NASCAR Media Group (NMG) is finding new ways to open its extensive video library of historic races to race fans, thanks to technical innovations in the DVD field.
This spring, NASCAR Media Group introduced ten previously unreleased “Classic Races” on DVD, available through the NASCAR.COM Superstore. What makes this release unique is that the DVD’s are produced and shipped “on demand,” in response to individual web orders.
In the recent past, it could have cost a content owner tens of thousands of dollars just to author a DVD title and manufacture in the minimum quantities required to fill traditional retail channels. The heavy financial risks associated with such “traditional” DVD releases has kept many of the greatest NASCAR races in the vault and unavailable to consumers.
NASCAR has partnered with Duplitech Corporation of Redondo Beach, California to cost effectively encode and author the DVD masters. Duplitech utilizes proprietary, automated DVD encoding and authoring systems to do the job. A third party fulfillment center then burns, prints and ships individual DVD orders direct to consumers – on demand.
“There are several ‘DVD on Demand’ fulfillment operations today, but few (if any) authoring houses that can match our efficiency in delivering high quality DVD masters so quickly and cost effectively,” said Tony Cunha, President of Duplitech. “The great thing for content owners is that, once they’ve got their titles re-mastered for DVD, they can work with multiple DVD fulfillment and distribution partners.”
NASCAR Media Group’s success with DVD on Demand complements several other initiatives being undertaken in New Media. Before the year is out, NMG plans to introduce its first title on Blu-ray™ disc. Duplitech will provide Blu-ray encoding and authoring services for NASCAR, relying on NetBlender’s new DoStudio BD Workflow solution to do the job.
“DoStudio Workflow is really the perfect solution for us. It enables us to encode and author high def quality Blu-ray masters very cost effectively, while still allowing us to create some really neat interactive features.” said Cunha.
