"I would like to thank the Board of Directors, and the members of the DVDA for inducting me into the DVDA Hall of Fame.  Unfortunately I could not be here tonight to accept this award personally.

The DVDA and its predecessors - IMA, SIGCAT and IDMA - have been around since before DVD was born in 1996.  It seems like only yesterday when many of us were struggling to understand the newly released DVD specifications, and trying to figure out how this new multimedia publishing format would affect our businesses.

With the advent of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD products, our businesses are facing some new and exciting challenges.  Publishing content in the new HD formats will offer us new business opportunities, as well as a number of technical, marketing and business challenges.  The DVDA is well positioned to assist developers in embracing these new formats, and to help companies integrate Blu-Ray and HD-DVD into their existing DVD-Video and DVD-ROM publishing businesses.

I completed my first DVD project in 1996.  Since then I have given countless presentations on DVD technology, completed over 500 DVD projects, written a book on DVD authoring, published over 100 consumer DVD titles, and won a few industry awards.  Looking back it is amazing how far the industry has come over the past decade.  We should all be proud that our efforts have helped to make DVD the world’s most successful consumer electronics format.