CANNES, France - Pierre Raiman stood at the bottom of the red-carpeted steps leading to the Palais des Festival wearing pin-stripes and looking every bit the perfect French gentleman. Except for the cheetah.
Like many of the people swarming into Milia '98, the president of Paris-based Montparnasse Multimedia was in Cannes to make an announcement. His was for the launch of a CD-ROM interactive video about African wildlife, and the cheetah was one of the props.
"We think you can do really good interactive movies on CD-ROM, running on a Pentium 120 or 133," he said. "DVD is not there for one or two years as a mass market, and there's a large base of Pentium 120s. So it allows you to do great stuff."
In fact, hundreds of Milia attendees spent much of Sunday in conference sessions that attempted to make some sense of DVD technology, where the Internet is going and what the next century will bring.
Like many fortune-telling sessions, the predictions were often murky, incomprehensible, or simply safe. CD-ROM is out. DVD is on its way in, in one form or another. Television and online content and technology will just keep converging. And no matter who you ask at this trade show for content providers, content is king.
At a panel on market predictions for the 21st century, participants were asked about how online content providers will make money. The only consensus was: however they can.
One universal piece advice came from Esther Dyson, president of Edventure Holdings Inc., founder of the PC Forum and author of Release 2.0. Whatever you do, do it well.
"It's like the restaurant industry," she said. "There are lots of business models for restaurants. There are cafeterias, free breakfasts you can get in your hotel and fine restaurants. The question of success is not which business model you choose, it's do you do well within your chosen model."
For Raiman and Montparnasse Multimedia, that means developing CD-ROMs, even if the technology itself is not so very chic.
"France is every backward in computing," Raiman said. "Everybody knows that. It's true. Except France is catching back up, and one reason is the reference market. There's a very large reference market in France that doesn't exist elsewhere."
For example, he said, Montparnasse has sold 250,000 copies of its CD-ROM on the Louvre since it was launched in 1994. In France, Raiman said, there are about 5 million or 6 million CD-ROMs sold a year, with reference and culture titles accounting for 25 percent of that. (For comparison's sake, he said that reference titles make up about 5 to 6 percent of US sales).
Milia's aim is to be the international market for multimedia content providers. And the work under way on Sunday reflected that.
Javad Avetisyan, president of Moscow-based Multimedia Technologies, was looking for publishing partners for his language instruction CD-ROMs.
"We have Italian for Russians, but we're seeking partners to do Italian for French or Italian for Chinese," said Avetisyan. "We want publishers who can help us sell in the schools, because if we made Italian for China that doesn't sell in Russia."
Meanwhile, companies from around the world scrambled to get the word out about deals ranging from license and distribution agreement to office openings and new web sites. Here's a selection of what went on:
