New features on DVDs. Breakthrough technology or worthless advertising?

In what looks like a new trend of “branded interactive features,” Progressive Direct has added in a running tally of the insurance estimate all of the damage done to vehicles in Universal’s DVD release of “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.” The optional “Progressive Direct: Insurance Damage Estimates” can be displayed as a small window on the screen while watching the movie.

“Product placement is hard because it doesn’t all fit, but this gives us new opportunities,” said Craig Kornblau, president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment. “In the early days, it was a movie on a disc. Now we can take it anywhere.” This new potential revenue stream for studios has been enabled by the new DVD formats that are becoming popular now. HD DVD and Blu Ray both offer studios much more space on the disk, allowing them to provide many new features like the one found on the HD DVD of “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.”

It has been speculated that turning this extra storage capacity into additional revenue will be tricky at first. A few people have brought up the point that there isn’t much point to putting extra features on DVDs if people probably don’t want it anyway. It will be interesting to see how this turns out though. Maybe with the power and funding of advertisers behind it, we’ll see a bunch of great new features on DVDs in the near future and all we’ll have to tolerate for the extra benefit is a few advertisements for free auto insurance quotes.