Content is king, and without Warren Lieberfarb's aggressive corralling of Hollywood studio support, DVD may have been a playback technology without anything to play back. As chief of Warner Home Video, Lieberfarb pleaded, harangued, bargained and bullied his fellow home theater executives to bring their movies to DVD. As the driving force behind the format, he was dubbed "The Father of DVD" by Variety.

Born September 28, 1943, Lieberfarb earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Wharton, a master's from the University of Michigan, then spent three years at Ford after being chosen for a selective finance management program.

Lieberfarb started his career in the entertainment business when he was hired as executive assistant to the president of Paramount Pictures in New York in 1970. Lieberfarb was then recruited by rival Twentieth Century Fox as vice president of telecommunications. He joined Warner Brothers in 1975 as vice president of marketing and held a series of other positions with the company during a tempestuous early few years. In 1982, Lieberfarb was appointed senior vice president of Warner Home Video (WHV) when the unit had total revenue of only $73 million. Two years later, he was named WHV president.

During the next 18 years, Lieberfarb presided over explosive growth for WHV, packaging not only Warner's vast library for VHS, but adding the pre-1986 MGM/UA library to the WHV portfolio. He also acquired distribution rights to programming from Lorimar, Turner, Castle Rock, Hanna Barbera, PBS, BBC, IMAX, National Geographic, New Line and HBO. By 2002, WHV revenues were more than $4 billion annually.

By the early 1990s, however, the home video revolution began slowing and Lieberfarb, along with a number of hardware companies, began searching for a next-generation optical disc format. Toshiba had been developing a CD-sized optical disc format, while Sony-Philips proposed a competing alternative. Along with IBM, Lieberfarb helped broker a unified compromise format to avoid a Beta-VHS-like war.

But Time-Warner owned many of the DVD patents and the other studios balked at paying royalties to a rival, as well as voicing concerns about piracy. Lieberfarb launched himself into the fray, brokering deals to mollify executive anxieties and get all the studios to release titles to make the format a success.

And successful it was. Only five years after DVD made its debut, hardware and software revenues topped $30 billion. In recognition of his efforts, Lieberfarb, as well as executives at Toshiba, received an Emmy. In 2002, Lieberfarb became the first recipient of the Wharton/Infosys Technology Change Agent award. The following year, Lieberfarb was awarded a Legion of Arts and Letters award from France, Cannes Film Festival Medal du Festival, and the MIPCOM DVD Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lieberfarb left Warner in 2002 and consulted with Toshiba and Microsoft on the HD-DVD format. In 2003, Lieberfarb founded the Los Angeles-based consulting and investment firm Warren N. Lieberfarb & Associates, LLC.