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Studios Face Off in Next-Gen DVD Format War
WaZiX writes "After yesterday's HD-DVD strike, the Blu-Ray Disc format received support from Disney (and its Buena Vista Home Entertainment unit) as reported by ZDNET. As predicted, the format war has only just begun."
As before, there will be a short 'format war', maybe even shorter this time, say 6 months - and low and behold every product will sudenly start supporting every format - just like they did when DVD burners became popular.
:D
Time to comoditisation of products get's shorter every month
My Portfolio
Heh, you beat me to it. That was my first thought too. Disney is amazing in its ability to force-feed cross-marketing material at their consumers. I have a couple of young nieces who watch Disney full time, and when I'm over at their house (and thus seeing what's on the Disney channel), I'm always amazed that they exist in a closed universe of Disney material.
The Disney TV show is interrupted by a commercial advertising another upcoming Disney TV show, followed by a "behind the scenes" look at the filming of the latest Disney movie, interrupted with an "insider's access pass" to the music from the latest Disney DVD, along with ads for Disney theme parks, Radio Disney, and now back to our Disney TV show, but first let's meet the backup singers from the new Disney movie.
After that I just want to retch in technicolor...
As predicted, the format war has only just begun.
How exactly does one claim success here?
Download my free songs!
Huh? What's wrong with the DVDs I have now? Will the picture be so sharp and crystal clear and picture-perfect that I simply must upgrade? Will the sound on these things really be so good that if I close my eyes I really will think that Will Smith or Keanu Reeves or Sigourney Weaver or whoever massacred an entire clan of godless communist bug eyed alien monsters on my living room carpet? Is it really possible for these things to be as much of an improvement over DVD as DVD was over VHS? Doesn't the law of diminishing returns have something to say about this?
Oh yeah, I forgot. Someone worked a way round the bogus encryption and region coding and DVD-player vendor lockout last time round, so we've all got to dump our perfectly good DVDs and our DVD players and throw more money at film studio execs and consumer hardware manufacturers. Silly me.
I know this technology is still a ways off before it hits the shelves en masse, but I just can't see it getting a great response.
In the end, it probably won't even matter which format which companies support. Just like Betamax, Laserdisc, and Minidisc, if the consumer doesn't support it (no matter what the quality increase is) it will fall by the wayside.
I may be completely wrong, but thankfully, I'm sure you'll tell me if that's true.
Simply for it's increased storage. 25 GB (Blu-Ray) vs. 15 GB (HD-DVD). The disparity is far too great, and people buy DVD's by the truck load simply for the larger storage space.
HD-DVD might win out for players. But I'm betting Blu-Ray dominates the personal computer market.
Which is larger?
As someone who watched the SACD v. DVD-Audio format war with a keen interest (I'm sold on high-def multichannel music) I eventually invested in a player that supported both formats, thinking I couldn't lose. But - to my amazement - I did end up losing, not because consumers perferred one format over the other, but becuase most consumers had no interest in the new formats. The result? A dearth of SACD and DVD-Audio reissues and releases. High def audio seems to be dead.
The problem was that remixing old music in multichannel is expensive, so many discs we're simply released in stereo. For most consumers, the audible difference (due to the higher sampling rate) didn't seem quite worth the price (for a new player, for a new disc).
And now here we see a new format war for a high def video. You might think video is different because high def allows for massive content (at DVD quality). But does anyone really believe the studios are going to do this? It's hard to get a consumer to pay a lot of money for just one disc.
If the studios instead focus on delivering HDTV quality movies, then the superiority of the format (over DVD) will only be apparent to those who own HDTVs...a scenario which mirrors the problems with high def audio.
I guess my point (and worry) is: just like high def audio, there will be players that support both formats. And just like high def audio, nobody will care except for videophiles and gadget freaks. So in the end, the "format war" doesn't matter.
IMHO, high def DVD will more likely make its mark as a huge storage medium for PCs and game consoles.
Unlike HD DVD, Blu-ray has "a reduction in the cover layer from 0.6 mm for DVD to 0.1 mm." Of course Disney would approve, as a reduction in the cover layer makes it easier for a scratch to do real damage and makes it harder for scratch repair products such as Skip Dr to work properly, forcing parents to re-buy copies of animated movies that the kids scratched up.
What if they held a format war, and no one bought anything?
--- Ban humanity.
Hybrid player
Most likely, 3rd party hybrid players will appear on the market just as soon as either or both formats start being released. Then, the likes of SONY and Toshiba will start to make hybrid players also.
From an end user perspective, this makes sense. Then, it won't really matter what format your Disney or MGM title is, as it will just play on your player.
That's the way:
- multiregion players have gone;
- DVD writers have gone (I have a DVD+/-R(W) drive, for example).
To be honest, the end user doesn't really care about which format wins, or which is better, so long as they can watch the movie, or play the game, or listen to the music.
T.
Not saying that the research behind this article is biased at all, but at a first glance the title is: HD-DVD Must Die Sony's Blu-ray is the better next-generation DVD.
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The HiDef DVD market is at first going to be dominated by videophiles and collectors. Here I think Blue-Ray has the quality edge. As it approaches "prosumer" levels with HDTV owners, HD-DVD has the price edge. What can Blue-Ray do in that time window?
Because seriously, I've watched DVDs, and I've watched some HDTV samples (no, hdtv-lol is not HDTV, that's downscaled rips from a HDTV source) and the difference isn't *that* big. It is certainly superior, but VHS->DVD was like Tape->CD, while this is more like CD->SACD.
Personally, I suspect the players (and thus format) with best support for playing CD/DVDs with similarly compressed video will win. You can make a helluva impressive *cough*legal home*cough* video with 4.7/8.5 GB of MPEG4-video (4.3/8.0 GiB).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The article indicates that Blu-Ray is a far superior standard
That's not what I've read:
How would this affect durability in the face of scratched discs?
Which seems more likely:
1. Blu-Ray will win, simply because of the significant difference in storage capacity.
2. HD-DVD will win, simply because the hardware is easier to manufacture.
I'm going with #2, especially with those new DVD/HD-DVD discs they have created. Look at it from a manufacturers perspective: with minimal changes to their production lines they have a product that again has a fairly decent margin (at least for a while).
Disney backed DivX (disposable DVD format), Sony continues to create formats that no one uses: Beta, MiniDisk, MemoryStick, Atrac3.
:( which is too bad because it seemed like the better of the two.
with these two on board, Blu-Ray is almost certainly doomed
An extended fight over optical formats will only:
-prevent market adoption for several years
-cost the content producers money in lost sales
-cost the hardware manufacturers money in lost sales
-keep the product off the market for several years
The whole dvd-r/dvd+r/dvd-ram fight delayed low cost dvd burners for 3 years and home entertainment room dvd recorders for 3 years.
All lost time and lost money in this process.
Sony, Phillips, etc. should just pick a format and set licensing fees at some low value like $0.01 per unit.
Based on Sony's stance with SACD vs. DVD-Audio, I doubt we'll see any hybrid players from Sony. Sony doesn't produce any DVD-A players (to my knowledge). Only when their high end digital cameras started getting some semi-professional usage did they include a CF slot. And only on their high end cameras.
Sony likes their (propietary) formats.