Billboard Music Video Conference -- 11/9/95 (Los Angeles) "Multimedia and Music Video: The Real Deal" by Karen Pals Reseda, California On November 9, 1995, Todd (Rundgren) participated with Josh Warner, Charley Prevost, Duncan Kennedy and Douglas Gayeton at the Billboard Music Video Conference in Santa Monica, California on the Multimedia and Music Video panel moderated by Deborah Russell, associate editor of Launch, a CD-ROM magazine. Following are some of Todd's remarks during the panel session: The simulated video on The Individualist was principally a space issue because the audio and video on the Enhanced CD are fully integrated rather than the audio residing in its little domain and the other presentations, the QuickTime movies or whatever, existing in their domains and having compressed sound with them. You almost always play Red Book audio (the CD audio standard). So once you invoke the audio, the so-called video has to be in memory. If we were running QuickTime movies, you'd get probably about 8 or 10 seconds worth of video for an 8 minute song, then of course, it'd be a blank screen after the initial coda. Very conceptual. So we did these synthetic video techniques. We took a concept that Apple had developed called QuickTime Virtual Reality and did our own version of it, because QuickTime Virtual Reality was generalized for a different purpose. It was more of an interactive technology than a presentational technology. We wanted something optimized for presentation. We developed our own version of that and overlaid a bunch of other things on top of it like a Doom-style 3-D world engine, sprites and similar. It was a complete virtual video environment in which we can take the specially generated images and an environment that essentially is only one image, but you have a virtual camera that you can spin around and point at things and move around inside the environment. You can also add some video-style special effects. In a lot of cases, there's actually nothing going on in the scene, it's all about camera motion and thinking like a camera person in an environment where there isn't much action but a lot of interesting things to look at. It's all about the way you use the camera rather than what you're really looking at. The reason we did that is less about quality issues than by the constraint that we couldn't go back to the disk to get more data. Whatever we put on the screen had to fit into about 3 megabytes and last sometimes as long as 8 minutes. We utilized a grab bag of techniques to make up for that. My observation is that as far as the people in this room are concerned, what they have to do to change what they do in order to make CD-ROMs is a completely moot non-issue. You have to go for the best quality video in all respects that you can come up with, because if you're making good stuff, it's deliverable on a number of platforms, not just on CD-ROMs but through interactive television and possibly other services we can only possibly imagine. But everyone here is talking about things that are, not things that will be by the time you actually assimilate this information, learn how to use it and get around to making a title. By the time you do that, almost all these consumer machines will have MPEG hardware. MPEG was a general purpose standard developed to take advantage of preexisting content, which was not filmed specially for this medium. By the time you figure out all these peculiarities about color palettes and such, everyone's going to have MPEG players and it won't make any difference. These are interesting issues in the short term but in the long term, for people who are most concerned with creating the images, not necessarily with getting them onto the disk, I think it's a non-issue. In terms of what extra content goes on these disks in order to create not only an Enhanced CD but enhanced value for the consumer, biographical stuff was stuff that used to be given away for nothing. It was a way to familiarize people with you, get your name in their heads -- like when you go into the supermarket and you see 20 different kinds of cereal and one of them happens to pop into your head, not because any one of them is any different from any other one in its basic ingredients, you just remember the name of one. The whole idea for me in using this extra space is to create added value. The record company's objective in creating enhanced value is to charge more money, in the space they normally gave you anyway but didn't put anything in it. The other objective is to complete the artist's vision and do that without charging people more money. My idea is that instead of artists charging for stuff they normally gave away, for them to give away stuff they normally charged for in order to make themselves more appealing in a world where there's a lot of competition for space on the racks for these little silver disks. All the additional content on our disks is just "grass" at least for the time being because we're not even sure that the audience or customers perceive value. The disk isn't free, the extra 100 mgs. is free. We still charge for the 60 minutes of music. What these people have to learn about and to get comfortable with is nonlinear storytelling. It's different from a videotape where you sit down and watch the whole thing end to end. It's a story that has possible branches and alternative scenarios. They have to do that while they are producing the imagery, when they are making the title. The word and whole concept of interactivity was not in the common vocabulary as little as three years ago. Interactivity meant going to a cocktail party and speaking to someone. For a long time, the people involved in making these disks was a small community of people who understood the issues and they moved around from company to company. The companies got funded with millions of dollars and after a year they'd go bust. Then the people would go work for another company. It's a lot of these same players in the business. But now places like the San Francisco Art Institute are starting to have multimedia courses. Now there are going to be a lot of these people. A few years ago, we had no empirical evidence to base it on but we knew that it was possible to give someone an interactive experience. We couldn't guarantee they'd enjoy it, or buy the disk out of anything but curiosity at that point. Although we've learned some things, it's still only been a very short time. There's still no such thing as the "Citizen Kane" of interactive movies. Nothing has achieved that. There are no authorities. I think artists have every right to get in there and test the assumptions that these people give them because most of them don't know what they are talking about. The idea of pitching interactivity to a specific kind of audience, like a 5 year old audience or a mature audience, I think misses the point. There are, even in one individual, a number of interactive personalities. One is an extremely lazy interactive person where one just sits there and watches and doesn't do anything. There's another person who, when they're in the mood, is a twitch. They just twitch the button all the time. The problem is that most titles don't support this continuum of interactivity that exists even within a single person, let alone in the audience at large. One of the principal rules I have for interactive titles is that it should not stop like a movie at a theatre stops in the middle so people can go to the bathroom or get refreshments. It's like, "We're just going to stop the movie now. It doesn't matter where in the movie we are, we're just going to stop." If the user doesn't interact with the title, it has to have an agenda of its own. It can't just sit there. It has to continue to go. It's like saying the artist or producer had no agenda when they put the disk together. They were just guessing about what they wanted to convey to you. At this point, most people who have invested in this are very apprehensive about the public's response to this, not only the retailers. We had the same problem when we were trying to figure out how to make this disk and deliver the enhanced content. We thought we'd put in a key system and they would call an "800" number and we would unlock it. However, the retailers wanted to know, "If at some point later on you're going to charge people more money for it, where's our piece of it?" So they didn't go for that concept. There's also a problem in having a plain version at the regular cost and another that costs more and goes in a different section of the store. Nobody responded well to that. So we decided to release it as a regular disk and not have people have to go through the torturous distinction of CD vs. Enhanced CD. It's just one disk. It's all there on the same thing. It was never a problem for me putting the extra content on the disk of The Individualist. It took me about two months to make the music and I did it all myself in my own studio. The costs for the studio have long since been amortized so if I do it all myself, it costs me really very little to make a record. A lot of records are made on the cheap these days. That's the style. It seems to me unconscionable that having written off all the bottom line costs of manufacturing, creating the music, advertising and stuff like that, between retailers and record companies, they would charge you an extra $8 which is all profit on top of the cost of the disk, to get something that in all likelihood they spent a fraction of the music budget on. It's totally unconscionable unless the content is so spectacular that it really is like buying a video along with your CD. It's a humongous mistake at this point if the record companies try to cash in on this. They're going to turn off consumers when people take some of these titles home and realize they're being put to sleep by the antics of some of these disinterested artists. There's not going to be a market when they charge $8 extra and they didn't spend nearly enough to justify charging that. If you just give retailers an interactive disk, they may not know the most compelling part of it to show. Or, if they leave it running in the store for people, it's just as likely to be a turn-off as a turn-on. If you stand there in Radio Shack or something and look at the Cranberries disk and sit on the couch for a half-hour, I can't believe this is going to compel you to buy the disk. And, you at least want to see whatever is the most compelling moment on the disk. The only way to ensure that is to selectively edit out all the rest of the stuff and actually make a demo disk that's only the best, most exciting stuff. I've always maintained the CD is going to disappear at any moment-- that little silver disk. Within five years it will be an accepted fact that CDs are going away and that you will get nearly everything down a fiber optic cable or wirelessly. It won't disappear in the sense that you won't be able to get one or have some use for one but you'll have a CD-ROM burner in your television set. When you want an album, you'll just download it and wake up the next morning and it's in the player. You can take it and put it in your car player. If they want a copy of the album, they can have a copy of it made onto a little silver disk. I'm not saying the compulsion to buy will disappear. People are compelled to shop. That's a truism that will last. All the problems with bandwidth and size of domain go away when it's all centrally housed and distributed. That's where things are destined to go. Once the business deals are done and sorted out, this connectivity thing is going to blow up, explode so big that CDs will look like caveman technology. They'll say, "that tiny thing? 600 mg? What, a gigabyte? Is that all?" You'll have access to unlimited data. You can buy an MPEG card for your machine right now. Many Multimedia PCs you can buy now have them. A year from now, it will be standard equipment. It's the encroaching standard. As far as fiber optic technology becoming available, you can get an ISDN line now. If you are rich enough, you can get yourself a T1 line and watch real time video over the Internet now. If you start developing a title today, it won't be ready for a year. So if you're going to start today, count on MPEG. It's an uninformed assumption to think that there will be a software solution coming along. The only thing that will compel people to upgrade to PowerPCs and Pentiums is if you start getting great products on the platforms where they belong, Power PC- and Pentium-compatible only, rather than dumping them down to these other platforms so people will be nursed along forever with their old O30 machines. Our solution to content delivery is not the solution for everybody. About three years ago, when my recording and publishing contracts expired, I didn't renegotiate with anybody. I retained the rights to everything and I negotiate licensing on a per disk basis with people. I can do anything I want with any of my content. In all likelihood, if I can find another way of making a living, I'm going to give it away for nothing. Because I stole it all from my influences anyway. Artists with their highfalutin ideas like they invented this stuff. They stole it from other artists. C'mon, admit it.