Dunn Seeks CE Support for Integrated Hard Drive-Equipped Ultra HD/Blu-ray Player, at CEA Industry Forum

LOS ANGELES -- An Ultra HD Blu-ray player could be on the market by Christmas 2015, said 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment President Mike Dunn, during a Q-and-A session after the keynote speech at the CEA Industry Forum Monday. Dunn referred to “multiple flavors” of Ultra HD but said the “best thing” would be to have a consumer experience Ultra HD on a big-screen TV in a retail store and come out saying, “That looks different, that looks so much better, that sounds incredible.” Ultra HD “in full flavor” involves sending “really fat files that throw tremendous amounts of data up to a display,” he said. Fox is working with studio and hardware partners on what Dunn called “the Digital Bridge” within the Blu-ray Disc Association, he said.

Fox is a “huge supporter” of the integrated hard drive solution as an extension of the Blu-ray player, Dunn said. Once the hard drive is removed from the solution, “you have to have a degree in IT in order to connect everything,” he said. He said disc players in the U.S. have nearly 100 percent household penetration: “It’s one of the most important pieces of real estate anywhere.” Almost any company in the world “would die for that little four feet of real estate under the television,” he said. Integrated, “no-brainer devices” that manage these files are the “platform for the future,” he said. The Digital Bridge offers a pathway for new connections between consumers and their content and “we must build it together.”

Dunn said the Digital Bridge can be a platform on which the two industries can innovate for the next decade. A closer link between entertainment and CE “can drive big-time growth,” he said. “Imagine a Blu-ray player that lets consumers play all the discs in their library along with next-generation discs with Ultra HD quality,” he said. Fox supports both the “elegant” hard drive-based solution and an external hard drive version, which would enable consumers to copy a physical disc and then store and manage their digital library in “one centralized location,” he said. That living room-based solution would allow consumers to move digital files around seamlessly to any device in the home, he said. Portable devices could access content from the cloud. He envisioned interactive 4K content “enhanced by high dynamic range, higher, deeper color space, high frame rates and 3D audio.” Most content could be sent to a device in under three minutes, he said. “It’s an entertainment hub that bridges consumer behavior into the digital future,” he said.

Asked how CE companies can work with Fox’s Innovation Lab, Dunn said the company is trying to build strategic relationships for creating content in a way that will support CE companies’ businesses so the two can “arrive at the same time to the consumer.” In many cases, “either you're early or we're late or vice versa,” he said. The Innovation Lab is a way to get objectives aligned and “hopefully provide better products in the future,” he said.

Dunn cited data that tablet users spend 60 percent of their video time watching long-form videos, divided between movies and TV shows. By 2015, there will be 874 million connected devices versus 558 million today, the average TV will be 65 inches in screen size and the TV will be “smarter and deliver even better picture and sound quality,” he said. Taking a defensive stance in response to people who say, “If only Hollywood would make its content available,” Dunn said, “We have our product available in nearly 50,000 physical locations and on all major digital platforms."

Dunn highlighted Fox’s Digital HD initiative as a way the studio is responding to the growing number of ways consumers can view content. Digital HD offers early access to new releases at $14.99, cloud storage and access to the full library in HD, he said. Consumers’ appetite for digital content is “a significant positive” for both CE companies and Hollywood, he said.

On a light note, when asked by CEA President Gary Shapiro about how the CEA industry and Hollywood can work better together, Dunn referred to a previous session on future technologies that might include robots cooking dinner and a drone delivering pizza and quipped, “All I'm asking for is an Ultra Hi-Def Blu-ray player with a hard drive.” He also joked that future connected cars that drive themselves could raise the time that the average American spends watching TV per day from 4 1/2 hours to six hours, especially “if you live in Los Angeles.”