Denver — Executives with DTS Digital Entertainment and the Colorado Rockies apparently shared a similar mission here Tuesday night — expansion.
Executives with the surround-sound technology company brought members of the press to Coors Field here to watch the Rockies fight for a 6-5 12-inning victory over the San Francisco Giants and possibly set the table to repeat a history-making performance that led to a Rockies’ National League championship a year ago.
After Tuesday’s victory, the Rockies were five games out of first place and gaining ground in the NL West, almost exactly the same position they found themselves in one year ago at this time.
For DTS, the evening served as an opportunity to celebrate a host of recent 7.1-channel DTS HD Master Audio licensing partnerships that will deliver the company’s advanced 7.1-channel lossless surround sound system to a host of audio equipment and Blu-ray Disc manufacturers that will be unveiling their latest offerings at CEDIA Expo here Thursday.
The company also has expanded its reach significantly into software titles using its new advanced codec.
“There are over 700 titles in Master Audio now, and if you look at all of the lossless codecs out there, we probably have the dominant share worldwide across all of the different titles,” said Tom Dixon, DTS marketing VP. “There are so many that we have gone to an online system to let people input the new titles coming out.”
Dixon said one of the bigger challenges facing the DTS Master Audio format is the confusion some users are finding in properly connecting and setting up their equipment to playback the Master Audio sound tracks.
“What we will be starting to do now on our Web site is to get all the Blu-ray players and provide menu freezes so we can offer tutorials on Master Audio setup, because frequently to get an ADO stream out of the decoder, the player is having them use linear PCM as their output, which makes no sense — it’s counter intuitive,” Dixon said.
In the next 12 months DTS will be looking to promote the DTS HD Master Audio system and name.
“We will be resuming our in-store communication and education efforts from a year ago,” Dixon said, who added the company is planning a number of cross promotions around home theater and in-store point of sale and “cyber sales” in the PC space. “Now that the format war is over, the mission becomes advocating high def over standard def, and our message there will continue to be, ‘Don’t forget about the audio.’”
For the future, DTS says it will be looking to expand its technologies beyond just audio systems.
“We are going to play in the IP space and maybe video, but we will stay focused on digital entertainment,” Dixon said, explaining that company’s strong cash position from the recent sale of non-home entertainment businesses could lead to future acquisitions. “We don’t have a whole lot of interest in content or digital rights management systems. We are going to focus on developing things that make the overall entertainment experience better but transparent to the end consumer.”
With a little luck, both DTS and the Rockies will have even more to celebrate next year.
