The 19th General Meeting was held on June 17th.
The meeting first proceeded with the elections for the 4th Financial Year office representatives, where the current officers were all re-elected and approved through common consent. Immediately following the result of the elections, the representative, Mr. Koki Aizawa thanked the members for his re-election to run for office again. This was followed with a power presentation, stressing that DVD related products has always centered on the DVD-R and DVD-RW formats, and will no doubt gain even higher positioning in the market, focused and determined to continue verification checks of the superior R/RW media for compatibility. Also from the Vice-Representative, Mr. Magohiro Aramoto, expressed his gratitude for being re-elected as the Vice-Representative. This was followed with a short speech saying that recordable/playback devices have attained prosperous demands these days, convinced that DVD-RW products with high playback compatibility will surely gain its position in the market with even further importance.
Mr. Shinohara from Pioneer Shared Services Japan Corporation reported the 3rd Financial Year End Results, and from the RWPPI secretariat, the Activity Plans and Budget Plans for the 4th Financial Year as well were reported, which were all unanimously approved through common consent.
For newly joined members to RWPPI, we welcomed Ahead Software AG and Gigastorage Corporation. Unfortunately, due to SARS influences, the meeting for this time only included Japanese residing companies, and therefore, the self-introduction of the newly joined companies has been postponed until our next meeting. After the Hardware / Media Working Group reports were made, the RWPPI Home Page Update report was made, followed by the EU Copyright Levy progress report and WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) exhibit report by Pioneer. Microsoft announced that it will release its next OS "Longhorn" that will support all recordable DVD formats in 2005. At the same time during the WinHEC show, Toshiba, Pioneer with 3 other companies exhibited products to demonstrate interchangeability between AV devices and PC devices, which were successful in gathering high interest.
For the last agenda of the meeting, the special lecture by Mr. Satoru Wajiki of the NHK Technology Center (Reception Project) on the topic "Current Situation of Digitizing Broadcasts and its Activities" was made. His lecture on Digitization of terrestrial broadcasts expected to start from December 2003 in Japan was well received with high interest from the members.