Jerry Pierce most recently held the position of senior VP of technology at Universal Pictures. He joined Universal in 1995, and formed the Motion Picture Technology Office for Universal in ’00. His projects included digital cinema, next generation DVD, electronic sell through, home servers/networks and copy control technologies.
He was a member of both the technical committee and the management committee of the studio consortium Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) and was on the board of USC’s Entertainment Technology Center. He continues to be an associate member of the American Society of Cinematographers, VP of the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) and is chairman of the Inter-Society Digital Cinema Forum (ISDCF). Pierce recently left Universal to return to his home in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Since ’99, Pierce has been involved with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) digital cinema work. He was chairman of SMPTE-DC28.2–Digital Cinema Mastering and in ’03 became chairman of SMPTE-DC28.10–Mastering. Prior to joining Universal, Pierce established the joint project with Matsushita Electric Industries (Panasonic) for DVD disc authoring and high definition telecine transfers. Before Universal , he was VP of Eidesign Technologies, an innovator in the design of MPEG-1 video encoder systems and services. Eidesign participated in Video On Demand test systems as well as the emerging Video CD markets.
Pierce was a member of the SRI International (Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park) team for more than 13 years; he served as director of the electronics technology center. The ETC team worked with consumer electronic companies in the development of new products in areas including image processing. He holds a MSEE degree from Stanford University and a BSEE from UC Berkeley. He has been issued more than 15 patents on optical cards, hybrid optical/magnetic memories and scanner systems.
SHOOT: At the recent Hollywood Post Alliance Technology Retreat in Palm Springs, you keynoted a supersession titled “Predicting the New Home: Where and How Will Consumers Be Entertained.” We also heard from representatives of companies including Google, Panasonic, Samsung and Microsoft (SHOOT, 2/9, p. 4). What is your view on where and how consumers will watch entertainment in the future?
Pierce: To put things in perspective, it is always a good assumption that change in consumer behavior will be slow so in the near future (one to five years) most people will continue to be entertained in the same way as today–on television, purchased DVD and also in theaters. It is the trends that need to be watched.
It is easy to name all the new ways of acquiring content and new places to consume content. The difficulty is saying which ones will have a major impact on the industry in five to ten years.
My crystal ball is fairly cloudy, but here are my top-level guesses:
1) Distributing content will be far more fractured than it is today. DVD is here to stay for a long time. We will add new ways of distributing content and erode the market share of current methods, but they won’t go away.
2) The Internet delivery of TV shows, both streaming and downloading, will grow substantially. This TV content will be consumed primarily on computers.
3) I think the main TV in the house will have a general-purpose computer as one of the sources for content. I think movie libraries will move from physical DVDs to large hard discs containing hundreds of movies. This will follow the path as music did when it moved from CD’s to iPod libraries.
But I should give my opinions on which ones may not become that successful–this is a bit dangerous, but what the heck!
1) I don’t think NexGen DVD–either BluRay or HD-DVD will become anywhere near as successful as DVD for the studios.
Consumers will find the extra cost and lack of flexibility as a major deterrent to re-buying titles. They may buy the hardware, but not titles.
2) Hand held video displays would be part of the landscape for very short forms–trailers, jokes, music videos–but not critical for movies and only marginally for television.
As with most major changes the business models will be very important. Rental of movies can be very attractive, but without proper business models behind them, it will be difficult to have them launch.
SHOOT: How will these things impact advertising in the future? What do you think advertising will look like in the future?
Pierce: It is a fragmented marketplace and advertising will need to be very fragmented. For new media, Google seems to get it right. Those targeted ads work.
I think advertisers and content distributors will be better at hitting us with information/ads that are not offensive, but effective.
As an example, when you go to watch a streaming show, you assume that it takes a while to start the video (buffering, access, etc.), but in reality you are “forced” to watch a side ad–either a click through or a streaming ad. It has your full attention to wait for the show to start, but your eyes go to watch the side ad–it is not offensive, but very effective. That’s value for you and the advertiser.
SHOOT: What are the biggest challenges to getting to the digital home of the future?
Pierce: As your question suggests, there are many challenges to getting to a digital home, from real broadband (meaning 10-20mb/sec), to a good living room experience. If I were to pick two, they would be:
1) Building a home “ecosystem” that consumers can easily set up, easily maintain, and easily use. Right now we are a long, long way from that.
2) Consumer trust in new media. Why would a consumer purchase a movie if they were not sure it would be useable in a year? Consumers are willing to buy iTune tracks–they trust they will be around. But BluRay/HD-DVD? Plays-for-sure? Rental makes for an attractive offering, but do the business models support rental?
SHOOT: The Entertainment Technology Center at USC produced a full-day program last year titled “Other Digital Stuff,” which explored the different types of alternative content that may find its way onto movie theater screens. The topic was prompted by movement toward digital cinema distribution and projection. In addition to feature films, what sort of content/opportunities do you expect to become popular for screening in digital cinema theaters?
Pierce: Digital cinema offers a new palette of opportunities for creative expression. The obvious new uses will be in pre-show. I think we will see very creative use of the new palette first in trailers, advertisements and short films that run before the main feature. This is where experiments can take place. We can use the 48 fps feature of digital cinema and the use of multiple versions for different audiences. Short form may be a good use of the pre-show.
I think digital cinema’s primary goal is to make the movie experience the best it can be. This is the first time we can bring the quality of an answer print to the average theater. Of course when digital cinema is fully deployed, we will see more creative uses of alternate endings, interactive experiences with theater audiences and cinematography tricks that you can’t do with a film release.
