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What's Next For Entertainment?

April 2004

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Brandon Burgess, vice president of business development for NBC, was keynote speaker for the 2004 Future of Entertainment Conference, held at the Stanford Graduate School of Business April 3. He ventured some predictions about his industry.

"TiVo with a portable TV will probably be available in two years for about $200. It already exists, but it's expensive."

"DVR [digital video recording] is going to beat VOD [video on demand]. I don't think VOD is this universal thing."

"DivX is MP3 for video. You can basically reduce file size 80 percent and preserve 80 percent quality." (The technologies allow large video and audio files, respectively, to be compressed to sizes they can be transferred over networks.)

"Peer-to-peer is a reality that's not going to go away. I think it needs some rules, but it's an attractive sharing mechanism, and anything that makes sense is going to continue to exist. Right now it has lots of things that parents don't want. But I think it will end up being a very attractive environment for our kids."

"DVD is such a high-growth, high-hope business that it's like a drug. I think we [in the company] have to be careful not to rely it too much because DVD is also going to have an end to it. DVD is not going to be the ultimate way video is distributed in the long run."

"Portability is just taking off. Portable video display, video playout capability that plugs into some terminals-I think that's going to happen. It's happening already."

—Laurie Vaughan

Related Links

Entertainment Networks Must Battle For the Pocketbook Instead of Ratings (2004 Conference)

The Reality of Video Games (2004 Conference)

Technology Drives Entertainment (2003 Conference)

Industry is Trying to Change How we Watch TV (2002 Conference)