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FILM, THEATRE, AND TELEVISION

Proceed to Check-Out: The


Proliferation and Primacy of DVD
Content
Daniel Bulger

O n January 21, 1968 Disney telecast a special event from its Anaheim-based theme park,
Disneyland, to viewers across the nation. Marcia Miner, official ambassador of Mickey-dom,
hosted the program, called “Disneyland from The Pirates of the Caribbean to The World of
Tomorrow,” an emporium of Walt’s latest Imagineering, with behind-the-scenes looks at the
painstaking realization of these two “revolutionary” theme park attractions. Essentially a video
brochure (or inflated advertisement), combined, in Disney’s indelible manner, with an air of
newsworthiness sustained by documentary-style presentation, the program represents an early
effort at media convergence: the culling of team Disney—its films, merchandise, theme parks,
etc.—within a television broadcast, traverses the media landscape in “one giant leap,” in the
spirit of the Space Age fervency offered to TV audiences by Neil Armstrong the following year.
Culture, nevertheless, extirpated the natural macro-universe in favor of a silicon micro version
fewer than two decades later; yet Disney today seems vindicated, as the Age of Information
collides its media together with as much frequency as the prolific matter/antimatter pairs of a
Space Age—an apt image for the evolving concept of media convergence.
“Convergence” has been a watchword in media camps for many years now, though its
practical success, as such theorists as Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell have argued, has been
marginal at best. However, the ever-emerging “new media” sectors—including the web, wireless
peripherals, blogs, DVD, video games—have inspired fresh convergence ventures attempting to
synergize these diverse platforms into entertaining and profitable forms. As a result, the notion of
convergence continues to be interwoven with the ideal of a dawning “media future.” I therefore
use “convergence” in this paper as a term for the imbrication of new media in today’s
conglomerate-dominated system. However, I am also mindful that it is an industry-invented
term—a euphemism for the oligopoly and hyperbole of the medium-bending capability of such
media.
Despite the shortcomings of some of the industry’s recent efforts (especially “crossover”
TV programming – see John T. Caldwell’s article cited below), one new media format in
particular, the DVD, has begun to show success on the frontiers of convergence, especially in
fusing itself with the web. The Disney example, for instance, was not procured through tedious
browsing through television archives. Instead, Disney resuscitated the featurette as added content
on its December 2004 “2-Disc Collector’s Edition” release of Pirates of the Caribbean: The
Curse of the Black Pearl. The film, based on an amusement ride (a phenomenon of aesthetic and
even philosophical proportions itself), entertains many of new media’s incarnations over its two
disks. This particular morsel from the sixties offers a surreal indication of the power of
convergence media: amusement park rides, telecasts (from then or now), interactive web-based
menu systems, and a digital video presentation. And the DVD manages to integrate—almost
seamlessly—this array of content.
The proliferation of DVD content, in particular, displays the attempts of media
conglomerates to develop DVD as an interactive and convergence-minded home viewing
experience. Utilizing both “environmental” and “economic” convergence, the DVD medium
entices the viewer to “check out” various features and extras over the breadth of a disk, and then
encourages the viewer to proceed to “check-out” (i.e., purchase) with various brand-related
merchandise in tow. Hence, DVD content has emerged as a commodification of a film text—an
outlet for brand cultivation—under the aegis of interactivity and convergence. For today’s most
popular home viewing medium, this strikes some theoretical chords that I wish to examine in this
paper.
I will begin by underscoring the interactivity of DVD disks by examining the praxes of
programming and content; I will then examine the increasing trend of the “PC Friendly” DVD,
which demonstrates the potential clout of DVDs in the e-commerce sector. It is, furthermore, my
conviction that it is ultimately important to keep sight of the movies—that is, to remember that
there are film texts among the many-layered converge-agents of DVDs, especially as the films
themselves are pushed to the periphery by incessant extras and bulging multi-disk epics. DVD
content today is often colliding rather than converging with film texts, which calls scholars to
analytical diligence and draws attention to the cataclysmic user-text shift in home viewing. In the
words of Charmaine Gravning, product manager for Windows at Microsoft Corporation: “Gone
are the days when you view a movie only once or twice. There’s always something new to check
out” (NAPSA).
For the major home distribution companies, some of whom hazarded significant capital
on a young and untested medium, the reception of DVD has been a godsend. After a contentious
nascence, the DVD gamble has paid off, to the tune of unrivaled sales for both software (DVDs
themselves) and hardware (DVD players). DVD-video (a.k.a. digital video disk, digital versatile
disk, but now an entity all to its own) was an impressive upgrade from the minimal VideoCD
format, which allowed only seventy-four real-time minutes of play (hardly ideal for the 90-
minute threshold sometimes imposed on feature films). DVD converted time into capacity,
following CD’s 640MB memory, cramming 1’s and 0’s into microscopic spirals with more
proximity and depth than CD and then adding a second layer, so that DVD disks hold up to 8.5
gigabytes of information (Lake G: 7). High-Definition formats, which will be on the market
soon, exceed even that figure: HD-DVD, which presently has the blessing of the DVD Forum
(an industry-instigated effort to standardize DVD technology), holds up to 30GB; Blu-Ray,
Disney and Sony’s favored child, holds up to 50GB (“Digital Video Disk”).
DVD is a compression format, sometimes called “lossy,” since some of the picture and
sound information must be sacrificed to accommodate a 135-minute film on one disk. The
following, though, is an advantage of compression: where picture and sound terminate, space
often remains (Lake G: 7). The DVD is roomy enough to hold supplementary content. Far from
being wasteful and unresourceful, the motion picture industry sought to augment the home
viewing experience and attract sales—advantageously, one might add—by inventing a dictum
that has evolved to deluging proportions today: volume equals content.
Extra content, though, is not without precedent on older home-video formats. Disney
patrons will recall the “special presentation” or “making-of” segment that followed several of its
high-profile cartoon musicals in their 1990s releases. Likewise, in each re-released “Special
Edition” Star Wars on VHS, the feature was preceded by a brief behind-the-scenes program with
footage from the original filming and commentary on the 20-year face-lift of the special edition.
These are only two of the many examples readily produced in correspondence with VHS
features.
The direct lineage of DVD content, however, hails from its quasi-digital forerunner,
Laser Disk. Capable of secondary, even tertiary, audio tracks, the Laser Disk format
revolutionized the first “Special Editions” as we know them today, utilizing unused space by
offering an optional commentary track to run simultaneously with a given film. Voyager’s
“Criterion Collection” pioneered the practice on its 1986 release of Citizen Kane with
commentary by film historian Ron Haver. And at its apex, Laser Disk Special Editions and Box
Sets were not radically different from today’s normal DVD releases. Tim Burton’s “Collector’s
Edition” of Nightmare before Christmas, for instance, features a panorama of content (behind-
the-scenes footage, production stills, etc.), the full appraisal of which requires hours of viewing
beyond the film itself.
Naturally, the emergence of DVD content is impossible without a “text,” the film itself,
as an ontological cornerstone. DVD content is mostly designed and published by a post-
production team, though development today is sometimes concurrent with the production of a
feature (and its release, as in the case of Peter Jackson’s King Kong and his Production Diaries
DVD, is even known to precede that of its text), which further confuses that relationship.
However, “content autonomy,” in a motion picture sense, will never truly exist, since, if DVD
content is produced sans texts, it will no longer represent a filmic form. This is not to say that
within the medium itself, content, though indebted to its text, cannot take precedence. The news
media, for instance, which savors DVD interactivity, seems to subscribe to the new primacy of
content: DVD reviews, common now across news outlets, often cite content volume as well as
the post-auteur lease to “become the director” and other such film manipulations as judgments
on DVD quality. Content as a selling point is logical from a company source perspective, too,
since sheer volume is what distinguishes “regular editions” from their pricier “special edition”
and “box set” counterparts.
The function of DVD content as it relates to its text also deserves some brief words.
Content can both immerse the viewer in the film text and act in the role of anthologizer. The
Criterion Collection in particular has defined the standards of the latter. Complementing a film
with historical and expository material, Criterion DVDs formulate an anthology of the film
(much as critics and historians have done all along), thereby carrying DVDs from the realm of
entertainment into that of historicity. It is not my claim that Criterion’s efforts disparage film
texts or that DVD releases from other distribution companies do not perform a function similar
to that of the anthology (since non-Criterion DVDs comprise my examples). However, I am
arguing that DVD extras will begin to veer away from this “educational” model as content
becomes a commodity—a tool that media conglomerates will exploit to further promote their
brand.
Today, content on a DVD disk is normal and expected, even on regular-release films.
Hardly a film is released without menu options and a theatrical trailer or two, even from the
micro-distributing companies specializing in (sub) B-movie pictures. This is due in large part to
the popular conception of DVD as an interactive medium. Triggered by Laser Disk experiments,
DVD championed a home-viewing experience that is determined by the viewer. Unlike VHS,
which relies on the insertion of a cassette and pressing the “play” button (until auto-play vitiated
that guilty pleasure), DVD (in most cases) interrupts the “pre-play” and “play” continuum with a
user-controlled interface, the main-menu. Inherent in interactivity, though, is the role of choice—
a menu without an option or four is no menu at all, but an on-screen play button. Content, then,
furnishes the permutations organizable and justified by menu interactivity. In other words,
without content, DVD interactivity would be dully recursive (perhaps we could be treated to
Nightmare before Christmas in different shades of blue). As such, DVD programming is
becoming codified to complement and stress DVD content—and thus interactivity.
“Just press play” defined VHS as a simple, automated home viewing format; which is
threadbare from DVD’s perspective, whose interactivity amounts to a user-controlled matrix that
resembles “click and go,” web-based ideology. I offer the web, therefore, especially the
“cyberspace” moniker, as a foundational medium of DVD programming. Web pages are self-
contained opuses organized behind some fundamental impetus (news, sports, personal
advertisement, or a favorite soap star). A film lends the DVD format that impetus, and designers
forge on from there. Similarly, the web and DVD intersect on their chosen route to render a text
toward interactive entertainment: the promotion of a virtual environment.
As in cyberspace, DVD disks offer the viewer relative autonomy to navigate within the
given content. In order to make navigation more entertaining and to eschew text-heavy lacuna,
DVD designers (as web designers do) normally construct a sense of space that unifies the disk,
drawing on the diegetic world of the film as a basis for leitmotif. Today, DVD designers seem to
favor an intro piece, a kind of prelude, as the normative first-foot of that experience. Essentially
a short digital overview of the film, the prelude is reminiscent of shockwave videos that precede
web space home pages. As in holistic web environments (as well as virtual space in video-
gaming), the viewer is invited to be immersed in the film (DVD) experience.
Another staple of extra content, the DVD "chapter" system is derived yet again from the
Laser Disk format, though now with the added responsibility of environmental similitude. On
many DVDs key nodes of the film are often graphically represented by thumbnail pictures, both
static and animated, included as a segregated "film chapters" menu option. Rather than simple
text, image thumbnails expand upon viewer immersion in the DVD-created world, incorporating
actual film imagery into the motif (the Aladdin DVD examined below adds a scarab cursor,
instrumentation of “A Whole New World,” arabesque image frames, and a desert backdrop to the
mix). As a viewer browses through the "pages" of a film, visual markers expose narrative
development and orient a viewer with touchstone moments, or at the very least, junctures of
narratological salience.
Stephen Mamber offers DVD chapters as naturally occurring examples of "narrative
mapping," a technique he developed to "represent visually events that happen over time"
(Mamber 145). Mamber proposes a snapshot of visual narrative in this essay—a panoptic, all-
inclusive image—as “a useful tool for dealing with complexity, ambiguity, density, and
information overload” (Mamber 157). The technique delineates seismic shifts in shot as well as
story development.
However, there is also something less noble and pedagogical underpinning DVD
"chaptering" than narrative mapping would suppose. Ostensibly, fractioning film texts benefits
knowledgeable (read: repeat) viewers for quick-referencing purposes, saving unwanted minutes
of seeking with rewind/fast forward in order to relive and rejoice in specially endearing
segments. A medium amicable to re-viewing, as the advent of home-viewing espoused from the
first, DVD is typically modern when compared to a recyclable format such as VHS. Its pleasures
are brief and available on-demand. In reality, episodic formats are the breadwinners of the digital
age. It is commonly asserted that time has been fragmented over the course of history due to
cultural strictures. In our viewing, too, we seek something more palatable to the taste of hyper-
speed lifestyles, something, in fact, that will not fetter us for two hours at a time. Serialization is
entirely true to digital form: it is open to revisiting, but in fixes short and exact. DVD chapters
lend to the protracted film format the possibility of brevity by endowing the viewer with the
authority to isolate the filmic moment. Likewise, DVD environments unfold to immerse the
viewer in the content, but by transporting him or her through it at warp-speeds (we are one
“click” away different DVD “locales”)—"super-scrolling" in web terms. And one is left to
wonder if the film, by association, is vulnerable.
To generalize about the praxes of added content and DVD environments, I will briefly
examine Disney’s Platinum Edition of Aladdin. The disk opens astride one of the film’s famous
“Arabian Nights,” during which we see the film’s title across the screen on the sands of the
desert. A within-the-shot tilt then reveals two of the three environments available for exploration
in the DVD: the Cave of Wonders and the Genie’s Lamp (the third is the diegetic city of
Agrabah). It is important to note that once these kinds of environments are established, DVD
designers adhere to them totally so as not to mar the immersion experience. In this particular
DVD, backdrops and excerpts from the film’s score are consistent in all of the disk’s menus,
even in the set-up menu, the only section on most DVDs that refers to an apparatus rather than
films themselves.
The layout of the content is then divided environmentally: in Agrabah, we are treated to
regulars among DVD content—deleted scenes, audio commentary from filmmakers (here
divided between filmmakers and animators), music videos, and the disk set-up option. Also DVD
content thoroughfare, the making-of featurettes/documentaries are included in the “Cave of
Wonders” environment on disc two. The disks are rounded out by several mini-games including
the exploration of the remaining environment, the genie’s lamp, a “magic carpet ride” through
the cumulative diegesis, and a fortune-telling game that returns us to Agrabah. Finally, the
Aladdin DVD is also “PC Friendly” which means, in many cases, exclusive-to-your-PC content,
though on this disk it only provides web links to various Disney resources (I will discuss the “PC
Friendly” phenomenon later).
Embedded, too, in the DVD’s interactive environment is the film text itself—and since
DVD interactivity is reliant on content, it is highly appropriate to examine how DVDs integrate
the film in such an environment. In the Aladdin DVD, and most DVDs in fact, the film gets top
billing on the main menu (denoted by “play” here). Viewers also have the traditional option to
“just press play” and forward to the feature. Furthermore, two-disk (plus) editions have
sometimes separated the feature and commentary from the extra content, putting them on
separate disks, though this is not standardized. Therefore, the films are certainly present in the
DVD environment. But are they prevalent? One is inclined to think not, especially since the
DVD environment was created to organize content. Skepticism persists too since media
companies are becoming more and more prone to make certain that viewers do not simply ignore
DVD content (by stressing its importance within a DVD), because it is the content, more than the
film, that will optimize the medium’s profitability.
Overall, the application of an interactive web environment in DVD authoring recalls
Anna Everett’s theory of “digitextuality.” As a broad concept, digitextuality “suggests a more
utilitarian trope capable at once of describing and constructing a sense-making function for
digital technology’s newer interactive protocols, aesthetic features, transmedia interfaces and
end-user subject positions, in the context of traditional media antecedents” (Everett 6). Thus,
digitextuality suggests cross-medium relationships between new media formats, which is plainly
obvious in DVD design, and also references “old media” formats that have come before. In this
spirit, Everett does not dispense with “old” views on the economics of the media. Instead, as
products of a digitextual age, conglomerates and the theory of convergence remain susceptible to
qualifications as “proconsumerist” or “procorporate”—and if I could add to that list,
“profilmic”—a point that I will develop in the context of “PC Friendly” DVDs.
DVD and new media are not without predecessors, as theories such as digitextuality have
sought to explore. DVD design borrows heavily from web sources to create an environment of
convergence. But economic convergence—a fiscal strategy more than an organic outcome of
interactive media—is an appropriate topic as DVD begins to expand from web-based design to
web-active design, that is, from offline digital media to online e-media. Convergence is
economically feasible and profitable within a system that facilitates cooperation between media
appendages, especially when each media source is contained within a parent company that
mitigates risk over interrelated products. Companies who stand to gain the greatest in each
instance of media convergence are those where each converge-agent is a filial partner, opting to
establish the brand portfolio in new markets instead of challenging a “brand” with each
individual product. Quite simply, the type of economy that encourages convergence (and its risk-
free outcomes) is a conglomerate system where multifaceted businesses fall under one dominion.
Simone Murray concisely describes the outcome: “a panoply of ostensibly competing products
drives return on the conglomerate’s investments by recycling proprietary content across the
gamut of company-controlled entertainment platforms” (416). It is no wonder, then, that the
media industry, subject of several of the more recent mega-mergers, would promote convergence
over its diverse products. I have shown that DVD incorporates elements of convergence through
its design. However, DVD is increasingly becoming economically convergence-savvy in
conjunction with its environmental homage to convergence—that is, DVD has begun to emulate
the hand that feeds it, rapidly becoming a more “conglomerated” medium as content moves from
your television to your computer.
InterActual is the new name in DVD content. Bought by Sonic Solutions (a DVD
authoring company) in 2004, InterActual provides media distributors with “PC Friendly” extras
for DVD movies (hence, DVD-ROMS, the type of disk your computer reads) that include, most
importantly, hotlinks to various movie-related web resources. Consumer research firm Centris,
however, speculates that only 20-25% of users will access the extra DVD-ROM content—but
Interactual, which now supports over five-hundred films from all of the media industry’s biggest
names—and in 2003 supported 70% of the top-25 DVD releases—bets that “broadband DVD,”
disks synergized with online content, will be the latest digital revolution (Saltzman E.3).
Remunerating for the dot-com failure and recapturing the guttering dream of convergence might
be sufficient to lure big media to the table.
The first portion of this paper essentially atones for part of what has made DVD a popular
phenomenon: the utilization of media convergence (a la digitextuality) as a tool to promote an
interactive environmental. This, however, does not utilize the theory of convergence in all its
moneymaking capacity. “Making-of” featurettes are (arguably) pleasant additions to a film text,
but they do not exploit the “brand” of a film to the limits of its marketing incarnations.
Moreover, though repeat viewing is encouraged by extra content, repeat (and even habitual)
purchasing of a conglomerate’s products would rely solely on DVD disk quality, which home
audiences might equate more with the quality of an individual film rather than a company’s
commitment quality DVD authoring. The online content furnished by InterActual, however,
transports the consumer to an economically re-accessible plane (in the guise of the Internet) that,
while baiting DVD viewers with the promise of more content, simultaneously lures them into
further statistical (marketing) and consumerist enterprises.
To be sure, the initial promise of content is upheld. Common among InterActual DVDs
are features such as image galleries, exclusive commentary and documentaries, and even script
and script development browsing. The Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban “2-Disc
Widescreen Edition” DVD, for instance, offers a Hogwart’s Timeline with narrated on-screen
text, a link to the FA Harry Potter video-game series website, and a link to the Harry Potter e-
trading card website (like baseball cards with web rewards instead of bubble gum). As opposed
to content found elsewhere on the two Potter disks, these features expand the DVD viewing to
the net where the opportunity to continue patronage is offered for modest prices. Only the
Hogwarts timeline is an enclosed, “immersion” environment such as those enumerated in the
first portion of the paper.
The convergence revolution suggested by InterActual is realized in its DVD interface
more than its promissory content, however. Accessing features like those in Harry Potter
requires the installation of the InterActual Player, which shares the common attributes of other
popular computer DVD programs on the market today, except that the movie controls interface
(i.e., play, stop, rewind.) also incorporates links to various web resources (ostensibly to further
the film experience). Installing the player is the only legal route to “unlock” the PC-only extra
content; therefore the plunge is a highly lucrative one for a viewer. And for media conglomerates
paired with InterActual, “unlocking” added content is lucrative too: the browser successfully
opens the DVD market to an expansive, and previously remote, cash register. This calls on
viewers’ ability to bilocate (surf the net while watching a film) and illustrates Sut Jhally and Bill
Livant’s theory of “watching as working,” in that, according to Marc Andrejevic, “sites of
consumption and labor are no longer distinct” (Andrejevic 99). Here, in an ideal act of economic
convergence, I can buy a toy version of Harry’s wand as I watch him cast spells with it. The
“DVD plus Internet” features available through the InterActual player effectively localize
continued consumer practices with a company.
Again, we can use the Harry Potter DVD as a model. The Harry Potter fan base is
considerably large and devoted, with no prodding necessary from Warner Brothers. Guaranteed
capital, however, is no excuse to eschew tapping a market. The links on the InterActual player
include those to the official e-mailed newsletter (which in turn advertises other Warner Brothers
theater releases as well as the Warner Brothers website, plus, in the 6/20/05 edition, includes a
cross-promotion for Mattel’s “Scene It” board game), message boards (to further a sense of
loyalty to the brand), special Harry Potter events, merchandise, and a link to the parent site (in
this instance, “harrypotter.com,” which is really “harrypotter.warnerbros.com”). Once on the
official website, the viewer is then a click away from other company brands and resources.
Moreover, since the webpage is proprietary space, the company is unfettered to inseminate
potential viewers (and thence “fans”) with first-looks at films of a similar fare and other apropos
content while the DVD viewer surfs. For a company’s merchandising department, and for the
management of enticing cross-product web offers and giveaways (e.g., free tickets to the next
WB film release), the schema is a blessing since it is flux-manageable and updatable and
therefore never obsolete. As a result, web designers can even invoke the seasonal pining of its
patrons: “Christmas at Hogwart’s” is an option that allows a fan to e-mail a Potter wish list to
different parties. These are the types of instant features that the convergence of digital media and
the web alone provides; and for media conglomerates, it is exactly the type of user flow that a
convergence medium should promote.
In the conglomerate media world, inserting a DVD disk is like logging-on to a home
page—and any successful webmaster knows that once a consumer logs-on, cross-promotion is
king. This, at least, was the theory behind the web portal debacle in the late 1990s. The universal
web portal, a utopian vision for many conglomerates, saw its heyday when various media
companies including NBC, Disney, and Time Warner purchased and invested heavily in several
of these internet gateways. Originally conduits to advertisers’ web content, conglomerates
tweaked portals so that its resources were directed to “third-party” sites that really emanated
from within the company (the first-party). In his study of Disney’s failure with the “Go
Network” portal, Jeffrey Lane Blevins accounts for several of the contributing factors to its
collapse, two of which are an “excessive amount of cross-promotion and how the company
mishandled the brand identity of its portal property” (Blevins 248). The “DVD portal,” I argue,
is a more subtle recapitulation of Disney’s and other media conglomerates’ web portal efforts
that is perhaps able to solve aspects of Blevins’ promotional dystopia.
First, DVD’s correspondence with a film text relatively dissolves identity issues with
regard to branding. Naomi Klein interprets branding as envisioning “a corporate mythology
powerful enough to infuse meaning into…raw products just by signing its name” (Klein 22,
quoted in Blevins). Film texts are similar: they hold sway over legions whose zealots are
sometimes vast and often powerfully cultish, to the degree, in fact, that for the acolytes of films
such as Star Wars, patronage becomes a way of living. In the purchasing of a DVD therefore,
chiefly a “Special Edition” type DVD, a corporation has already anticipated your extended fealty
to its “brand,” and therefore the portal to extended content and purchasing is logically brand-
based. In other words, Lord of the Rings fans need not agonize that their portal will misdirect
them to Raise Your Voice film content when they pop in their Special Edition disks: brand
ambiguity is safe-locked with DVD portals.
This is part of a larger tendency in the media industry to follow narrowcasting practices
where e-commerce is involved. The nature of the electronic universe is close to unpredictable
since access is open “via multiple channels, at any time of the day or night” and encourages
constant “migration,” usually among diverse brands (Caldwell 136). The industry responded, vis-
à-vis its web portals, by appropriating broadband Internet providers’ “walled-garden”
programming strategies that “[attempt] to turn users of networked communications into
customers of a proprietary environment” with techniques to deflate migration including
“prohibiting customers from having a choice of providers, from accessing rival content, or from
creating independent content” (Aufderheide 518). The “cross-promotional” overload within
media conglomerate web portals was a byproduct of these practices—and the ultimate failure of
those portals by this strong-arm approach was obvious juxtaposed with popular notions of the
plasticity and self-expression inherent in democratically liberated net space. DVD, however,
recasts the failed configuration of a web portal in order to suit and exploit a (self-manufacturing)
niche audience. That a DVD browser narrowcasts, therefore, is pre-conditional. It is an outcome
of the consensus between the consumer and producer at first purchase (Lord of the Rings vs.
Raise Your Voice again). A DVD disk is, in itself, a “walled garden,” and though companies
might once again mismanage promotional content, this fact provides the opportunity to extend
procorporate latitude beyond the limitations exposed by the dot-com collapse.
Narrowcasting, too, is similar in principal to Mark Andrejevic’s version of e-commerce
in that it represents “a particular form of subjectivity consonant with an emerging online
economy: one that equates submission to surveillance with self-expression and self-knowledge”
(Andrejevic 97). In this context, let us examine the terms InterActual lays before its costumers:
I give InterActual Player permission to locally and anonymously collect and upload
product usage and viewing behavior information. I understand that this information will
be used and provided to third parties by InterActual for marketing purposes. A benefit to
me is that as a result, the InterActual Player can personalize and enhance my
entertainment experience (InterActual).
InterActual seems to assume that its customers are familiar with the modern consumer-producer
pact that “mass individuation” paradoxically relies on “willing submission to pervasive
surveillance” and “[plugging]…vital statistics into a marketing algorithm” (Andrejevic 111-113).
References to a permissive “Big Brother” society aside, a service such as InterActual garners
vital information from the consumer, and enables him or her to continue purchasing through the
viewer’s unwillingness to sacrifice the monad of self (i.e., the intrinsic consumer want of
“enhanced personalization”). The ability to monitor an audience, according to Andrejevic, is a
“crucial aspect of new media” (101), which InterActual successfully achieves.
In summary, the dream of convergence that began to crumble with the failure of the dot-
com explosion and web portals has been, in some ways, refigured in the DVD explosion. Disks
such as Harry Potter are becoming PC and Internet Friendly (thanks to third-parties such as
InterActual), not only expanding the scope of added content, but also priming digital video for
economic convergence. DVD perpetuates the “walled-garden” theory of content that doomed
web portals; however, the closed-text nature of the films DVD represents make directed, non-
peripheral surfing logical and less imperious. Armed with successful branding solutions and a
profitable (if still problematic) convergence ideology, DVDs are new media’s most popular
“conglomerate-friendly” product.
The possible limitation to broadband DVDs is that linking relies on convergence media,
which for the industry today means online content. Television, despite several articles discussing
phenomena to the contrary, including the work of John T. Caldwell and “VR in the ER: ER’s
Use of E-Media” by Jeremy G. Butler, is still predominantly an offline medium. But Video On-
Demand, “interactive” features on major television providers such as Comcast and DirectTV,
cable and satellite providers doubling as cable modem and DSL internet providers, and various
cross-content efforts have played a role in imagining television as an integrated web medium
linking the televisual world with the internet. And in 2002, Buena Vista Home Entertainment,
New Line Home Entertainment, and Warner Home Video announced a cooperative effort to
bolster the development and sales of a “next-gen” enhanced DVD player, a DVD-ROM player
for the television (InterActual). Perhaps, then, if these points and the popularity of DVDs are any
evidence, convergence is finally upon us.
Finally, I explore the hierarchization of content within the strata of a DVD disk. In other
words, does the film take precedence over content; or, similarly, does PC Friendly content
supercede “making-of”s and other such content? At first glance, films proper and their additional
content appear locked in a symbiotic relationship: both seek to gain (economically) from the
other—and in the case of content, it would not exist without a parent source. John T. Caldwell’s
theory of “second-shift aesthetics,” a term he borrowed from the early television/web
convergence experiment of homicide.com, serves as a model here to help finagle an appropriate
approach to this relationship. Caldwell explains that second-shift aesthetics “attempt to bring
new forms of rationality to unstable media economies.” In doing so, conglomerates are able to, if
their second-shift tactics are successful, “track, monitor, and predict—or at least respond quickly
to—multidirectional user flows and migrations.” The model can be condensed further: the first-
shift is the impetus to interact with a company, the second-shift is the “stickiness,” the extra
content, or “aggregate text” that extends the first-shift experience and maintains user relations
(Caldwell 136-139). In terms of DVD video, the film is the impetus and the content is the
second-shift aesthetic. Caldwell, however, does not specify which “shift” he believes is the
primary focus of new media outlets. Obviously, for any motion-picture company, without the
film, the first-shift, there is no DVD and no content. But within the DVD medium itself, I argue
that the second-shift aesthetic takes precedence for purely financial reasons.
Recalling our discussion of the DVD environment (which does not appear to stress the
film itself) and the reemergence of online economic convergence in broadband DVDs (highly
lucrative to media conglomerates), content, it would seem, is the priority of DVDs, rather than an
ancillary, nice-to-have-it addition. Consider the Aladdin DVD: prominent on the title page is an
advertisement, alongside one for other beloved Disney Classics headed to DVD, for a “preview”
of the second disk, the disk filled with content. One might also cite as evidence the pronounced
“Special Features” captions on the back of DVD packaging, and even the widely popular “DVD
Review” that rates current releases not only on the content of a film, but on the content of its
extra content.
Added content on a DVD disk presents a company with new marketing strategies: with
InterActual, more user monitoring; with its browser, a new site of consumption. But if the
reception of films like Aladdin and Harry Potter are predetermined by first-shift aesthetics, DVD
content, rather than enticing new viewers, will encourage established ones to further invest in a
brand. As PC Friendly (and later TV Internet friendly) disks become the norm, which the current
trends predict, DVDs will lean more and more away from films themselves and to their content
where the possibility of further monetary investment is realized. Therefore, rather than viewing
extra content on DVDs as partnered with a film text, it is, in fact, more appropriate to regard it as
the paramount function of the DVD, converging medias successfully where few others could,
and therefore championing the marketing aims of media conglomerates.
InterActual also powers the Pirates of the Caribbean DVD for Disney, used as an
example in the introduction of this paper. Albeit less a cult following film than Harry Potter,
(though still, it seems, a potential sequel factory) Disney does not let good web-space go to
waste, using InterActual’s browser to promote itself. Features include signing up for the “Disney
Birthday Club” (to receive personalized Disney-themed e-cards on special occasions), or “DVD
finder” (a search engine of available and upcoming DVD releases), or even downloadable
wallpapers so that you may further brand your personal (Disney) space. Included, too, amidst
this promotional morass is the option to buy tickets to the Disneyland resort to “see the real
thing” (the Pirates of the Caribbean theme ride that is) in action. How vaguely the specters of
Marcia Miner and Walt Disney begin to materialize.
Like many films that unwittingly become the vessel of a high-profile trailer, content too
is proliferating beyond the limits of a single film. Unfortunately, many DVD disks misread
convergence media’s lure as a carte blanche and haphazardly string together orbital elements
around an increasingly muted and ulterior core, the film proper, in response to larger intra-
industry currents. But scraping together close-to-relevant material for DVD releases is no longer
the stopgap procedure it once was: the proliferation of convergence media available for browsing
on DVDs has become a precise corporate-promoting instrument. Added content, in particular,
while lending entertainment value above and beyond the immutable hours of screen magic, also
exists to “converge” several financial parties in order to reap mutual benefits.
The entropic mediascape today is under careful scrutiny from media critics representing,
and inter-representing, all platforms of the “new media”—including cyberspace, web blogs,
videogaming, wireless peripherals, HDTV, DVD, satellite radio, and updated versions of
“dinosaurs” such as Broadcast television and print media. Its issues are universally vast and
ironically and essentially humanist, given that its subjects increasingly lack a human element.
One thing, however, is clear, even as traditional parameters are blurred: more crossover content,
from the gimmicky to the bold, encompasses the normative vector flow of medias old and new
than ever before. DVD content has established its crossover into web space and into the check-
in/check-out aisles of e-commerce. One is therefore left to wonder if today’s most popular home
viewing format does its service and if there is evidence to challenge the industry-asserted claim
that “when medias converge, the consumer wins.”

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