Disney Plans to Be on Digital Frontier

Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael Eisner said Monday that his company would not let the threat of piracy keep it from aggressively pursuing business strategies based on new digital technologies, even if that means rethinking its current business models.

Eisner’s remarks at the National Assn. of Broadcasters convention appeared to signal a shift from Disney’s emphasis on policing copyright infractions. Last year the company was a leading proponent of a bill, which didn’t become law, that would have forced electronics makers to prevent consumers from making unauthorized copies of films and songs.

In the future, Eisner said, movie studios will need to be more flexible about the way they distribute movies. He suggested that in place of the current sequence of studio releases -- from theaters to video to pay per view to television -- studios would need to offer faster distribution, directly to consumers.

“If we don’t provide consumers with our product in a timely manner, pirates will,” he said.

This year Disney will begin testing Movie Beam, a service that lets consumers download movies via broadcast signals transmitted to set-top boxes.

Disney’s ABC also is working aggressively to offer more broadcast shows in high-definition or HDTV, including the upcoming season of “Monday Night Football,” a move experts say should help increase demand for digital TV sets.

Eisner noted that Burbank-based Disney was one of the first movie studios to see television as a distribution and marketing outlet, rather than as an unwelcome competitor, and then helped popularize color television with “Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” in the 1950s.

“We take this tradition very seriously and are now positioning ourselves to be on the leading edge of the next technological wave in entertainment,” the Disney chairman said.

Separately at the convention Monday, media mogul Barry Diller warned against allowing the major entertainment companies to grow any larger and said he opposed efforts to relax the national 35% television audience cap.

“We need more regulation, not less,” Diller said.

Diller, who heads the Internet commerce firm USA Interactive, also raised eyebrows by announcing that he supported a reimposition of federal rules that restrict the major networks and cable operators from owning 100% of the content they show. As head of the Fox Network in the early 1990s, Diller helped repeal the broadcast rules.