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HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disappointing So Far
Dster76 writes "Reuters is reporting that the new format wars are showing signs of underwhelming performance, both technically and financially. In fact, according to the article, the new formats are just not selling. Reuters chalks it up to a current lack of interest. They indicate that as more movies and players become available this autumn, sales should improve. Just the same, the current picture is quite sour." From the article: "'Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience,' said Bjorn Dybdahl, president of San Antonio, Texas-based specialty store Bjorn's. 'High expectations were set. At every meeting with Sony, every demonstration was spectacular,' Dybdahl said. 'Then along comes the first Blu-ray player from Samsung and that's when my expectations were hurt. When we put the disc in, all the sales people looked around and said it doesn't look much better than a standard DVD,' he said."
From the article, a quote: "Neither format is selling well or at the level I had expected. I had expected early adopters to step up and other retailers have had the same experience."
I'm an early adopter, have been for a long time. I have always been willing, even eager to "step up" and pay the premium to get new (and great) technology early. Not so here. Another characteristic for early adopters is they tend to be more aggressive in research (those that aren't buying for status), certainly the case for me. The more I researched DVD both HD and Blu-Ray, the less interested I was. There was a certain promise of amazing high quality video, but NOT ONCE was I able to get anyone to give me a demo where I saw convincing evidence this was true.
Add to that the war of the formats and the fact I have to replace movies I already own at outrageous new prices (yeah, early adopter), but each new format is providing a limited and only slightly overlapping selection... wtf? This was the same early problem with CDs. The difference here is, we already have a very high quality, convenient, inexpensive, long lasting option (regular DVDs), and there's nothing compelling in the new DVDs warranting the hassle, the expense, nor the "convenience" (which is less than existing DVDs).
Then there's the specter of DRM and that it's not entirely obvious or clear to me or other early adopters what the final DRM landscape looks like. If we had to guess, it doesn't look hospitable (sp?).
Here's another telling piece of evidence from the article, again a quote: "Often, it has something to do with source material. Sometimes the film itself is shot in a way that may emphasize a grainy look as opposed to a sharp picture," he said. This almost outright concedes the new "high resolution" exceeds what most media will be capable of providing... or, it's an excuse... neither gives me any warm fuzzies about my return on investment for new DVD formats.
Early adopters like new technology when it's new and improved, and are willing to pay for it. In my opinion, someone(s) in some conference room took this thought and ran with it, not considering the early adopters might be a bit more discerning in their tastes. We're not your cash cow toadies.
Maybe that's what's happened to their mysteriously AWOL early adopters... they're not early marks. Lesson learned (not).
DVD was a huge step up from VHS tapes. HDDVD/BR offer nothing truly substantial to make people want to buy them plus most people don't have an HDTV to take advantage of the extra resolution.
Yea.Early adopter.They expect them to buy a player each - One to play HD-DVD;Another to play Blu-Ray; And then they will keep the user guessing as to which one will become the standard.
They created the confusion.They are paying for it.Why should consumers too?
Wincopy
Consumers have a tendency to stay away from confusing markets. Nobody wants to buy something only to find out that they "got ripped off".
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Sony are control freaks and absolutely obsessed with their own proprietary formats (no matter how many times this has burned them). But if they don't blink on this one, it could take BOTH formats down.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"When we put the disc in, all the sales people looked around and said it doesn't look much better than a standard DVD"
The important part: "...doesn't look much better..."
I would be the first to agree that HD does look better. But does it look better enough to toss my current DVD player and TV? Is it worth the headache of the format rivalry and all the DRM connectivity issues that I'm not sure a new set will be compatible with in two years?
No.
I'll continue to sit on the sidelines for a while longer.
The formats just came out, and the players are still expensive. Did they think that we would all run out and buy our movies again? Much less a player for $1000. Pfft. While we are still getting announcements like "Sony releases 2 more movie titles for Blue-Ray" tells me that they shouldn't be concerned about underwhelming performance yet...it is still NEW! Give me a reason to replace my ubiquitous DVD players.
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
Oh, sure we're an impulsive crowd, but most are educated and realize when we've been snookered before.
Did nobody in either camp stop and look at how they had royally screwed every early adopter of HDTV? The promise of content that never occured. The delayed, and delayed, and delayed rollout of OTA. The jumble of formats that caused event the best CE to falter under the load of options. The incompatibilities between components. The ubiquitous component interface that every early adopter had on their display sets which are now utterly obsolete due to the need for "content protection" - a perfectly good $7000 50RP set which may be relegated to 480p at the whim of the broadcaster. The promise of 20Mb HD that got chopped into subchannels to rerun Andy Griffith and the Golden Girls in SD simultaneously, at the expense of HD. The iron fist approach to preventing transferring DVDs to Media Servers.
No, the industry has drawn a line, and the early adopters are on the other side. We're the ones who are most adversely affected by the content protection and market jockying. Don't come to me with your hand out for your improved shovel right after you run over my dog. The industry has, through their anti-piracy efforts, significantly alienated a large portion of their first-run consumers. They've managed to eliminate the initial cash infusion that covers the R&D part of the CE process, and now they're stuck with trying to add enough volume to get every household to buy the product just to cover the engineering costs.
The early adopters want to buy this stuff, but we want to play with our new toys, not see how womebody else want us to play with them. Give us back our control, and we'll open our wallets. 'Til then, go fuck yourselves.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This keeps being compared to the VHS-Beta conflict. We've already been through that and, as consumers, we learned from it. When CDs came out, there weren't competing formats. There were also no competing formats for DVDs (unless you consider DIVX more than a blip). The VHS-Beta conflict was fueled by the fact that you could adequately use either format to record. Where's the fuel for HDDVD/BR? A smattering of random titles? I'm sorry, but it's not worth $500-1000 for me to see and HD version of "Serenity". If there were more titles available at launch ("Lord of the Rings"), then I would consider diving in. This is just like trying to decide which gaming platform I'm going to buy - they are all superior to my old system, so it comes down to the games. Given the current array of weak HD titles, why would anyone bother (unless you really love "Serenity" that much)?
"Both Blu-ray and HDVDVD support the same codecs Mpeg2, mpeg 4 (h.264) and VC1 (Windows Media). For some reason Blu-ray creation software didn't support the other codecs initially, but the player does."
That's correct. However, the end result is the same. Films released on Blu-Ray format in mpeg2 look noticably worse than films released in mpeg4 or VC1 on HD-DVD. I was shocked at the difference in image quality between the two. So, perhaps blu-ray players do support modern codecs (avsforum has had a good deal of discussion on this matter at their blu-ray forum) - but the upshot is that blu-ray releases look terrible compared to HD-DVD. And Blu-Ray drives cost twice as much.
What would *you* buy? (well, *I* would buy neither - and wait for the format war to finish).
There is very little incentive for all but the most rabid consumer to adopt either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray formats before widescale HDTV adoption at a reasonable price, which won't happen until one year AFTER 2009. When the price of reasonable quality HDTV is below the $300 price point, you can expect consumers to start choosing - but the reality is that most movies they want to play - at a price they want to pay for - will be on DVD and work perfectly fine.
People still anecdotaly remember being burned in the VHS versus Beta wars - I was on the winning side of that, bought one of the first very expensive VHS VCRs from RCA, but I worked shift and made more than I do even now.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The lack of sales of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is unsurprising.
What does surprise me is that it seems both sides are mostly selling these products on higher quality video, rather than capacity.
I look at the early releases for these two and only see movies.
I can't really tell the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray or HD-DVD in terms of video quality, but I can easily tell something quantifiable like having one piece of media for a whole season of a TV show vs. 4 or 5 DVDs. That convenience is why I like single DVD games over 5 CD games for my PC.
HD makes no visible difference for me. I don't keep my glasses clean enough of spots for HD to matter. And I like big tapestries on my walls more than big screens. Watching DVDs on my 19" PC monitor is enough screen for me for the rest of my life.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
The great thing about dvd was that you saw immediate benefits both from the medium and the content on your _standard_tv_. You didn't need the latest lcd/dlp/plasma display to appreciate what you were getting... Now we have only an incremental increase in the convenience of the medium (saves having multi-disk sets) which really doesn't mean much for most viewers and the improvements in quality only applies to a much smaller audience.
When it comes to the new consoles, both MS and Sony have bet the bank on the television market being saturated with big HD sets that would justify an "investment" in a game console that would display in HD on them. In a few ways -- cost of game development, size of their potential market as you say here -- both companies appear to have lost track of the market, or to have projected it wrongly. Market penetration of huge HD screens just isn't there yet. Maybe it will be during the lifespan of these consoles, maybe not.
Meanwhile a competitor that tries to jazz up the game experience on "your _standard_tv_" is out there, phrasing its admittedly not-cutting-edge technology in ways that DO mean something to most game players.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Records: Handel in Quad; John Rockwell; The New York Times February 19, 1973, p. 29
'Music for Royal Fireworks' Sounded Better in an Early Stereo Version
Whatever its ultimate artistic and technological merits may be, quadraphonic sound understandable has the classical-record business rubbing its collective hands together with glee. The classical repertory has its limits, after all, and the standard pieces have been recorded to death in stereo. Now, at long last, a new gimmick is at hand.
Not only it is presumed that the American public will spend millions on equipment, but all the hoary old warhorses and hi-fi spectaculars can be done over again in four-channel sound....
---
Truth in advertising... Rockwell acknowledges he was listening to the new release in "plain old stereo." A March 12, 1972 review by an audio reviewer, Don Heckman, listening in quad is, however, only slightly more encouraging:
"Just what was there to hear on all this gleaming new electronic exotica? Ah, there's the rub. Until just a few months ago, quadraphonic disks were dominated by the sound effects of falling trees, puffing choo-choos and gurgling whirlpools... [now there are more and] in some cases the rewards can be quite spectacular... a room-filling, near-concert-hall effect.... Pop music programs like Joan Baez... [and] Barbra Streisand are straightforward presentations in which one is less aware of a four-dimensional effect than of a kind of opening up of the sound.... [In one track on a Vanguard demonstration disk] the organ sound is quite extraordinary.... Switched-On Bach will probably have its sales surge as listeners discover that it sounds even more fascinating when these weirdly-distorted and re-timbred snippets of Bach go whipping around four, rather than two speakers."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Well, true, but it's also a significant point that these are HD formats. The TV industry seems to be doing pretty well right now. Everybody I know has their eye on SOME kind of TV lately, be it plasma, LCD, or what-have-you. The government is actually fuelling this fire with the promise that, sooner or later, everybody will be forced to upgrade to a set that does HDTV. The problem is, of the people who are buying these sets, most of them aren't using them for HDTV. It's just not "there" for most markets and, you guessed it, the only format available for film buffs (the types of people who buy home theater equipment) is standard DVD.
To me, it totally stands to reason that the consumer electronics manufacturers would be falling all over themselves to release an HD format for home movies. You do the math -- it sounds like there's a huge market brewing out there. I think the problems are simply threefold: One, that the manufacturers have really shot themselves in the foot with this ongoing and very public standards battle that has left everyone leery of the first-generation equipment; Two, the first-generation equipment is widely perceived as too expensive, with a Blu-Ray player costing ten times what an acceptable-quality DVD player costs; and Three, the studios haven't shown any kind of commitment to the new formats, releasing bullshit recent movies that nobody cares about and not investing in restoring the quality of the video sources so that they pop your eyes out the way they were promised to do. Until the movie and electronics industries correct two out of three of these problems, whatever market there is will lie fallow.
Breakfast served all day!
Does anyone remember the format war between DCC and MiniDisc? While each did get their adopters neither really faired well in the overall market, since nobody saw real reasons to adopt them.
When people talk about BluRay vs HD-DVD and compare it to VHS vs BetaMax, I am not so sure, since at least video tapes had a reasons to be taken up. I really believe it is like MiniDisc vs DCC, since few people really care. Drop the DRM and the region encoding and I will be willing to consider them.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
And, for that exact reason, it will never be allowed to be successful in North America.
The content lobbyists will introduce a tarriff on foreign players. Then they'll say that even with the tarriff those players need to be outlawed since they probably encourage piracy by people. Afetr all, if it will play anything, then it will probably play pirated versions.
It would simply be impossible for an unencumbered product, not championed by someone who is paying law-makers and lobbyists to be either distributed or become successful in the current climate.
And, that makes me sad. Because (even though I'm not familiar with it) the product you describe may well be technologically superior -- or at least superior to standard TV stuff without the liminations of the newest stuff that Sony wants us to buy.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'm not going to invest in technology where it's not clear that my investment is safe.
:-)
And I am an early adopter, I just sunk 2000 Euros in a brand new graphics card, a 1920x1200 monitor, and a dual core CPU. So I can watch HD content. OK, and play some HD games
They expect me to pay $1000 for a player that they can shut down remotely? They have GOT to be kidding me. No way in hell.
Oh, and they are targeting 40-50 Euros for a blank medium.
No. Thanks, but no thanks. Go try to butt fuck someone else, content mafia. I'll wait till you go bankrupt and then we'll see reasonably priced HD content.
I mean, they can't be THAT stupid, can they? What kind of value proposition is that? You can probably get HD content for $10 per month from the warez doods, without DRM, and without downscaling. This business model will be their downfall. And the people who say that if they fail, there will be no HD content, are wrong: every major cable TV provider has to offer HD channels these days. All the content will be there. So not even the pity argument counts.
One big problem with HDTV is now becoming apparent - the frame rate of movies is too low. 24FPS at 1080p with the screen in front of your face looks awful when the camera is panning.
Sports, especially football, compress badly. Football is almost the worst case for motion compression - the camera is moving relative to the background, the players are all moving in different directions, their body parts are all in motion, there's lots of detail that's important to the viewer, and there's no central character that dominates the scene. Viewers are likely to rerun parts of the game in slow motion, which brings out all the compression artifacts. When you have a 50-inch screen in front of you, all those problems really stand out.
Quick, name one player that uses ICT? Anyone? That's because the studios agreed to not use it
You misspelled "disk." The player is required to support ICT as a part of the AACS spec. If the studios want to release a few unimportant disks with ICT turned off to sucker us in, they might find we will not buy in.
but when the source is 24 fps
Cable and broadcast HDTV already support 60fps. I would think you would understand, since you own a 1080p HDTV. If you already own a player, fine. I'm going to wait for one that can decode 1080p60. Your computer can already do that.
LoL... "Looks like crap on a 55" screen." Spoken like a true videophile. DVD's look great on HD monitors at 720p. HD is *very* marginally better. To most people I know, the quality difference worth about $50 bucks.
2) $500 is very expensive. A person making a great living pulls in about $4k after taxes. So there went 1/8 of your monthly income for a player (vs 3 hours). If you are making a managerial or doctor's salary then cool. I also don't drive around a dodge viper (only about 3x a normal car price in its day) or wear armani suits (about 7x a decent suit). And HD/blu ray are no where near better a DVD than a dodge viper/armani suit are than their counterparts.
3)I paid about $1,200 for a phillips 57" HD monitor with tuner. It is a great monitor. When I can get a bluray or hd player for $99, then I'm there. I agree, average joe can get a crappy monitor for less. I agree videophile can get an EXCELLENT monitor for about $2800 (plus 600 service plan plus 340 taxes plus 120 delivery and setup or about $4000 total with misc cables and crap). I looked long and hard at the $2800 level which IS better (and DVD's look great on that format). I love the look and form-factor of 57" LCD screens. But I don't want to eat dog-food when I retire to have one. And I think they will drop by over $1000 in the next 12 months to a more reasonable $1,800 for the same quality.
4) As the other person already pointed out- businesses make promises all the time that they do not keep- the capability IS there. They will use it before 2010 if they can get away with it.
I agree with all your other points about why no one wants it.
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There is NO point in being a first adopter these days. Used to be, that gave you a BIG edge over everyone else. You might be 12 to 24 months ahead of them and be "cool" for a long time. These days- if something is going to be successful it is probably ubiquous within 6 months. Why keep paying a 10x premium? I purchased 80% of my dvd library for about $5 to $7.50. As a result, I have 99% of what my friend's have AND then I have a bunch of stuff they can't afford because they are all paying $20.00. (Why pay $80 per xfiles season when THIS week you can now pay $20 per season! ($180 total)).
There is such a huge glut of entertainment now- I can't possibly watch or keep up with it. So I fell behind and noticed how much money it was saving me to be just 3-4 months off the leading edge. So then I pushed it to 6 months and the savings were even bigger. Now i push it to 6 months + next major holiday nad the savings are almost always 60% or more vs what my bleeding edge buds pay.
It would be *different* if HD/BLU was NIGHT and DAY, hands down, fabulous, life changing, emotion wringing, bud attracting (hey let's all go over to Maxo's house- he has HD/BLU!) better. But it is not.
It's a teensy bit better for normal people and MUCH more expensive AND heavily laden-- no CRIPPLED-- with DRM format which was stupid and gives us 50/50 odds of picking the format which will have the movies we want.
There isn't just ONE reason to crush the sellers on this- we need to crush them so bad, their entire departments will be fired and they will have to leave their respective countries in shame.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
A lot of football is at 720p, which is 60(!) frames per second. When football is done at 720p with full frame rate (around 17Mbps), it looks terrific. Even CBS' 1080i broadcasts look outstanding, although they do suffer some artifacts and tearing during heavy motion (close up of the action at real speed). But, since the typical camera angle is far away, this rarely happens either.
Tell me, have you actually WATCHED a football game in HD? Your post seems to say no (or that you have some offbrand cable company as your provider).
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Thanks to my local cable company I have seen lots of HD content and movies on my 50" HDTV (Pan. 500U). I tried an up-converter DVD player through HDMI and a regular prog. scan DVD player and got lousy results with each, lots of blur and bad pixel averaging. Oddly enough the original xbox had incredible playback. Now I have the xbox360 and it's even better. Closest to HD I've seen and in fact close enough that I could care less about getting the HD-DVD add-on that Microsoft has announced. Maybe it's the right "fit" for my TV because I've seen contrary comments to my results from other HDTV owners. But, I am glad to have no need to re-buy my favorite movies in HD or worry about which new format they are. When dual format HD players and HD discs come down to current regular DVD price levels, maybe I'll change my mind. For now I am lucky enough to be satisfied with what I have. Perhaps I am not alone based on this article.
This is "the lesson of the iPod" all over again.
Digital music, in the formats and sample rates that the vast majority of people use, is far inferior to best recorded sources, and inferior to the basic and ubiquitous CD. Digital music is successful because it is convenient to carry around an entire record collection. The iPod is the most successful digital music player line because it is easy to use, especially coupled with iTunes and the iTunes store.
Cable TV offered the convenience of more channels and not having to struggle with an antenna. Cell phones offered the convenience of making and receiving call anywhere. People buy laptops now because they can carry them around their house rather than sit at a desk.
In the end HD and all its accoutrements won't be rapidly adopted because they don't offer any increase in convenience. If people cared about quality, we'd still have big movie theatres playing 75mm films, but people preferred more choices and more show times.
The TV industry seems to be doing pretty well right now. Everybody I know has their eye on SOME kind of TV lately, be it plasma, LCD, or what-have-you.
The Wikipedia article on HDTV says that by the end of this year, 10% of US TVs will be HDTVs.
Ten percent. Real soon now.
When VHS and DVD launched, everybody had an SDTV. But Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have nothing to appeal to 90% of potential (US) customers. And they have to split the potential market they do have between two incompatible formats.
You do the math.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.