CD Freaks presents a series of Questions and Answers with people working in the digital storage industry. Questions are gathered by posting a thread in the forums where community members can ask people working in the digital storage industry what they always really wanted to know.
After a week the questions are collected, send to the right person and the answers are posted here, at CD Freaks.com.
This week we post the answers to your questions asked to Patrick Peeters, General Manager EMEA, Nero.
Questions and Answers for Nero
1. What does Nero think about Blu-ray and HD-DVD, do you favor any of the formats?
Different from some of our competitors, Nero does not favor any of the 2 mentioned formats. Nero supports them both.
2. Who do you consider to be your biggest competitors and how do you differentiate from them?
Seeing the functionalities and possibilities of Nero 8, we have many competitors.
We first have the companies targeting 1 application like photo or video editing, CD/DVD burning, backup software, …
Then we have companies trying to offer a similar package like Nero, covering a full spectrum of multimedia applications. En then last (but not least) we have Microsoft offering some basic multimedia functionalities in XP or Vista.
Nero differentiates from its competitors, to always offer new features and formats/standards in the fastest possible way. The user can then obtain them free of charge within the same version.
3. How many people use Nero worldwide?
Seeing the fact that Nero software is bundled with leading Optical Disc drive and PC manufacturers, and the best sold multimedia software in Retail and Online, there are several hundred million Nero users worldwide.
4. With Nero, which group is your target? is the advanced user or the family and beginners?
Nero 8 targets both the entry level as well as the advanced user. In several of our applications, the user can choose the “basic” or the “advanced” version.
5. A lot of users switch to different software because Nero has too much features, functionality, different applications, is this a problem for Nero? Any solutions for this?
By offering a full range of multimedia applications, we try to give the user the best price/performance ratio. If a user wants to buy all the functionalities that Nero 8 offers, he/she needs to spend over 200€. For 69,99€ for Nero 8, they get more than 20 advanced multimedia applications; or around 3€ per application. This is the best value available in the market.
6. Why can't Nero make a easy to read tutorial? Nero makes it so complicated, I can't even understand it.
We are constantly improving our documentation and tutorials. For Nero 8 for example, we took the feedback of our users from Nero7 and implemented this in Nero 8 (documentation, software and tutorials).
But any suggestions that can improve the software and the manuals/tutorials, are very welcome. This is the only way for us to give the user an even better experience in the future.
7. What does Nero think of free burning software, for those who only want to burn a CD/DVD what does offer Nero more?
In order to be able to offer some key technologies for the users like Dolby or MPEG, we need to pay royalties to the patent holders. Free software can never offer these key technologies, and therefore they can only offer a very limited functionality.
8. Why does Nero not allow to make backup’s of movies that people have purchased but which contain a copy protection?
Nero fully supports anti-piracy and copyright laws, and the fact that it is illegal to remove or work around any type of copy protection. Nero allows the copying of any type of content that is not copy protected.
9. What is the strategy behind Nero? What is your aim to achieve? Becoming the largest downloadable all-round application?
Nero´s main strategy is to offer the user the best multimedia experience and the best price/performance multimedia software in the market. If these efforts result in market leadership, then this is an asset, but has never been a target itself.
10. Why are you forcing Nero indexing, Nero Scout to be installed, when people don't want it?
Nero Scout is currently required for some of our applications such as Nero MediaHome and Nero Home to properly function. The indexing services running in the background are also necessary for creating and maintaining the Nero Scout multimedia database, making it more convenient for a user to stream or playback content from an indexed database than it would be to search the system for content. It is also less time consuming and much more user-friendly, especially if the user has their PC configured to run as a media center. Nero Scout is simply a database and is therefore not system stressing or resource consuming, nor does it require much storage place. We have significantly improved the performance of the indexing services and we have implemented them to run only when the system is idle. As soon as there is any user activity, the services become inactive. There is also an option for deactivating Nero Scout and the related services completely. For future versions, we will evaluate other possibilities regarding Nero Scout and its services. I have to say, this type of question always amuses me, since I do not hear many people complaining about iTunes or its services, which are far more system stressing and invasive than Nero Scout.
11. Why won't NERO8 automatically install LightScribe? NERO7 did
There have not been retail versions or web demo versions of Nero 7 that installed the Lightscribe API automatically. The Lightscribe API always had to be downloaded and installed separately. Only a few OEM versions, which were bundled with Lightscribe drives, did the installation automatically. The reason is pretty simple; we want to make sure that users install the latest available Lightscribe API, which we provide on our website, guaranteeing the proper function of Lightscribe features.
12. Are you concerned that many advanced users have not 'upgraded' from Nero 6?
I don´t understand where this information comes from.
Seeing the sales figures of Nero 7 and now the new Nero 8, and the number of users upgrading from previous versions (also Nero 6) I can only conclude that the above statement is not correct.
Additionally, I can state an anecdote that I had this year at the IFA in Berlin. I had a chance to talk to a 65 year old person that was already using Nero since version 3, and told me he is so satisfied with Nero software that he has been upgrading every single new version that has come out, and he told me he will upgrade to Nero 8 as soon as it is available. I can assure you that these kinds of conversations give me a tremendous satisfaction and show that the products we offer really offer something to the people.
13. Why does Nero not issue details of the changes made from version to version. With the large file size having to be downloaded each time, I would like to know if the problems I am having have been fixed.
Nero publishes release notes after every update, and we have been doing so for many versions over many years. Of course we present only the most important changes in these release notes, which can be found on our website.
http://www.nero.com/eng/support-nero7-release-notes.html
http://www.nero.com/eng/support-nero8-release-notes.html
14. Why is support so slow? With most of my software I can get an answer within 24 hours. Nero takes a week if you are lucky.
Our aim is to give feedback within 24-48 hours.
I can not judge individual case-by-case why sometimes it would take longer (I can only imagine that this could happen when it concerns very complicated questions or during the release of a new version. Furthermore, let me point out that we try to provide our customers not only with answers, but with solutions. We provide responses which should solve the problem so that the user does not have to call or write again. Other software companies’ support departments give canned answers just for the sake of a prompt response. We do not believe this is effective technical support.
15. Does Nero 8 have the ability to transcode video files from PAL to NTSC and vice-versa? If so, what element of the product suite offers that feature?
Nero Vision 5, like its predecessors, has the ability to convert PAL to NTSC and vice versa. Nero Recode will be able to do that during encoding procedures to MPEG-4 with the upcoming Nero 8 update.
We would like to thank Patrick Peeters for cooperating with us and answering the questions.
