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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
Blu-ray Discs can store up to 50GB of data on a dual-sided disc. That's significantly higher than the 4.7GB capacity of the DVD format Blu-ray is looking to succeed.
Yippee! Even more room to store lengthy commercials for other "limited edition gold/platinum" DVDs of re-released animated movies from 40+ years ago. There's nothing I enjoy more than paying money to rent a movie and sitting through 15 minutes of advertisements because the DVD won't allow the player to skip forward through that crap.
Disney said its plans to release movies on the Blu-ray format are nonexclusive, meaning it could publish movies on other formats as well.
If other formats can hold more and can lock out the DVD player even better than they wouldn't want to eliminate the possibilities of moving to that format now would they?
"The studios will come around to the superior format," Peterson said. "Capacity and picture quality are directly related."
The studios will come around to whatever is cheaper for them to produce/distribute their materials while still being competitive/profitable and staying within their business model (whether that is adding 15+ minutes of commercials to all their DVDs and not allowing DVD players to fast-forward through them or not).
Also, the larger the capacity the greater the troubles in ripping/modifying/burning the discs. If the discs hold 50GB you need a 100+GB HD to do any modifications to the movie before reburning it. By changing the formats you are less likely to have the hardware to burn that format and thereby lose the ability to do what you did with regular DVDs once the burner prices dropped well under $100.
I'm sure they figure it will be several more years before blu-ray DVD writers and extremely large HDs will become common enough for everyone to make their DVD viewing experiences on DVDs they purchased acceptable.
The DVD technology has become the most successful consumer technology ever because of the re-release of older movies on the new format for what consumers have deemed reasonable prices. Are all these movies going to be again released on Blu-ray/DVD-HD for the same prices?
I see a good possibility that most people won't give a shit one way or the other and will likely keep buying the media that is even more inexpensive. It all depends on your willingness to accept/adapt new technologies and your need for a better movie watching experience. Obviously DVD is far superior to VHS. Will Blu-ray and DVD-HD have a similar quality increase?
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...
And of course, I'm blind you insensitive clod!
I'm laughing at you, Gizmodo, because just a couple of months ago you told us that Blu-ray has already won. Disney must agree with you, but four other big studios don't. Care to hedge your bet?
I'm just gonna buy my "CD-RW, DVD+/-R/RW, HD-DVD, Blu-ray" drive in 2 years for $70, while reading and complaining about the impending SuperHD-DVD vs ReallyBlu-Ray format war on /.
:-P
NEEEEEXT...
As predicted, the format war has only just begun.
How exactly does one claim success here?
Download my free songs!
As I recall, Disney was a big supporter of the dead-on-arrival Divx format. We know how well that went. Disney may be able to throw its weight around, but if the format doesn't have consumer acceptance, even Mickey's clout won't help.
t ml
h tml
A couple of quick Google results:
+5, Informative: http://www.thedigitalbits.com/editorial/bz21998.h
+5, Funny: http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/divxpress.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
While the format wars are bad for the cutting-edge people that have to purchase something new, they end up being better for the consumer in the long run. Look at Beta VS VHS. The formats competed, and consumers decided which format they liked better. The format that could record a full film onto one cassette won, despite the fact that it was not 'technically superior.' If all of the studios had settled upon Beta from the very beginning, we'd all have to record in LP or EP just to fit a movie on one tape.
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.
...begun the format war has!
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?
Slate.com covered this a couple of days ago, ultimately giving the Blu-Ray the nod over HD-DVD. The article also links to this useful comparison chart.
Bush Lies On the Record.
Don't mention the war... I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.
Slate just posted an interesting analysis of the differences between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The article indicates that Blu-Ray is a far superior standard, and the only reason that some studios are lining up behind HD-DVD is to spare the expense of buying new production equipment. HD-DVD disks can be made using existing production machinery, whereas Blu-Ray requires all-new equipment to manufacture.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
I think that is an urban legend
.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.
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
When you have three times as much shelf space in video rental stores as the competition, you have succeeded. Rental discs are prone to scratching, and HD DVD's thicker layer between the surface and the data may be able to resist scratches better than Blu-ray's.
I usually play DVDs by "mplayer dvd://1" and never see that junk.
What do house guests think of the big ugly computer case sitting next to the TV? And what about people who don't have more than $100 to spend on a set-top DVD player?
You see, Disney has this habit of withholding their products from the public. They're a little like an old rattlesnake, which will conserve it's precious venom for when it will be most useful: it will withhold it's venom until it wants to kill something.
Before Blockbuster Video squashed all the independent video rental shops, I was a clerk in one of those petite shops. Lots of VHS Disney titles were missing from the store, listed on the computer (a brand-new 486) as rented, and never returned. This was because Disney would only offer its titles (like "The Little Mermaid") for short periods of time, and after that time the only way a person could get that title would be to steal it in one way or another.
I won't pretend to have comprehensive knowledge of Disney's marketing voodoo, but it seems to me that Disney would like nothing better than a new video format, even though there may not be a good technical reason for it. They just want you to buy yet another copy of "The Little Mermaid" on yet another format. Blech.
Most consumer electronics stores are notorious for feeding poor signals to their display sets. Just imagine all the connections that the original signal passes through to reach 20-30 sets. Secondly, the sets on the floor are almost never tuned to provide their highest quality. From the factory, most sets are set with both very high brightness and contrast. This helps them stand out more from the TV sitting on the floor next to them. But it does not help the actual quality of the image. And finally, an electronics store is nothing like the environment that you will be actually watching the TV in when you bring it home. All the fluorescent lights and other TVs all make for glare and reflections. Even though stores like Best Buy and Ultimate Electronics put their TVs in darkened nooks, there is no substitute to a light controlled room. Demo a HDTV. Buy one with a satisfaction guarantee. Once you get it home, and hooked to a clean, true HD signal, you WILL be wowed. Promise!
What made Betamax superior ?
When VHS was introduced, it had 2x the recording capacity. I just read a link (posted in this article's comments) talking about the beta vs vhs debacle. Apparently the quantititative difference between vhs and beta equipment from a pq and audio standpoint was not detectable on normal equipment, and generally, the variance from one machine to another of a given type was more than the difference between the two types of machines.
I don't see at all what makes Blu-Ray superior. Sony and Disney, two of the most wretchedly evil litigious tail-wagging-the-dog IP companies ever are soundly behind one format. That should be a warning sign to you.
If you read the links, HD-DVD can re-use much of the existing productino equipment, whereas blu-ray needs new everything. The capacity argument is the only one in blu-ray's favor, and its not even clear that that is the case since HD-DVD can have multi-layer, multi-side discs, which ought to mean 60GB for a DL/DS disc. (Not sure if Blu-Ray can go dual layer)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I have a 120" front projection system, and let me tell you the difference between HDTV and DVD isn't just minor but HUGE. A good HDTV source (and the quality on this front varies greatly depending on production) is better seen on my system than any Cineplex movie I've seen in the last 5 years (granted our local Cineplexes are crap).
Not many consumers today have 120" screens with high-end data grade projectors (I'm homebrew), but the quality of consumer TV Gear is improving at a phenomenal rate. 100"+ systems under $1000 will be the norm in 2 or 3 years time. Given how crappy (or expensive for passable) HDTV offerings were 5 years ago (with no channels to watch anyway) this is a bit of a surprise.
True 1920x1080 is finally a true movie going experience. When you see stuff shot in True 1080i with a good HDTV camera directly your jaw drops. Most stuff is still shot on 35mm and scanned in. This is superior to DVD, but not the huge improvement of direct to digital. There is something about the grain of most 35mm film that makes HDTV transfer kind of muddy and muted (granted scanning technologies will improve).
Instead of more pixels we now need higher scan rates (something I've brought up in other discussions). Instead of shooting movies in 24fps they should be shot in 60fps. 1080p at 60fps would be awesome and Blu-Ray has the capacity to pull it off. If you have ever noticed the choppiness of a fast sideways scroll of Text or Action at a Movie, you know what I'm talking about. Regular 35mm at 60fps could be marketed as IMAX35 or something to indicate a bump up in quality (though not true 70mm IMAX).
When you have the equipment to show the true difference (which I repeat is HUGE) you will notice and you will care.
Letter To Iran
This is what I found funny, in a sad sort of way:
"The studios will come around to the superior format," Peterson said. "Capacity and picture quality are directly related."
It's been a long time since I was naive enough to imagine the studios care about picture quality. If they care at all, it's because they see high quality as a minor disadvantage: something that encourages piracy.
And to be fair. . . They have to look at consumer response. Consumers mostly rejected S-VHS because most of them "couldn't see any difference" from regular VHS. Consumers mostly rejected Laserdisc because they couldn't record on it, despite the superior picture quality. History shows the majority of people don't give a flying flip about picture quality -- which is a source of endless frustration for the minority who do.
Also funny. . . People complaining because people aren't ready to replace their DVDs, since it's still a new format. And worse, asking whether BlueRay will offer any significant improvement over DVD.
DVD is a new-ish format, but it basically offers the same audio and video performance as Laserdisc, which was introduced in . . . 1978, if I recall right. Both of them will output basically what NTSC can display.
As for some form of high-def videodisc, I don't think it's too soon -- I think it's way overdue! Seriously, I believe this is the main thing holding back adoption of HDTV. You can buy HD sets, you can buy HD satellite receivers, and even Tivo-like recorders that will handle HD. The element that's missing is any HD videodisc. HDTV fans have been waiting and waiting and *waiting* for this, and the companies just keep dragging it out.
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.
Oh, and I'm not buying one until I have a television system supporting hi-def also.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."