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DVD Truce Between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD?
An anonymous reader writes " Reuters is reporting that Toshiba and Sony are in talks about reconciling the two next-generation DVD formats. Ideas floated in the article include a unified DVD arch which could use "Blu-ray's disc structure and HD DVD software technology" (Sony's idea) or "HD DVD disc structure and employing Sony's multi-layer data-recording technology" (Toshiba's idea)"
I didn't realize the hard drive had to be made to be compatible. I guess speed could somehow come into play, but no, never mind, they don't know what they are talking about.
"It could take both camps some time to develop products based on a new standard, which leaves the risk of development delays for Sony's next-generation game console," Goldman Sachs analyst Yuji Fujimori wrote in a note to clients.
Does this really matter? Couldn't Sony still release their next PlayStation with BlueRay discs as their format? I mean, they did use UMD for the PSP, and they isn't a common format. If you know more about this let me know, but this to me would mean it could prevent more illegal copying of game discs.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
well, it looks like they got smart all of a sudden, because, unlike dvd+ and dvd- R and RW...bluray and HDdvd are so far apart you practically need 2 drives for total support..
not to mention the COST of bluray media...yeouch.
Without standards, there's no volume.
So they've got to:
Sort out the details
Get out a new spec
Prototypes
Verification
etc. etc.
All before the impending releases of if nothing else the PS3 and XBox2, never mind the PC & TV players?
Why do I get the feeling that this is a token gesture never intended to resolve the disputes, but instead to allow them to look back later and say "well we TRIED to get a common format but everyone else was in too much of a hurry!" If they were really serious about a common format, they would have done it long before now.
Deceipt at it's best!
I clearly do not fully understand how anti-monopoly laws work, but aren't competing companies prohibited from doing exactly this? Instead of each company selling it's product and letting the market decide which is better, they're working together to restrain the industry and keeping products that might benefit the consumer off the market. Isn't that collusion? Isn't it illegal?
Someone please explain why it's not, I really would appreciate it (not kidding here, genuinely cuious).
--
RumorsDaily
why not just use Blu-Ray technolgy and HD-DVD name (silid's idea)
Lets have one technology and an agreed royalty share - an effective buy-out. At least this way it will save millions in marketing in a format war, and both groups get a degree of guarenteed success.
and more importantly will allow me to enjoy the format sooner as i won't have to wait for winner.
Even if they end up using a hybrid of the two, the R&D isn't wasted. Along the way, both companies have learned a lot, including finding out a lot of things that *didn't* work.
A lot of R&D is failing and figuring out why.
It's not like we're talking about Xerox PARC, where Corporate wasted the opporunity to commercialize the wonderful things which were developed. A compromise on the new DVD format will still bring both companies/consortia licensing revenue.
Which, of course, begs the obvious question -- if they're both contributing IP, will they both be charging royalties and price the technology too high?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
In order to download a movie "instantly", you need a lot of bandwidth. To download a 1Gb movie in 1 second requires an 8Gbps connection. This is not going to be available affordably to the average person within the next 10 years, at least. As is, it costs maybe $20 a month to get an 8 megabit per second connection, and everyone knows it takes a very very long time to overhaul data transmission infrastructure.
Let's let the Chineese come up with a OPEN solution that doesn not belong to anyone and has no royalties attached to it.
i'm betting THAT one would be accepted by everyone within minutes.
With streaming media, it seems likely that we'd see a `pay-per-view' set-up. Besides that, what about out-of-print movies? If I buy a DVD and the manufacturer stops printing those DVDs, I can still watch it -- but what if I want to stream a DVD no one wants to host? We could lose a lot of important movies this way.
Prices are not even remotely linked to media costs/capacity! DVDs cost LESS to make yet sell for MORE than VHS. CDs cost LESS to make yet sold for MORE than audio tape.
If they want to charge you a lot for it, they still will. You erally think the scum will say "oh, since it all fits on one disc now instead of 4 saving us $0.40, we'll only charge you $20 instead of $100?"
HAHAHAHAHA! Not likely. Saddam becoming the next Pope was a much safer bet than that. Reality is that what you'll hear from their mouths is "BluHDRayDVD is 100x better, so we'll charge you 2x as much. You win by a factor of 50, aren't we kind?"
"However, just agreeing on a common standard does not collusion make."
Right. The first step is to hammer out the details of the DVD format.
Fixing the prices on the DVDs will have to wait until next year.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
When you get your content, or your applications, online, you are then at the mercy of:
:)
1) He who controls where the content or apps are stored, controls YOU.
2) Your connetion (being up or down, or slow, or high latency)
3) Security issues
But, if you like all that, feel free to check out the Phantom gaming system; you'd probably like it.
Blu-ray requires the same royalty, since it includes VC-1.
I'm still not convinced that we even need a next-generation format. HDTV is insanely scarce outside of the US [and most "HDTV" units already in the US are 480P EDTV anyway and most of the ones that actually are HD are rear projection units sitting in sunny rooms with the factory settings intact] and DVD is the most successful format in history. Obviously Hollywood wouldn't mind due to what I'm sure is much stronger DRM on new formats but we currently have two superior formats to CD and for consumers the convenience of lower-quality sound from digital files is winning out. Only a tiny percentage of audio nerds [and it's even a fraction of them because many audiophiles are terrified of any digital equipment] have bought into the new formats and they're people who ahve no problems with rebuying their favorite music over and over. The same may happen with movies.
Look at Laserdisc - far better picture and sound than VHS, no rewinding and pretty good studio support for a while but the cost, convenience and durability advantages of tapes won out in the end.
Well, I'd imagine it would be the MPAA and not the RIAA charging you for the movie. Also, are you going to watch the entire box of discs instantly or in super fast forward? If not, a pipe with enough bandwidth to support the data rate of the disc would be fine.
The trouble with HD-DVD is that its capacity is insufficient for 3 hours of true HDTV (in fact, its barely sufficient for 2 hours).
Just a guess is that Hollywood would prefer to sell us HD-DVD's (you know, the ones we just bought in DVD format) in some intermediate format, and then in another 5 years, sell us the same movies again in yet a better format.
Plus, it doesn't match up with expectations. If a CD holds 700M and a DVD (single layer) holds 4.7 G, then you expect the information density to increase by a factor of 7 with a new generation. Therefore, you'd expect about 30G from a new format.
HD DVD just doesn't cut it. It doesn't work for data storage, it doesn't work for HDTV.
I don't know anything about Blu-Ray and I frankly don't care. I just know that HD-DVD is too little.
Until a true 1080p TV costs less then a car, and the next generation media is under a dollar... why should I care exactly?
99% of the 10% of humans that even have a computer, don't care about any of this until it's AFFORDABLE. By which time, the margins will be so low that none of this battle will matter. And I'd bet backups to IDE will still be cheaper TCO-wise.
Also, a system with 10x the storage will be out in a year.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Generally you're right that a common standard isn't anti-competitive, but that's ignoring the implications of DRM.
If the standard they choose contains a mandatory DRM system, and if competitors are required by law (under the DMCA and software patent law) to have a license in order to join the monopolized market, it is effectively, if not legally, collusion.