Sundance Film Festival

Up Main Street a bit is the Microsoft House, which is devoted to various forms of home entertainment. They’ve got several “entertainment center” PCs from Toshiba (Qosmio G45) and HP (their HDX series) that are designed for optimal viewing of HD DVDs. There’s also an Xbox 360 showcase.

Upstairs and toward the back is a sophisticated home theater, where a Samsung SP-A800B projector, a $7,000 single-DLP model with 1920×1080 resolution, shows HD DVD content from a Toshiba HD A35 (third-generation) player.

I spoke with Kevin Collins, director of HD DVD evangelism at Microsoft, about why the company is at Sundance. Collins’ title explains quite a bit of it, and as the competing Blu-ray standard continues to make headway against its rival, HD DVD would seem to need all the push it can get.

Collins is here at Sundance trying to show independent filmmakers some of the creative interactive options they have with HD DVD, after their film has had a theatrical run (hopefully). According to Collins, the HD DVD specification requires the inclusion of an interactive layer that Blu-ray simply doesn’t. But, luckily for filmmakers who are first worried about getting their films produced, let alone authored to high-def disc, interactivity can be built into the discs after they’ve come to market. That’s thanks to the Ethernet connection built in to every HD DVD device, including Xbox 360’s and consumer Toshiba players.

At the home theater within the Microsoft House, Collins was showing off some of his favorite interactive features found within major studio releases such as 300 and Transformers. Hitting a button on the remote enables “gumballs” to show up while the movie plays, which again can be pressed to turn on extra features. One particularly impressive feature in 300 was a picture-in-picture that showed the all the bluescreen scenes of the movie playing in sync with the final picture (playing at normal size).

Producers of independent films might not have enough manpower to create such features, but especially for films with a socially conscious message or a current-events tie-in, it could be very attractive to have the ability to direct passionate viewers to an infinite array of new information sources outside the linear stream of the movie. The fact that this functionality can be built even after the movie’s released on disc should be doubly attractive. If HD DVD emerges as a viable format, its updateable interactive power might be a key reason.