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Anthony Chidiac is one of Australias pioneers in Technology in the field of Audio/Visual Entertainment. He is credited for progressing Audio and Video from Analog to Digital technology by way of allowing for its rapid uptake when showcasing examples of such at notable expositions and then offered such ideas to the public and the design knowhow to achieve the same outcome without credit or payment. He used bleeding edge technology to evolve the entertainment industry by allowing anyone to record, edit, and produce quality product inexpensively. In the final years of his career he converged his previous ideas to create todays modern form of entertainment and social interaction that progressed the internet cafe into worldwide proliferation.

Major event milestones in technology

Pioneering real-time DVD Authoring and Timeline Editing methodology in partnership with Pinnacle Systems Inc. at the Bill Gates keynote and Launch of Windows XP at COMDEX 2001 in Las Vegas and made the process of DVD Recordability affordable to the masses in the demonstration at the keynote and conference.
Pioneering Digital Audio Recording and Editing by way of making it affordable for every musician to record high-fidelity digital recordings without the high price, partnering with Atari and Hybrid Arts, Inc.
Pioneering the progression and proliferation of the Internet Cafe at the time that the Internet Cafe concept itself celebrated a milestone of existence, by way of converging a Licensed Bar, Dance Club and the "Jetseat" internet experience, creating a new way that people could socialise in public. The uniquity of his concept sparked a proliferation of cafes, especially in the Asian Countries, with creative variations of the idea Mr. Chidiac had.

History

Beginning his technology career in 1986, armed with a prototype of a 1980's design of a digital audio sampler published in Electronics Australia Magazine, Mr. Chidiac was inspired to turn the practice of Digital Audio Editing into today’s form of recording digital music worldwide. He received a grant by Her Majesty, The Queen Of England through the Youth Business Initiative Grants Scheme and commenced collaborating and feedback testing with Atari and Hybrid Arts Inc. developing and then cleverly using the ADAP II device to remix music for commercial release to DJ’s in Australia. In the 1990’s he was commissioned by various major record companies for commercial releases worldwide. With the completion of a digital "remix" of Michael Jackson's "Can't Let her Get Away", the end product symbolised the first ever music product ever edited, manipulated, mixed, and released to radio and to the public without the product ever having to depart from the digital domain. With the pioneering concept of digital editing on hand, Anthony moved out of his bedroom "studio" into 001 Studios in Carlton, Victoria then owned by Siew Ooi to complete an ever-increasing list of remixes from other notable musical clients and artists globally.

Mr. Chidiac then furthered the use of the ADAP II to pioneer the technique of Digital Audio De-Hissing and De-Crackling of vinyl and tape based recordings to full digital clarity using a process of digitally mixing inverse noise waveform back into the affected audio. Due to limited funds, Mr. Chidiac gave away his findings and methodology to Bearfoot Software Inc, in return for some additional hardware to complete such task for a proof of concept package as part of the ADAP II Digital Editor.

His work with such notable artists was the main factor in bringing about industry change in the way that Musical Artists recorded in the 1990’s. Working from his home in Bundoora, he founded a business named “opulent”, which in 1994 became Incorporated as “Opulent Multimedia”. His work then involved engineering and installing audio systems in nightclubs around the world, as well as converting 24-track two inch analog and 2-track 1/4 inch analog magnetic tape based Recroding Studios to Digital Multitrack systems.

The Record Label

In 1992, Anthony formed a vanity record label aimed at promoting himself and his talents at remixing music. By chance, executives at PolyGram Australia were looking for a business partner to add value to its products as well as providing a low-cost outlet in which artists that now were recording digitally using low-cost equipment can market and release their product. The deal catapulted the vanity label "opulent music" into a chart-making record label with artists such as Canada's The Groove Kings and Australia's Past II Present featuring prominently on the Australian Music Scene. The partnership split from PolyGram was mutual; PolyGram became increasingly reticent of distributing high volumes of product produced by opulent in order to ensure that other imported product they distributed themselves under direction from their American counterpart suffered no sales impact due to the unexpected popularity of the label project. Understandably, at the time, Australias market of imported versus local talent was in the order of 90 percent imported, 10 percent local. Today, as opposed to the 90's, the Australian music market is in a state of independent maturity and now more represents a majority of local artists versus imports. To continue to manage his music projects, Chidiac's Artist Repertoire was licensed predominantly to Mushroom Records.

Pioneering MPEG-1 to the Masses

Not content with such achievement that changed modern day recording techniques, Anthony set about to evolve the film and TV industry from analog based picture recording technology to digital technology by pioneering a low-cost example of a device later made possible partnering with Pinnacle Systems Inc. He first made contact with the Motion Picture Experts Group as the group had devised a codec labelled “MPEG-1” as a methodology to compress video that could fit on current hard disk capacities that were around in the 1990’s. Mr. Chidiac devised a variation of the codec now known as “MPEG-1 Non SIF” by compiling in pascal a Microsoft DOS based executible that converted Full Frame AVI Formatted Video to the MPEG encoded equivalent. Not knowing the value of such achievement, Mr. Dave McSwanson, a senior colorist at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, messaged Anthony on the support pages of Fast Inc's website, as he was known to be the "champion" of a product released by FAST Inc called [DV Master], which Anthony used to digitally record images from a video camera to Hard Disk in AVI Format before re-encoding to MPEG-1. Mr. McSwanson and Mr. Chidiac then partnered to try to resolve such limitations of the technology, and failed to find any viable alternative. At the time, both a 2 gigabyte hard disk limitation was imposed by Microsoft Windows 98 and editability of the MPEG product without a full recompression of an entire sequence, sparked a general lack of interest in the widespread use of such technology. Anthony re-directed his efforts to TV and music production, musical concerts, and the nightclub industry.

Sideproject: The Music TV Show

Though the research he did was shelved for use by the general public, he continued to find practical uses for his research for his own projects, engaging himself and a team of over 40 volunteers to produce a Music TV show and broadcasted it on a new Australian Public TV network Channel 31. Initially entitled "Rhythm NATion" (representative of the community group Northern Access Television) the name borne a strikingly unintentional resemblance to that of Janet Jackson fame, and accordingly after ten episodes and Legal Threats, the title changed to "Turn It Up". The "Turn It Up" TV show found a new viewer base and found its way to over 130 countries in South East Asia and parts of Europe via ABC Australia Television and Optus Vision. The TV show consisted of new and new age Musical Artists and Music Videos, of a half or one hour duration, and was presented by Paul Fidler, a then budding Radio Disc Jockey. Due to the amount of copyright broadcast clearance required to feature notable acts on the show, the project ceased. Of concern to the Major Multi-Nationals was the shows penetration into China and countries with sparse laws pertaining to copyright protection. It was also hard for a major to then support sales for an act when they did appear on the show, as the audience of well over Eleven million viewers spread out over a regional satellite feed footprint, and rebroadcasts to Cable companies in 50 countries was overwhelming as the internet was still in its infancy.

The Progression to Webcasting

In 2000, Anthony was challenged to attain another historic event, resulting in the worlds first Parliamentary Webcast to more than 5,000 people (Hon. Steve Bracks, first budget speech). If the event took place a week prior, it would have beat Prince's Album launch in similar fashion. The uniquity of the webcast that Anthony technically architected was that it was the first time a master-remote configuration was used in practice. Working in partnership with Microsoft (Windows Media Technologies 4.0) to trial this theory, the resultant technology whereby a video stream was captured by a location based server using capture technology by Osprey compressed to MPEG-1 Non-SIF and then transferred to a Web farm facility via an ISDN connection for dissection by a Master web server into multiple streams at differing speeds based on the end users connectivity, was truly unique.

The Convergent Internet Cafe Concept

In 2003 Mr. Chidiac devised a plan to open the worlds first fully integrated Licensed Bar/Office/Cafe/Internet Cafe and labelled it “o3 convergence cafe”, that opened October 3rd, 2003 at 800 Plenty road, Reservoir, Victoria. The concept was nominated by Yahoo as “The Worlds Best Internet Cafe”. Mr. Chidiac appeared on a multitude of TV shows and press in Australia to showcase the technology behind the concept. Once 9am with David and Kim did a eloquent cross to the cafe to report on its success, it drew the same media attention Anthony disliked from the Gates Gig. Following a marriage separation shortly thereafter, the "o3 cafe", "opulent multimedia" and many inspirational plans and profitable projects that Mr. Chidiac had, ceased without a trace of its existence in September 2006.

Challenges and Regrets

"If making some history didn't involve a challenge to the last minute, then it wouldn't make history" - Quote from Anthony on Radio 3AW, September 2001.

- The challenge to create the first webcast to well over 5000 viewers of the Hon. Steve Bracks, Premier of Victorias' first budget speech at Parliament House, Melbourne didn't go without drama. After carefully testing encoding machinery for weeks before the event, the minutes prior to going live to the web became challenging for Anthony and his team. As the technical leader of the project, he was struck with the lack of no test stream from the video streaming server based at a web farm in South Melbourne, only 25 minutes before the event was being webcast. Nobody knew what was wrong - the encoder was encoding, the ISDN connection was delivering data, but the relaying streaming media server was not available. As talent for such technology was non-existent, Anthony had to rush to the web farm across town by taxi and diagnose the error. The outcome was that the streaming server had the blue screen of death. A reboot of the streaming server luckily proved to resolve the problem, eight seconds before the stream was about to go live to the public. The streaming worked, and the "budget report" stream featuring Mr. Bracks was viewed by well over 5000 recipients at the same time, using different quality/speed streams to cater for dial-up to digital lines. Nobody outside of the team ever knew of the challenge faced in presenting such an event. The presentation looked flawless.

- The DVD Making History also almost didn't happen as planned. Only five minutes before the warm up band for the Bill Gates Keynote appeared on stage, the final test of the record and DVD Burn process failed. The team clammered to diagnose the problem and as a result, the Gates team decided to not have Mr. Gates in fact present the DVD History event personally, rather have a "Voice of the Gods" announce the achievement as Mr. Gates exited. Only 2 minutes, 29 seconds before the act appeared, Anthony diagnosed the problem to be an issue with the then Beta version of the DVD Codec that was built into the Windows Media Player machine set up to playback the resultant DVD on the big screens in the MGM Grand Arena. A reboot of the DVD Playback machine solved the problem and the process worked exceeding expectations.

- When submitting plans in October 2002 to the Local Council to open "o3 Convergence Cafe" (The Internet Cafe), plans for such were hampered by objections and protest by the local residents, who saw the project to be one that would create traffic pressure and undesirable "geek" element, bring out the "Vampire" population known to be in concentration around the Reservoir area, and generally disturb the peace of the suburb and area that was in retrograde. The Council permit that allowed the concept to open was granted at 4:45 pm on October 3rd 2003, one hour and fifteen minutes before the official opening party began. Had the permit not been issued, the opening night party would have been ruled as illegal and police would have arrested Anthony and closed down the concept before it even started.

- Anthony’s only regret was making a quotable mistake after the Bill Gates keynote at the Recordable DVD Council press conference. A question asked by a notable media reporter “Do you think that by succeeding with showing that this technology works, that it could pave the way for rampant DVD piracy?” His answer, “No, because technology prohibits recording on two layers, which means that commercially released DVDs would need to be compressed to a stage where quality would be compromised to fit onto a single layer”. Anthony learned that from the experience upon spurning a frenzy of DVD activity with Windows XP and the Gates' showcase that he should be guarded in describing how fast technology can and will progress for the benefit and detriment of an entire industry.

Discography

Year	Artist	Song	Release	Format
1991	Bingo Boys	How To dance	Ozmixx	DJ And Radio promo Vinyl
1992	Michael Jackson	'Cant Let Her Get Away'	Ozmixx	DJ and Radio promo Vinyl
1992	Shanice	I love your smile	Ozmixx	Vinyl/CD
1992	The Village People	YMCA (remix)	Ozmixx	Vinyl/CD
1993^{[citation needed]}	Backstreet Boys	Its Alright	Ozmixx	Vinyl/CD
1993	Janet Jackson	Because Of Love/Megamix	Ozmixx	Vinyl/CD
1993	Peter Andre	Funky Junky/Gimme Little Sign Megamix	Mushroom	Vinyl/CD
1994	Girlfriend	Take it from me	Ozmixx/BMG	Vinyl/CD
1996	Pretty Poison	Better, Better, Be Good To Me (remix)	Svengali	CD

Television Production

Year	Title	Featuring	1st On-Air	Link To Trailers	Est.Viewership
1994	Rhythm NATion (Ten Episodes)		6th October 8:30pm		30,000-78,000
1995	Turn It Up (Three Episodes)	Moomba Festival, Quincy Jones, Mary J. Blige, Paula Abdul, The Corrs, DJ Bobo	7th March	[one] [three]	11,500,000-88,000,000