Many independent filmmakers, particularly documentarians, are exploring the possibilities of enhanced DVDs or DVDs with additional materials. Of course, a major concern for filmmakers is cost: who’s going to pay for the work involved in incorporating the additional materials? And, of course, are consumers willing to pay more for an enhanced DVD? The question of the real value of enhanced DVDs and whether or not they can meet a cost-benefits analysis elicited widely divergent responses, partly predicated on the extent of the enhancements. For the purposes of this sidebar, calling something an “enhanced DVD” will be more like the “full-blown range of a medley of features” — per Bowen’s description below — and not the bare-bones versions with chapter stops and little else.
Bob Bowen of Cinemagnetics spoke about the basic options for enhancement:
People come in with a wide range of source material. Multiple source materials and additional elements, require additional time, which adds to the cost. Most clients don’t overdo the process, opting instead for more straightforward navigation. CineMagnetics offers three basic encoding options. One is basic, with no additions such as chapter stops. Another is a full-blown range of features. The third is a combination of basic navigation, with modest additions, such as up to 10 chapter stops and a single-page menu. Users generally do want to see chapter points. Most are not that interested in supplemental material, except for closed captioning and possibly foreign language versions. My impression is that because DVD capabilities are so new to them and the market is somewhat immature, it will take time for expectations to change.
The answer to the cost-benefits analysis question is not simple. When pressed, most respondents said that on a strictly financial basis, few enhanced DVDs would be justified by audience demand that translates into a willingness to pay for the extra costs of creating and manufacturing the enhanced DVD.
Exceptions to this were more specialized markets like art film and other areas where collectors had the requisite “must have, will pay” motivation. Some social issue media programs certainly benefited from having additional source material and background information. Bart Weiss, Director of the Dallas Film and Video Festival, spoke to this when he answered the question on whether add-ons work by saying, “If the intent is pure money, then it isn’t cost effective. But indies are different, and assume that people want to learn more about the subject.”
Independent media culture is particularly well tuned to the idea of enhancements and other additional context for media programs. The motivations are strong for filmmakers to make enhanced versions of their films and video, even if they won’t necessarily make money. This gap between a hard bottom-line and the aspiration to bring to audiences a fuller, truer portrait of a subject is much of what defines independent media and differentiates it from other, more commercial media. The value of enhancements then is somewhat relative. The paradigm of a maker wanting to communicate something that an audience may or may not want is a familiar pattern in independent media culture. Does creating an enhanced version of a film let audiences in on a special trove of interesting materials? Or is it reflective of the maker’s inability to fully edit a work or track audience preferences — the DVD equivalent of vanity publishing?
Some observers feel that the Internet is the ideal place for additional materials, rather than an enhanced DVD. Media producer and analyst Alyce Myatt feels that audiences should have a choice — she objects to paying for additional material if you don’t necessarily want more. She felt that viewers could encounter the story on DVD and then go to the web for more information. A password model for one or more plays on the web might provide some revenue, while giving audiences a choice to do so.
Steve Bartz, Project Director of Active Voice, a company specializing in outreach work that extends the reach of television projects, said they make great use of the net for supplementary materials when the budgets don’t allow for putting the materials on DVD. He built an electronic toolkit that lowered printing costs and made materials available on PDF files via the Internet. Larry Daressa of California Newsreel also said that they can only manage enhancements when they’re subsidized and that their supplementary materials are all on the web.
The question of the real drawing power of enhanced DVD brought out a variety of opinions. Some, like Debbie Zimmerman of Women Make Movies, see enhanced DVD as moving people to become buyers instead of renters. She also cited Docurama’s Steve Savage as saying that you have to offer expanded DVDs to motivate people to go to video stores to buy them. Bart Weiss agreed to some extent, but noted that lower price points and a new ethos of collecting instead of renting lead people to buy DVDs — with or without enhancements. Milos Stehlik of Facets Multimedia echoed the move to buying: “The DVD [is] more collectible, and DVD culture becomes a buying, not a renting, phenomenon. It’s closer to buying a book.” He recalled that bookstores helped sell DVD formats in the early years, with companies like Blockbuster losing out because they followed a rental model.
Emily Russo of Zeitgeist says that they do a lot of enhanced work. Their DVDs are high-quality, with lots of background material. Regarding a cost/benefit analysis, Zeitgeist assumes that their enhanced DVDs will last a longer time and have archival potential. Filmmaker Peter Wintonick spoke to this, saying “I liked the experience of doing the Manufacturing Consent DVD with Zeitgeist Films. I consulted on the process and put in some extra features. It was expensive, with a cost of about $10,000, but certainly worth it. And this was after we had tons of sales on VHS. The DVD release gave it a second life…and good royalty checks.”
Enhanced DVD has great potential for older programs, giving them a renewed life — provided, however, that the time, cost and availability of the materials are not prohibitive. Eddie Wong of NAATA recounted how Spencer Nakasako re-interviewed the subjects of his earlier programs Kelly Loves Tony and a.k.a. Don Bonus for the DVD releases. This strategy works if it is warranted by the quality of the original and the subsequent interview. Another example is the Styles Wars DVD released by Plexifilm. The project was massive, with four additional hours of material, 300 menu screens and an equal amount of video clips. Although the most ambitious and complex project that Plexifilm has done, they felt it was worth it — certainly, selling 40,000 copies helps. And they’ve had no small amount of satisfaction from seeing how an equivalent release, the Wild Style DVD put out by Rhino, a far larger company, did very poorly, selling about 8,000 titles. To Plexifilm’s Gary Hustwit, it was obvious that “they (i.e. Rhino) didn’t really care, and it cost them.” Filmmaker Arthur Dong, who self distributes his documentaries, also found that creating enhanced DVDs for some of his documentaries breathed new life into them (see the Case Studies: Filmmakers Who’ve Made Enhanced DVD — Stories from the War on Homosexuality: The Arthur Dong Collection, Vol. 1 for more information).
Unfortunately, some distributors can only add a small amount of enhancements for older titles, often for cost reasons. Additionally, with older titles, it may be hard to find the extra materials to go into enhanced DVDs. Enhanced DVD works exceptionally well for distributors whose focus is on classic media works that are highly prized by collectors. The Criterion Collection is perhaps the best example of this — their finely researched and produced DVDs are treasures indeed. The Criterion approach is great for timeless collectibles where a “must have, will pay” demand is evident and the products are generally evergreen. But such attention to quality and detail is also beyond the reach of most other distributors.
