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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
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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?
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...
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.
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.