Video Games and the Hi-Def Format Wars

Pika the Mad writes "Reuters has a concise but interesting article up about how video games will help decide the format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD. According to industry analysts "What Sony and Microsoft decide to announce publicly or to dealers at E3 next week will be key." So this year's E3 could very well be a deciding factor in how you view your movie library for years to come."

Comments

Real determiners of HD format wars

[Anonymous Coward]

The real determiners of the HD format wars will be the adult DVD producers. They put out over 12000 titles a year and this is the single biggest market of content repackagers / producers.

To be completely honest

[goldcd]

I'm quite happy with DVD for now - and I'll be damned if I'm going to buy either standard for the foreseeable future.
I mean I'd like Hi-def, but the amount it's going to cost me to upgrade and all the hassles with the competing standards, the retarded prices they'll be charging, the 'oh this can't play on your PC as we don't like the connector you're using' blah blah
I just can't be bothered. DVD'll do me fine for a few more years - and after that I'll be sticking to media-less content.

Re:To be completely honest

[swansontec]

My thoughts exactly. Why buy either when both will be replaced by direct download? Until then, the DVD is good enough. In fact, DVD will probably be around much longer than that, just as the floppy is still around today.

People keep comparing the BluRay vs HD-DVD war to the VHS vs Betamax war, but I think the comparison is flawed. This is more like the Zip-disk vs LS120 "war." Remember that? People wanted to know which format would replace the floppy disk, but both are now irrelevant. The difference is simple - VHS and Betamax both competed in a market where there was no existing alternative, while the Zip-disk and LS120 competed in a market with a well-entrenched but less-capable alternative. In the end, better technologies like flash drives, email, and networks destroyed the market for the high-capacity floppy replacements. Meanwhile, the floppy itself still lives on for the few things it can still do well, like system recovery. For the same reason, the DVD wil still be with us years after the HD-DVD and BluRay are forgotten. How else will we watch our massive collections of "old DVDs?"

Re:To be completely honest

[analog_line]

I concur.

Frankly, HD-DVD and BluRay displays at such a high resolution, I can't imagine that half the people that buy HDTV sets can even see any actual quality difference between an HDTV version of a movie and a standard DVD version without buy a television so large that few if any can afford it. My eyes aren't that good. Hell, my TV isn't that good, and I don't want to and am not going to buy one until this one gets broken beyond repair (and there's a very good TV repair place near here, so that's not very likely).

Also, there's little actual advantage that I can see in the HD-DVD/BluRay over the DVD format, aside from a reduction in the number of discs needed for big movie sets (like the LotR special editions, TV series, etc) but that kind of economy isn't going to last very long. The content size will expand to fit the media. Video games used to be dwarfed by the capacity of CDs, now they're pushing the limits of multiple DVDs, multiple HD-DVD/BluRay will soon follow so that doesn't really solve the multiple disc problem permanently. DVD had very clear advantages over VHS. HD-DVD's advantages are not so clear.

Re:To be completely honest

[7Prime]

Folks, anyone else out there realize that $900 is extremely expensive for the average joe to spend on a TV? Let's see, the majority of TVs are bought by late teens and 20-somethings, heading out into the world, or college bound to fit in their tiny apartments or basement flats. As they have famillies, SOME will become wealthy enough to spend $500 on a 30" TV, most will be happy with a 20" (as my familly has been for years), an elite few will be purchasing $800 widescreen, rear projection systems with surround sound equipment. The /. community is a VERY BAD sample of mainstream society. Most (not all) /.ers are middle class to to upper class citizens, as they had the fortune of being able to be introduced to high techology at an early age (I know there's a few of you here and there that are exceptions, but you are a minority). Also, we LOVE gadgets and technology, and various forms of entertainment. And still, from what I'm seeing, the majority of people even HERE wouldn't even benefit from HD.

Take off your rosie colored glasses and realize:

1. the average familly has a 20"-30" TV
2. the average individual living on their own has a 15"-20" TV
3. even though it has become a common catch phrase in our culture, very few people have "Home Entertainment Systems" this was a term circulated by TV manufacturers as a sort of "Everybody's doing it!" tactic.

I haven't done a direct comparison, but going to take a guess that HD will only be of real significantly noticable difference on 40"+ TVs. That's an extremely tiny part of the market. Most everyone else is fat and happy, and would rather spend their time trying to figure out a way of paying less at the pump.

Funny, I consider myself a film buff, I even work as a video editor and producer at a TV station, my life litterally revolves around the tube, yet I have zero interest in any of this HD stuff. When I see a movie, I don't care if it has the nth degree of resolution. My favorite movie of the year was "Good Night & Good Luck", how is HD going to help that? Even if "King Kong" was the hit movie of the year, I really don't see how HD is going to "increase my viewing pleasure", the graphics were neat enough as it was. This is 100% hype driven by video equipment manufacturers. Hollywood doesn't care (in fact, they'll be the big losers of this, because it might make more people stay home then go to the theatre), the mainstream public doesn't care, NOONE CARES! When The NES begot the SNES, the entire gaming community was ready for a change in quality, when VHS begot DVD, most people were ready for a media distrobution change to match their music media (notice I didn't say "quality", DVD adoption wasn't about quality, it was about convenience). People would still be using VHS if it weren't for the added convenience of DVDs, HD doesn't add any convenience. I seriously think that the HD revolution is going to die even before it gets off the ground. When 95% of the population goes to the store, see sa DVD version of a movie and an HD version of the same movie for twice the price, and buys the DVD version, suddenly the HD manufacturers are going to look a bit green around the gills.

The immediate future of movie distorbution is in cheap, simple, low-bandwidth internet distrobution. The population won't care if quality takes a hit, just as audio quality took a hit with the iPod. The TV manufacturers know this, so they're desperate to get a new media off the ground before traditional media distrobution becomes a thing of the past. Even if HD gets off the ground, they're only buying a little time, maybe a year or two. I bet you anything that even if everyone switches over to HD, the average citizen will be willing to fall back to non-HD if renting a movie becomes as simple as iTMS.

Re:I will vote "no comment"...

[kfg]

By buying a Nintendo Wii-volution.

Be vewy, vewy qwiet, we'ah hunting video fawmats. Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!

KFG

And the Winner Is...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The premise of the article is right - the game consoles are going to decide the winner in the "hi-def" wars.

But the article totally misses the dark horse candidate which I, with my great knowledge and keen insight of the market, predict will be the real winner.

The losers will be both BLU-RAY and HD-DVD. The winner will be downloaded content.

All of the game systems are network centric. In order to get much benefit out of any of the systems you practically have no choice but to connect them to the internet and that is typically going to be a broad-band connection too.

Combine that ubiquitous high-speed internet connectivity with the high-powered processing built into these systems and you have the ideal platform for media distribution using new highly efficient codecs like h.264.

An hour of 720p encoded with h.264 to just 1GB looks pretty good. In most cases it looks a lot better than a DVD. A low-end 1.5Mbps (DSL) connection can transfer that 1GB in under 2 hours. A mid-range 8mbps (comcast cable) connection can transfer it in less than 20 minutes, and high-end 20mbps (Verizon FIOS fibre) will do it in under 10 minutes with plenty of bandwidth to spare.

This combination of processing and network throughput will make it feasible to sell direct downloaded hi-def video to anyone with one of these game consoles.

I believe that just as MP3's portability convenience trounced the non-portable high-def audio products like SACD and DVD-Audio, so too will downloaded (possibly, but not necessarily) pay-per-view hi-def tv and movies.

Of course the quality of 1080p at 8G/hr with h.264 will be significantly better than just 720p at 1G/hr - but for many people the lower quality will be still be more than good enough, and for the videophile, waiting a little bit longer for the download of a top-notch 1080p encoding won't be a terrible inconvenience.

Re:Have you seen the difference?

[rootofevil]

Right, I understand that. Now step back 12 feet and tell me if you can identify which is which. I cant.

Is there a market for HD porn?

[tepples]

The real determiners of the HD format wars will be the adult DVD producers.

Conventional wisdom is that adult DVD doesn't want high definition, as the 480-line output of standard definition production hides the imperfections in erotic actors' skin.