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Apple Backs Blu-ray
zaxios writes "The New York Times is reporting that Apple has joined the Blu-ray Disc Association, and will use Blu-ray in upcoming versions of iMovie and Final Cut. The move puts Apple among Sony, Matsushita, Dell, HP and Walt Disney in supporting Blu-ray; companies including Toshiba, NEC, Warner Brothers, New Line Cinema, Universal and Paramount are pledged to adopt the competing HD-DVD format. Apple's support confirms Blu-ray's future dominance on the desktop, but the division in Hollywood and notebook manufacturers between the two HD videodiscs will ensure the bona fide format war we were all secretly pining for."
Apple's support confirms Blu-ray's future dominance on the desktop
Against the MS behemoth supporting HDDVD? Why exactly?
And mow for something completely different, who pays this site's bills?
-mkb
I really think the HD-DVD will win simply becuase of the name.
Consumer: You mean this is a H D DVD. Wow I have been hearing so much about how good HD is so I want one.
Dont laugh VHS rolled of tounge better than Beta Max. One has to wonder what marketing genus wanted to call their product beta anyway
I remember reading specs and what it seemed to me was Blu-ray was simply better from the users point of view. I think it took more work on the manufacturers side and forced them to do a lot of extra work for it to be able to read traditional DVDs, but that shouldn't be as important.
Am I on the ball here or is there really not a complete performance domination by Blu-ray?
Just look at the history!
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Correlation does not indicate causation. It could merely be the fact that Apple made the technically sound decisions, being the savvy players in the media market they are, or that they were simply lucky.
Its not so much that their two diffrent formats (As there will be at some point a combo drive, it always happens)...
its the fact that there are going to be two _competing_ formats which means...
lower prices!
-ND
I think they planned to annouce this at the MacWorld Keynote, but sometihng kept them from doing it. Why else would they have gotten the CEO of Sony to be there? They could have gotten anybody from Sony to demo their HDV camera, CEO appearances are saved for special occasions. As far as the HDV camera goes, Sony isn't the only manufacturer with an HDV prosumer camera.
I might remind you that the iMac was the first PC to come with USB, and not only that, but they used a USB keyboard and mouse. It came with firewire of course, but that is because Apple, 10-some years ago realised something that you have yet to realise: Firewire and USB have different purposes. It's like saying the Parallel port had failed because hardly any modems that worked on it were made.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
This is entiurely true, and they will quietly go with whatever is the least expensive and time-consuming. Now they can burn a Blue-Ray master with the tools they've been using all along - Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. The Mac has an enormous presence in the videography field, and not needing to buy or train on special software, apart from the usual upgrade to the tools they're already using.
So, whether Hollywood likes it or not, Apple's just won the fight for Blue Ray... unless they get tricky, and simultaneously support HD-TV as well, which isn't beyond the realm of possibility.
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look how well Sony got that to take off in the USA
i type this as someone who has a few pieces of MD hardware and actually likes it.... though i think most people that use(d) minidiscs liked them. i never bought pre-recorded music but used it to replace cassettes.
So why, exactly, should I be pining for a format war?
All that means to me is several years of incompatible hardware, price fluctuation, and annoying-ass FUD campaigns ("Our discs last longer! HD-DVDs melt after three months!" "That's a lie, plus OUR discs have better color density on playback!" "Oh YEAH?? Well, OUR discs...")
A format war might drive prices down more quickly in the short term, but what good is that to me if I need to buy new hardware and don't want to get stuck with a lemon during those few years before either one format wins hands-down or dual-capability drives get introduced?
The trouble with High-definition porn is that you actually get to see what 10+ years of over-work does to a someone's body. Not a pretty sight. I can't see this being good for the porn industry.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
You're right...And they have almost zero presence in the video editing field too...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
how many people out there have HDTVs right now? then think that most home users are not using HD cameras. even if everyone had these drives in their hardware tomorrow, it will take some time for HD cameras to trickle down to home users. odds are it will be higher end projects that set the pace for this. that kind of work is more likely to be done on an Apple then a Dell valu-boxen.
at some point what the masses buy will be important for burning discs, but i guess for now it is an issue what formats laptops will be able to play? if Apple, Dell etc etc sell laptops that can only play BlueRay discs and not HDDVD it might matter? if i could pick up both formats in the store, i would obviously buy the one i will be able to watch on a laptop.
You mean Microsoft's tiny market share...in the professional editing industry.
What good is it to have a format, Mr. Anderson, if you have no software to edit it with?
If I had a dollar for every windows box at Pixar and Lucasfilm, plus 50 cents for every windows box at professional editing houses in NY and LA, I'd have about $4.50.
Film and TV professionals like Apple, trust Apple, and they use Apple.
Oh, and Sony has this little thing called a Playstation, which means (shazam) 50 million blu-ray boxes in homes overnight. Once you have it, might as well buy some movies for it, right?
The only people I see so far supporting HD-DVD are content providers who don't sell hardware or do their own manufacturing. The hardware guys all seem to want Blu-ray.
Places like Paramount want the cheapest option because they have to subcontract manufacturing DVDs. What they sell is intellectual property, they don't really care what format it is on. They do care if the needed price point is more then what their customers want to pay (most casual DVD buyers would balk at a $60 Blu-ray disc, but would probably pay $5 to $10 more for HD-DVD).
Hardware manufacturers like Sony want Blu-ray because they need a killer hook to get you to upgrade (like more storage space). Sony is weird, because they are BOTH kinds of company at once, but they still think of themselves as hardware-oriented. They care a lot about format because they want control over sales, they want licensing fees (if applicable), and, most importantly, they manufacture the players. People JUST bought DVD players 3 or 4 years ago. The only people clamoring for a new format are Movie Professionals and Home Theatre Geeks, who tend to favor Blu-ray for technical advantages. They are willing to drop the $$$$$ on a new player, which means boffo profits for Sony. Paramount sees jack shit from player sales. They want to move as many DVDs as possible, they don't care if you use them as coasters. Sony would rather sell you a new player and 7.1 sound system so you can watch (Paramount movie) Top Gun on it.
Apple is a hardware manufacturer. They want to sell more editing suites and copies of FinalCut Pro. More lines on the screen is not going to be an easy sell with the people who buy their stuff. A big storage jump is.
I always love it when people give names to products which whould seem to imply that they are "the greatest" only to surpass them within a year or three.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Error correction/scratch protection. There may be some (or even many) of you out there who loathed CD-Caddy drives in the early days, but I MISS THEM. One thing the caddy did was protect the disc and prevent scratches. You could stick a caddied disk in your pocket and walk arround with it all day, pull it out, pop it in, and away you go. If you do that with a bare CD, by the end of the day you'll be lucky if it'll still read. Insertion and removal from a case is a pain, and I never met a jewel case as strong as even flimsy caddies. Sure, the prevelence and price reduction of media means if you ruin a disk you just burn another and don't care...
The problem is (and was/still is with DVD) that high data density makes the media far more succeptable to surface imperfections, be they scratches or dirt. Who hasn't sighed in irritation at rental DVD's that skip or blurt? And if you think DVD's are bad, just think for a minute about an optical media with 10 times the data density! Until synthetic diamond becomes cheap enough to coat consumer level optical discs with, I look forward to the return of our Caddy-Carrying Overloards.
Either that or there needs to be some SERIOUS error correction implemented. The average consumer just isn't going to want to handle a movie like it was a precious peice of china. Without some solution to this problem neither media will catch on with me. Maybe "they" are just planing on selling you a new copy of the disc every six months, but archivers and folks who use the media for data storage are not gonna like that.
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The iMac wasn't the first PC to have USB (invented at Intel) but was the first PC to totally rely on it for peripheral expansion. Apple dropped all support for SCSI (external storage and scanners), Serial (printers, LAN, and modems), and ADB (Apple Desktop Bus-input devices). This forced the major periph vendors (HP and Epson) to get off their asses and start making USB devices en-mass. Once the snow ball started rolling, others also started producing USB equipment.
Due to multiple hardware manufacturers in the X86 world, there was not much drive to leave legacy connection tech.
Oh yeah, the first iMacs didn't have Firewire. That came with the B/W G3 towers.
I drank what? -- Socrates
The stats that matter are market share of the video editing market--Apple controled 26% of the broadcast/cable market in 2003...imagine where they are now, 2 years later. And that doesn't count the home video market or the Film industry or porn industry (as someone else noted earlier) or video production companies or ad agencies, etc. etc. With actual Hollywood releases being made on Final Cut Pro, 4% doesn't tell the whole picture. Statistics are as straight-forward as the Bible.
As others have noted, the PS3 supporting Blu-Ray is probably all it will take to make movie makers produce Blu-Ray compatible content.
The other thing Blu-Ray has going for it is that Sony has a big stake in both sides of the equation.
If Sony DVD players only support Blu-Ray, it will be difficult for other content-publishers to ignore that market share, particularly since the movie-studios really don't have a dog in this fight.
Then, Sony is also a major studio, soon to own MGM as well. If Sony only produces it's content in Blu-Ray format, the other electronic manufacturers will have to support it and create hardware that will support either format. Unlike Universal Studios and Paramount, etc, Sony can get away with this because they do have a dog in this fight, that being their electronics division.
So, Sony Pictures will be willing to give up some market share to support the format, whereas the other studios supporting HD-DVD ultimately will not be willing, since they don't have any stake in the other side of the equation.
The only reason the other studios are even chiming in on this discussion is because they are trying to limit the power of Sony. They have no significant vested interest as Sony does.
If Sony manages to get the hardware makers producers players that support both formats, it will only be a matter of time before nobody produces anything but Blu-Ray content.
Consider this: the competition between +R and -R DVD formats probably helped push new features (not least +-R dual burners) as well as drive down prices. Even compatibility issues, while a hassle at first, in the long run seems to have lead to DVD players that will cope with anything, even round bits of bread being stuck in the drive (as long as they are buttered).
By the time DVD burners reached a price point I could afford, all the format issues had been worked out. Sure, my first drive (Pioneer 104) was -R only, but by that point which format you had didn't really make difference.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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Well, video professionals are still using the analog Betacam SP and Digital Betcam. They're based on the Betamax tape shell, but run at higher speeds and have much better image quality than Betamax did.
Sony Professional has certainly made enough profit on those formats to make up for the Betamax losses by now.
My video compression blog