48 GENIUS INTERVIEW RICHARD BERGER
FEED Can you explain how Movies Anywhere works?
But then you’re starting to see other immersive experiences that are associated with the film, like an augmented reality experience or a game. There’s really no limit to what the studios could attach to a piece of IP now. The spec enables these experiences on any platform on any service. FEED How do you engage with the service providers – like Netflix and Amazon – to make extras available? RB Together with the studios, there’s been outreach to make sure they’re aware of this. It would be a lot harder sell to those service providers if every studio was doing something dierent, and I think that’s where we as an organisation can help move the needle – when we bring the studios together on a common spec and initiative. Comcast launched it more than a year ago and has it on the X1 platform. Vudu has some experiences on its platform too. It’s going to be up to the individual OTT platforms how to best incorporate it into their own experience. FEED You mentioned content security as an ongoing concern. How has the strategy been developing around that?
We want the studios to understand and have accurate information about what the true threats are. We don’t get involved in policy, but we can bring technology and science to bear. Understanding what the threats are and what can be done is one piece, but figuring out how to make legitimate experiences as compelling as possible is the other. FEED So what are the biggest security threats now? RB It’s a lot of the same things we’ve seen over the years. Peer-to-peer was one way we were seeing distribution of copies of films, and there’s still some of that, but now we’re seeing more unauthorised streaming services that get installed on living room devices. It’s becoming easier to click and stream things, and it can be misleading for consumers, who might think they’re actually accessing a legitimate source. And from a content protections standpoint, we’re always looking at the new formats. How do we provide content protection for AR and VR, with good standards and practices set right at the beginning? RB Our focus has been on a lot of technology enablement. And we’re looking ahead to developing specifications for an improved digital supply chain. With a more sophisticated digital supply chain, we’ll be able to do a lot more things that we couldn’t do when everything was manual. We’re also connecting more and more to the business stakeholders at the studios to drive common studio initiatives that hopefully will make the whole industry better and better for consumers. FEED What’s next for MovieLabs?
RB It’s a similar concept to UltraViolet; it’s an interoperable rights ecosystem. When a US consumer buys a movie from a participating retailer, that content goes into a Movies Anywhere digital locker and is instantly available at all the other participating retailers the consumer is a member of. In the US, the initial retailers are iTunes, Amazon, Google and Vudu. If I buy a movie on any one of those services, I can access it on all of those services, as well as on the Movies Anywhere direct to consumer server. It creates a lot of great options for the consumer for playback and they’re not locked into any one particular retailer. With the CPE spec, we want to enable on these new digital platforms all the things people have been used to in their DVD and Blu-ray extras experience. But we didn’t want to stop there. We wanted the platform to enable anything the studios could dream up – being connected through social media or dynamic experiences which change over time that you can’t do with a disc. FEED So what kinds of extra content can be made available? RB There’s the main feature, of course. But there could be alternative versions of the film, like a director’s cut. There could be commentaries or deleted scenes.
RB The industry has always had a challenge in competing against free, unauthorised content distribution.
THERE’S REALLY NO LIMIT TO WHAT THE STUDIOS COULD ATTACH TO A PIECE OF IP NOW
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