVD came around, it took a while for the format to take hold, but after Walmart jumped aboard about two years after launch the studios couldn’t get rid of VHS fast enough. Studio executives all had DVD players and so did their neighbors, so why bother even making those clunky videocassettes anymore?
What they failed to realize was that those clunky videocassettes were not only immensely popular in America’s heartland, but they also were keeping video rental stores alive — rental stores that indirectly helped feed the DVD juggernaut by easing people into the new format. Ma and Pa Kettle in Jasper, Ala., could keep renting movies they liked, and gradually warm up to DVD — and the concept of out-of-the-gate ownership — at their own pace. It’s human nature to be more open to something new if we can approach it on our own terms, instead of having it forced on us.
Sure, ultimately DVD became the biggest success story the consumer electronics industry has ever seen, but I can’t help but wonder how much money was left behind by the premature death of VHS. I believe the two formats could have co-existed peacefully for a lot longer than they did, and the industry as a whole would have seen a much slower decline in rental spending — and a much less dramatic death march by independent retailers.
When Blu-ray Disc launched, our industry once again was lulled by looking inside, at our own close circle, instead of at the mainstream consumer. We replaced our movie libraries, so we assumed everyone else would, too — failing to realize that at the time Blu-ray launched much of America was still in the process of building up their DVD libraries. A new format, mired in a brutal format war, no less, must have confused the hell out of the average American who doesn’t live and breathe entertainment.
We further complicated matters by touting different “versions” of Blu-ray, as well as high-tech features such as BD-Live — this at a time when not a single studio president I talked to even owned a connected Blu-ray player.
All the while, we should have focused on one thing: a vast improvement in the viewing experience, with a true high-def picture and the best-ever sound.
Simple and direct. That’s what resonates across America.
By: Thomas K. Arnold
Fritz Friedman: He Did It His Way
Fritz Friedman
Twenty-five years ago, I was preparing for my very first home video convention, taking place in Las Vegas under the direction of the Video Software Dealers Association.
At the time, I was freelancing for a thick monthly trade magazine called Video Store Magazine, and I remember the editor, Frank Moldstad, giving me the rundown on the various publicists for the studios I would likely be dealing with. There was Steve Feldstein over at Disney, a big man with an even bigger personality who one fellow reporter confided to me was “the smartest guy in this whole business.” There was Maria LaMagra at MCA Universal, a gregarious charmer who ran her department like Margaret Thatcher ran England. There was Nina Stern at Paramount, the most human publicist in Hollywood.
And then there was Fritz Friedman at RCA/Columbia, who Moldstad told me “is in a class by himself,” as all the other reporters nodded in agreement.
I soon learned for myself what they meant. Fritz had along ago broken out of the bounds of standard studio publicity and had emerged as a true public relations strategist. Like the finest craftsmen, he saw publicity as both a science and an art, grounded in developing close relationships with the press built around mutual respect. If Fritz wanted a story, you ran with that story — not because he begged and pleaded, but because it made sense. Fritz never gave reporters a hard sell because he didn’t have to.
Fritz was also a pioneer in bringing event marketing to home entertainment; one of my first-ever Hollywood parties, in fact, was a bash he threw on the studio lot for Boyz n the Hood. He worked the room like a politician, and drummed up so much publicity for a home video release that event marketing soon became a mainstay on the home entertainment circuit, particularly after the transition from VHS to DVD lifted the business into Hollywood’s single-biggest revenue source. He was the first publicist to bring a major star (Jimmy Stewart) to the VSDA convention; in 1996, when the convention came to L.A., he threw the biggest party in town, an elegant bash for 7,000 people on the studio lot featuring entertainment by Riverdance. More than a decade later, he orchestrated Spider-Man ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange — not once, but twice.
You hear stories about people who are consumed by their jobs; in Fritz’s case, it’s more like the job was consumed by him. He liked what he did, and he was damn good at it — which is why as word broke that after 34 years of running publicity at what is now Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (and, in recent years, the studio’s acquisition program), Fritz had decided to retire, I didn’t feel bad for him one little bit because I knew that if he was leaving, he was leaving because he wanted to, because he felt it was time.
He’s certainly got enough to keep two or three Fritzes quite busy. He’s an adjunct faculty member at the prestigious Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism. He’s been appointed to the Cal Humanities Board by Gov. Jerry Brown, an agency that since its founding in 1975 has awarded nearly $22 million in grants to organizations and projects within the Golden State, including dozens of Sundance, Emmy, and Academy Award-winning and nominated documentary films.
And he’s involved in all sorts of activities in the Filipino community. He lobbied Congress to give benefits to Filipino veterans of World War II (with Lou Diamond Phillips). He served as Chair and President Emeritus of the Filipino-American Library in Los Angeles. And he co-founded the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE), which with more than 3,000 members is the largest entertainment networking platform for Asian-Americans.
By: Thomas K. Arnold
Home Entertainment's Mid-Life Crisis
It’s a tough business. That’s what I’m hearing all around from studio executives and retailers as the home entertainment business adjusts to life as a middle ager (which the U.S. Census says starts at 35).
“This job is no fun anymore,” one high-ranking studio executive recently told me. “Every week, it’s all about cutting — taking out costs to save the bottom line.”
Traditionally, when businesses find themselves in a mid-life crisis, they focus on reinventing themselves and hopefully reinvigorating their revenue streams. The defense industry is a perfect case in point: whenever there’s another cycle of downsizing, defense contractors figure out some other business to get into. In 2012, a company called RTI Internationals, which had built its business largely on selling titanium to the U.S. defense industry, bought a medical-device business focused on spinal implants and other products for the nation's growing number of senior citizens.
Our business is a little different: We’re not suffering a cyclical downturn, but, rather, a transformation from one method of distribution (physical) to the next (digital). Americans haven’t slashed their home entertainment budgets; they’re just spending it in different ways, such as Netflix subscriptions.
We also have a clear eye toward the future: If digital distribution is the new way consumers will get movies and other content into their homes and onto their personal devices, then we need to transition the most profitable aspect of our current business — the consumer purchase model — into the digital realm, which studios are doing through Digital HD and, to spur sales, early release windows.
The problem is that the transition isn’t happening smoothly. It’s a bumpy road, with the biggest obstacle being subscription streaming services and video-on-demand.
And while we all still hope that one day these obstacles will be overcome, it’s managing the interim that’s proving to be problematic. With declining revenue from discs, it’s hard to maintain staff and marketing dollars that may well be needed in the fight to get consumers to buy downloads.
Compounding the problem is that the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel isn’t as bright as many of us had hoped. Sales of downloads may never approach the peak of Blu-ray Disc, much less DVD, simply because the joys of ownership have traditionally been centered on a material object you can look at and hold and file away and show off to your friends.
I most certainly want to own The Wizard of Oz, for example — but if there was no such thing as disc, I’m not sure I would fork over $10 or $20 for a download that lives on my hard drive — or a “license” to access the film in the cloud.
Ah, the joys of middle age.
By: Thomas K. Arnold
Disc May Be Down, But It’s Far From Out
The home entertainment business is becoming increasingly polarized in its thought leadership. We have those executives who believe there’s still plenty of life left in physical media, particularly in the country’s less-tech-savvy heartland, and then we have the disc-is-dead folks who believe Netflix and subscription VOD have destroyed sellthrough, paving the way for the disc’s imminent extinction.
The former group seems to be throwing their lot in with the 4K crowd, believing there’s a growing market for even higher-quality viewing experiences than high-definition and that the industry needs to start offering consumers a 4K option with both physical discs and set-top players.
The latter crowd, meanwhile, dismisses quality as a secondary factor — citing the disaster that was DVD-Audio and Super CD — and maintains any investment in building a better disc, so to speak, is futile, since we’re all going to move over to electronic delivery before too long.
This contrast really struck me the other day when I had conversations with the presidents of two major-studio home entertainment divisions in the space of about an hour and a half. One president said he sees Netflix eating into broadcast TV, not disc sales, and maintained the disc market remains much healthier than many might think; the other president said disc sales are plummeting “because everyone’s gone over to Netflix.”
Black and white, folks — when, in truth, as with so many things, the real answer lies in the gray area in between.
Here’s my take: Yes, let’s forge ahead and keep improving the physical disc — all the while promoting it as the premier viewing experience when it comes to quality – but let’s manage our expectations. As we’ve seen with Blu-ray Disc, people are not going to rush out and rebuy their entire movie libraries again — it’s the law of diminishing returns, compounded by growing acceptance of the cloud, which presents us with a unique way of “owning” something without cluttering up the house.
The disc market, then, will be smaller, quite possibly a lot smaller. But it’s not going to disappear, either — simply because there will always be people who want the best possible viewing experience and for the foreseeable future, at least, the disc remains the best way to deliver on that front.
And yet at the same time, electronic delivery will continue to grow — although I’m not convinced EST will ever be as big as many in our industry hope. Even if building a movie library is cheap and easy and you can store it in the cloud instead of the hallway closet, the need to own is tenuous. Part of the success that DVD enjoyed came not from people wanting to own a bunch of movies, but from the collectability it inspired. And now that we’ve been there and done that (sorry for the cliché) it’s time to move on.
The fact is, subscription DVD, a la Netflix, is about as simple, easy and cheap as the average all-American couch potato could hope for. So I’m not surprised in the least by the new PricewaterhouseCoopers study that predicts electronic home video revenue will be the main moneymaker in all of filmed entertainment by 2018, driven by subscription VOD services, which generated $7.34 billion in 2013, but in PcW’s view will more than double to $17 billion by 2018.
That’s where the viewing future of on-demand home entertainment lies — I think we can all agree on that. But it’s not going to be an all-or-nothing proposition, and I have a hunch the physical disc, though down, won’t be out for a very long time.
By: Thomas K. Arnold
Early Release the Way to Go
A new NPD study finds that UltraViolet users are 11 times more likely to have made an electronic sellthrough purchase in the past year, compared to other U.S. consumers, and four times more likely to own a connected Blu-ray Disc player or other streaming media device.
The research group calls Ultraviolet users “early adopters” who like early adopters of other technologies — most notably, DVD and Blu-ray Disc — tend to be voracious consumers of entertainment and much more tech-savvy than mainstream folks.
If the pattern holds true, we have nothing to worry about: The early adopters set the trend and everyone else follows, just like that.
The problem is, Ultraviolet isn’t a new product, it’s more of a concept — and selling people on a concept is significantly more difficult than pitching them something tangible.
And the concept we are selling here is buying movies electronically rather than physically — a much bigger stretch than getting someone to switch from a videocassette to a disc.
Compounding matters is that UltraViolet is really the means to an end. It’s a way of storing purchased content in the cloud and then accessing it anywhere, at any time, on any device. It’s designed to add value to physical discs and transition consumers to the end game, which is buying movies electronically, without any disc at all, with the same promise of ubiquitous access and availability.
In that sense, then, the other means Hollywood has employed to effect this transition — early release windows — is much simpler and easier to understand. You can buy The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on disc right before Christmas, but you can buy the film electronically two or three weeks earlier, for less money — and watch it just as easily on your home theater setup as on your smartphone.
Bingo. That’s the magic formula, and we as an industry need to promote the heck out of it.
As for UltraViolet, it’s a wonderful idea, but the execution has been miserable — we should have had a common, universal website from the get-go, and everyone should have been onboard from the start.
Given the countless obstacles and resistance from some quarters, it’s amazing that UltraViolet has been accepted as widely as it has been. But in the big picture, UltraViolet is small potatoes: The real trick is selling digital downloads, and hyping the hell out of early release is the way to go.
By: Thomas K. Arnold
Sleeping With the Enemy
I must confess, for years I have put off getting Netflix, despite my kids’ ardent requests, because I have seen the subscription rental service — particularly its movie-streaming — as an enemy of our industry. I have bought into the notion that Netflix cannibalizes sellthrough, the lifeblood of the home entertainment business, and insisted my kids watch every single DVD and Blu-ray Disc I’ve got socked away all over the house before I feed such a destructive beast that threatens the livelihood of the entire home entertainment universe, including Home Media Magazine.
A few weeks ago, I relented — or, rather, the boys teamed up with Mom and signed us up on her credit card — and I must say, I have completely changed my mind. We’re still watching new movies as they come out on disc, at the rate of two or three a week.
What’s changed is that we are no longer watching any network or even cable TV.
There’s lots of good old movie and TV stuff on Netflix — very similar to what’s on cable — so when the kids are in the mood for some channel surfing, they browse Netflix instead of the cable menu or what they’ve DVR’d. Last weekend Conner and Hunter binged on “Family Guy,” just as they do most Sunday afternoons after particularly heavy sports Saturdays — but instead of watching the animated show on the DVR, they watched it on Netflix.
And while our hunger for new movies go down a little in the coming weeks as we continue to explore the wonderful world of Netflix — last night I even set up my own channel, consisting mostly of cheesy horror movies I never got around to picking up on disc — I’ve already assembled a play pile of The Counselor and several other recent Blu-ray Disc releases, hot new stuff Netflix won’t be getting for a while.
So yes, cannibalization is occurring — but not, necessarily, where one might think. And from my conservations with several high-ranking studio executives who have admitted to me, privately, that they, too, have become Netflix households, it appears we’re all having the same experience.
Here’s to sleeping with the enemy.
By: Thomas K. Arnold
It's Not Yet Time to Kill the Golden Goose
Sometimes I just don’t understand retailers. Disc sales may have dropped significantly since the 2005 peak — slipping from an estimated $16 billion in sales revenue in 2007 to $7.8 billion in 2013 — but that number doesn’t factor in the rampant discounting we saw happening during that same period, which means actual unit sales aren’t nearly off by that much.
And $7.8 billion is still a very healthy number, particularly on the studio end, where you have to factor in that a growing percentage of every dollar that’s lost from the sale of physical discs is made up for on the digital end.
Sure, from a retailer end, a drop of more than 50% is a scary concept. But instead of looking at the glass as being half full, many retailers are reacting as though not only is the glass half empty, but it’s also draining, fast.
Visit any of the big chain stores and you’ll see that DVD and its successor, Blu-ray Disc, aren’t getting anywhere near the respect they once did.
Best Buy stores are a prime example. Movies used to be front and center, commanding huge, neatly organized aisles. Now, the DVD and Blu-ray Disc sections are tucked away in a corner in the back of the store, maybe one-third the size they once were. At the Best Buy in Oceanside that’s one of my regular stops, the disc section is almost always in a state of disarray, with half-empty shelves and tattered merchandisers standing around like bored people in an elevator.
At the nearby Walmart, it was 2 p.m. on a Tuesday and a pallet of unopened disc boxes was still sitting around at the front of the electronics department, almost completely blocking access to the meager new-release endcap at the front of one of just two rows the store now uses for its DVDs and Blu-ray Disc.
It appears that retailers are fast giving up on packaged media, and if they keep treating DVDs and Blu-ray Discs as the proverbial red-headed stepchildren (no offense, Chris Tribbey — this is an old Southern expression!) then their fears that discs will soon become obsolete will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I understand retailers have to go with what’s hot; everything else is an afterthought. That’s why so many big retail chains where the disc was king are now focusing on tablets and smartphones, as well as accessories. Follow the money, as the saying goes — and that’s precisely what they’re doing.
And yet if you look back, DVD achieved its phenomenal success in the first place because these same retailers took a gamble and put the disc front and center — long before there was any money to follow — and largely through their efforts at wooing consumers with their bright, catchy displays and prominent positioning, the format took off in a far more successful fashion than anyone had expected.
In hard numbers, the golden goose may have lost some of its luster, but it’s still golden. Retailers should rethink their strategies and breathe a little life back into their disc sections. They just might be pleasantly surprised at the results.
By: Thomas K. Arnold
There’s Still Life in Them There Discs….
During a presentation at the Ultra HD Physical and Digital Media Conference at NAB in Las Vegas, Michael Arrington, senior analyst with research firm IHS, predicted that consumers will still be shelling out a respectable $10 billion or so on Blu-ray Discs and DVDs in 2015 — half what it was a decade ago, but hardly an amount to be dismissed.
“People … like to have [content] in their hands,” he said, while home hardware storage and bandwidth aren’t quite yet where they they need to be for everyone to go full-blown digital.
I’m certainly one of those who likes to have content in his hands. One of the great joys in life is walking into the closet where I keep all my discs, neatly filed, alphabetically, Blu-ray Disc on one side, DVD and TV on the other, and picking out something to watch that night.
Of course, I keep getting told it’s a generational thing. I still like to read an actual newspaper in the morning, and I have eschewed e-readers for paperbacks — new and used, which I devour during my daily spinning sessions at the gym.
But I wonder — will physical ever go completely away? Despite the ease of downloading and storing music electronically, CDs are still around. So are books and magazines. Is this merely pandering to a generation — my generation — that will one day die out, or is there in an inherent need in human nature to at least on occasion reach out and touch something real?
My boys are 18, 16 and almost 12, and while they’re knee-deep into YouTube and Hulu and streaming, they, too, are frequent visitors to the media closet, especially when they have friends over and want to watch a movie on the big TV in the family room. In those cases, quality still matters, and I don’t care what anyone says — you still can’t beat Blu-ray Disc for clarity and sound.
It sort of makes you wonder.
By: Thomas K. Arnold
Welcome to Hollywood 4.0
Studio restructurings are painful. Longtime staff members are laid off, often through no fault of their own. It’s not the quality of their work, or their productivity; it’s part of the ongoing drive by corporations everywhere to cut costs and boost efficiencies. I remember when I first joined this magazine a colleague called a studio publicist a few minutes before 9 a.m. “We’re not open yet,” said the publicist, who must have answered the phone by chance. “Call back during business hours.”
These days, I get emails and calls at 6:30 in the morning and 11:30 at night. Most studio publicists are required to carry their smartphones with them at all hours and on weekends, so they can be reached at any time, at any place. 24/7 is a cliché, but it’s really true. Technology, which we all thought would make our work easier, has done exactly that — but our bosses know this too, and they want to get as much out of us as they possibly can.
Studio executives know they can get more out of less, and they seem bound and determined to do exactly that. It’s the same all over corporate America — hence the “jobless recovery” of our economy and the fact that so many smart, talented people are out of work.
And yet the latest wave of restructurings at the major studios are far more complex than mere “people dumps.” Studio structures are changing not so much with the times as in advance of them. It’s now clear that the future lies in digital distribution — and once that realization hit, studios began prepping for the revolution.
Nothing levels the proverbial playing field so much as the Internet — and if the Internet is going to be the primary mechanism through which studios transmit content to consumers, it’s time for a “one world” approach. We can no longer look at home entertainment in “domestic” and “international” segments the way we did, say, in the early days of DVD, when discs were coded for different territories and even countries so there would be no crossover.
These days, it’s all about crossover — the Web knows no boundaries, and it’s high time we began looking at home entertainment from a true global perspective. That’s why Sony Pictures and Universal Studios recently tapped international business leaders, highly attuned to global business issues, to lead their respective home entertainment divisions. Globalization is no longer a catchy buzzword; it’s rapidly becoming the reality, not just in Hollywood but throughout corporate America.
Now, any time you bring two entities together there are bound to be casualties in “human capital.” You see it whenever two companies merge; there are always redundancies.
And yet the wave of restructurings that is now hitting Hollywood — and believe me, we’re just in the early stages — isn’t driven solely by globalization.
It’s also a reflection of the massive transformation in how we do business. We’ve entered a new era — an area of social networking and big data, of business intelligence and search, of mobility and analytics — that compels studios (and other corporations, for that matter) to completely rethink their business models. The CIO not only has a seat at the table, but more and more he’s driving innovation — he’s not reacting to business needs, but helping to shape and determine them.
Call it Hollywood 4.0. It’s a brave new world out there.
By: Thomas K. Arnold
Craig Kornblau: A Legacy of Vision
Craig Kornblau
It must be gratifying to go out on top. Craig Kornblau’s sudden and unexpected departure from the presidency of Universal Studios Home Entertainment, after 16 years at the helm, was part of a bigger strategic move by the studio in which he was nothing more than collateral damage.
Universal, you see, was the last of the majors with separate domestic and international divisions, and with globalization being the mantra of corporations everywhere his higher-ups were faced with a pickle: They had to meld the two units into one, and yet each was headed by a top-notch executive — smart, savvy and shrewd — the company could ill afford to lose.
And yet one had to go, and one can only surmise that Eddie Cunningham, the international president, stayed on as head of the new worldwide home entertainment division because his learning curve was a lot lower: He had to learn the ropes of just one market, a market that despite its size is really quite simple, and one where Universal, thanks to the team that Kornblau put together over the past 16 years, was cresting on top. In a way, Kornblau was a victim of his own success: The former Universal Studios Home Entertainment was a smooth, well-oiled machine with some of the industry’s most respected executives, a clever marketing team, and an unparalleled supply chain apparatus. It was also coming off one of its best years in history, with the division laying claim to the top-selling DVD/Blu-ray Disc of the year (Despicable Me 2), the No. 1 EST title of all time (also Despicable Me 2), the No. 1 catalog title of the year (the original Despicable Me) and two of the top five rental titles (No. 1, Identity Thief, and No. 5, Ted). Identity Thief was also the No. 1 VOD title of the year.
Kornblau also left on a personal high. Just five months earlier, Kornblau was given expanded duties at Universal, as his division assumed responsibility for all of NBCUniversal’s digital distribution and marketing, including VOD and EST. Kornblau also won industry kudos for working closely with NBCUniversal sister division Comcast Cable to launch a digital storefront to sell digital copies of its movies to 25 million subscribers, and for crafting a fulfillment contract with Paramount Home Media Distribution to capitalize on Universal’s supply-chain strengths.
He also finalized renewal of an agreement with Open Road Films to handle all marketing, sales and distribution services for Blu-ray Disc, DVD, EST and VOD platforms of Open Road Films' theatrical titles through 2017.
Kornblau leaves behind not just an extremely efficient, and successful, domestic home entertainment operation, but also a legacy of leadership and vision. The son of a retailer, Kornblau arrived at Universal Studios 16 years ago to take over the ship from Bruce Pfander, a former 20th Century Fox executive who briefly ran home entertainment after the ouster of longtime head Louis Feola.
He was not yet 40, and an alumnus of the legendary home entertainment empire at Walt Disney assembled by Bill Mechanic — and honed to what many consider perfection by his successor and former lieutenant, Ann Daly, now at DreamWorks. It was an empire built on the concept of selling movies directly to consumers rather than retailers. In an era dominated by the rental cassette, the revolutionary sellthrough model worked at Disney for two reasons: The studio is the only one with a genuine brand that means something to consumers, and its executives were smart enough to figure out a way to exploit it through such strategies as placing hot titles on moratorium after a specific period of time to build consumer excitement — and demand.
Kornblau was a key member of Team Disney, back in those days: As SVP of worldwide operations and logistics, he pioneered Direct Account Management, and served as the chief architect of this system, which set a new standard within the home entertainment industry, particularly after the advent of DVD and the explosive growth of sellthrough.
During his 16 years at Universal Studios, Kornblau quickly established himself as one of the home entertainment sector’s true thought leaders. He saw the threat to sellthrough posed by new rental models pioneered by Netflix and Redbox and led the industry charge in establishing unprecedented, critical windowing agreements to minimalize cannibalization. He clung to HD DVD during the next-generation format wars because he thought it made more sense to retool an existing product rather than introduce something completely new; when it became clear HD DVD was a lost cause he became one of rival Blu-ray Disc’s most enthusiastic supporters, although in hindsight he may have been right. The revolutionary nature of Blu-ray prompted a hiccup on the manufacturing as well as the retail end, and the format never quite rose to the heights of DVD.
More recently, Kornblau has been a key driver in industrywide initiatives to promote consumer and retail adoption of digital content, including the aggressive push to early electronic sellthrough (EST) windows and the standardization of Blu-ray combo packs. He also influenced the development and promotional rollout of the pioneering digital storage offering, UltraViolet.
To say Kornblau had a good run is a vast understatement. To twist an old saying, he may be out, but he’s certainly not down.
By: Thomas K. Arnold