Sonic Solutions is ready for digital movies to heat up
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sonic Solutions CEO Dave Habiger believes his big gamble is about to catch fire.
"We have spent the last four years with the bulk of our resources going into this new format," he says. "And it's finally coming to fruition."
Sonic also makes professional tools for Hollywood to produce DVD and Blu-ray discs. As the company prepared for a transition from DVD to Blu-ray, it ended up concluding that the business as we know it of renting and selling DVDs — think Netflix, Blockbuster, the corner video store — is poised for an exit. Habiger believes the time has finally come for movies to be delivered via the Internet to a slew of devices including TVs, cellphones and ultraportable computers known as netbooks.
"The notion that right now, there's some plastic pellets ... that are being shipped to a plant in Taiwan, and they're going to be melted and pressed into a disc, and a movie will be put on that, and that disc will be shipped back to the U.S. ... that model doesn't make sense anymore," he says.
For decades, Hollywood has salivated at the notion of saving on manufacturing and distribution costs by going directly to the consumer with video on demand (VOD), but it's been a slow process. Originally, the thought was that cable and satellite systems would build robust systems that would rival any video store.
While many operators have stronger video-on-demand selections today, most don't come near the offerings of online stores such as Netflix, Amazon or Apple, which are pushing their on-demand ambitions with sales of set-top boxes that consumers plug into a TV.
