No Ceasefire in DVD Format Battle

haja writes "The BBC reports that the high definition DVD format war will continue until a winner is declared. There is no sign of the two camps working on a unified format. Some believe the industry at large is being damaged by the war due to consumer confusion. From the article: 'Backers of Blu-ray are bullish and are predicting victory. Blu-ray has more backing from film studios and more makers of the players, but HD-DVD has sold equally well in the first year of release. But the Blu-ray camp believes a library of exclusive titles and the power of PlayStation 3 - which has an in-built Blu-ray player - will see the format pull ahead in the next 12 months. Mike Dunn, president of worldwide home entertainment for 20th Century Fox, said: "I really believe the format war is in its final phase."'"

Comments

They Can Keep Battling it Out

[neoform]

Consumers really don't care at this point.

Seagate announces Hard Drives will be at 300TB in a few years, what do we even need these formats for? DRM? yaaaaay!

Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out

[noidentity]

I think it'll be a while until you buy your movies in the store on a dedicated hard drive. Until then, cheap plastic discs are viable.

Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out

[Lumpy]

As soon as segate announces that those hard drives will actually last 5+ years then that statement will be relevant.

As of now hard drives life sucks horribly. At least my DVD's don't crash and take all the data with them like my last 3 Fujitsu, last 2 Western Digital, and last 4 Seagate drives.

Every drive I have owned above 120gig capacity has not lasted more than 18 moths. this is with cooling fans to keep the insane temperatures down and REALLY GOOD power going to them.

Hard drive longivity simply sucks right now to the point that I dont trust them to hold data safely for more than 3 months.

Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out

[aplusjimages]

Who says they have to be stored on our harddrives? Look at the xbox360 and what they are doing with TV shows. You can buy the show and store it on your 360 HDD if you want. If you delete it, then you can always download it later. I like the idea that my library is stored online. If my apartment burns down I don't lose it, if I move I don't have to move them, and I don't have to worry about the format war. And you don't have to wait that long to watch them because you can start playing the video after 2 minutes of downloading, so you're watching it as it downloads. Lets just hope they change their movie rental policy to movie purchase.

Plus you also have other people doing the same, like Sonic Solutions and Apple. Downloadable content will end the HD format war or at least give them a hard slap to the face so that they will move to ending it.

Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out

[Penguin's Advocate]

I don't care much about DRM since 1) I don't buy many movies (not because I steal them, just because I have no interest) and 2) When I do buy movies, I put them in a player, and watch them, and that's it. I want blu-ray to win because it's technically superior. It can store more data, and is more scratch resistant. That's enough for me to support it.

Re:They Can Keep Battling it Out

[DRJlaw]

Oh, if you _do_ need them on all the time, look for something like the Western Digital Caviar special edition drives, which have a 3 year warranty, or SCSI drives, whose warranties go up to 5 years. Standard consumer drives come with a mere 1 year warranty, and there's a good reason why...

Source for the last statement?

Seagate consumer drives come with a mere 5 year warranty, and there's something that directly refutes your point.

Until a winner is declared

[Rik Sweeney]

the high definition DVD format war will continue until a winner is declared

Couldn't get more Irish than that could you? Here's another pearl of wisdom:

Ah, to be sure it'll rain tomorrow unless it doesn't.

Consumer "confusion"?

[noidentity]

Some believe the industry at large is being damaged by the war due to consumer rejection.

There, corrected that for you.

A war worth ignoring

[jmagar.com]

Neither format matters any more. Physical media is going to become less and less important as our content is now being delivered over the wire (or wireless). I can't remember the last time I purchased a DVD, or a CD for that matter. I haven't been to a video rental outlet in more than a year, and I don't intend to do so in the future.

An HD TV set, with a PVR, and digital cable is serving me just fine. On Demand movies in HD 5.1 gets it done for me.

The only counter argument that nags in the back of my mind is that I borrowed the LOST first and second season DVDs from a friend, and truly enjoyed watching the series on DVD. No Commercials, and three episodes a night really move the plot along. I find it very difficult to stay interested in the show now that I am watching it on a weekly basis, when they happen to bless us with an episode. Too long between important events, and the hook is gone... So the DVDs of Complete seasons may be a better way to enjoy quality TV shows.

But, I suspect that it won't be long before the LOST series shows up on the On Demand service, just like the fine HBO content... and I can again enjoy three episodes in a sitting.

what format war?

[grapeape]

For the vast majority standard DVD's are good enough. I dont know a single person who has gone out to buy either of the new formats. I have one friend with a ps3 and even he hasnt bothered to actually buy a blu-ray disk, he just doesnt care. I know one person who is planning to get one but he is the same idiot that talks about how all his muisc has to be obtained in shorten format and how all home media currently sucks. I think the believes he is impressing someone but most of us that know him just think he's an idiot.

One argument I hear is that more will adopt when the formats get cheaper, but even if players were $50 like cheap standard DVD's you still have to replace your library to take advantage of it. Maybe im in the minority but the difference isnt great enough to justify replacing a collection of around 700 movies.

With the consistently plumetting costs of storage I'm leaning towards the idea that both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray both flop as movie standards in favor of video on demand and other downloadable content.

Name recognition

[s31523]

One thing Blu-Ray might not be counting on is name recognition.

Right now, if the average Joe walks into an electronics store looking for high definition movie players he/she will see a wall of "Blu-Ray" and "HD-DVD". Most people will see the "HD" and think "yeah, that is what I want, Blu-Ray, what is that? No.. No.. I want high-definition".

Based on name alone HD has an advantage. Blu-Ray needs some serious marketing because if they rely on the sales person in the electronic store for supplying information they will be hosed!

Re:How can they be that confident?

[cpuh0g]

1. Lots of people already have an Xbox 360
"Lots of people" ?? Gee, that sounds like hard, scientific, evidence. I'm not a Sony defender by any means (still playing my 4 year old PS2 just fine), but to insinuate that XB360/HD-DVD as king's of the hill is a little premature. PS3 has only been available in very limited fashion for about 2 months. XB360 has been out for how a while and still lags behind the old PS2 in sales. The high-end XB360 is $400. Tack on the cost of the HD-DVD and you are probably gonna spend over $600, same as you would for a PS3.

Neither HD-DVD or Blu-Ray really excite me much now, at least as a video medium. DVDs in progressive scan on a high-quality bigscreen TV look pretty damn good to my tired old eyes. HiDef discs might be nice, but not enough to justify the change, at least not for a couple of years.

The war is almost over...??

[EMNDev]

Mike Dunn, president of worldwide home entertainment for 20th Century Fox, said: "I really believe the format war is in its final phase."'"

The insurgency in Iraq is "in the last throes," Vice President Dick Cheney says. (June 20, 2005)

Some people clearly can't see the forest through the trees.

Re:It's quite easy, really.

[Daemonstar]

Serious question: how well does the PS3 play Blu-Ray movies?

I'm still waiting a while to get a good HDTV, much less a HD player (waiting to see how things play out a little more).

In about six months

[jimlintott]

In about six months I'm going to visit a local porn shop to see which format they have the most titles in.

There's your winner!

I really don't care...

[d3ac0n]

As I won't be getting any HD equipment of any kind any time soon.

Not because I'm a Luddite, but for two very critical reasons:

1) It's too damned expensive and I don't have the money to blow on HD toys. Maybe the rest of the world makes over 100K a year and lives in an inexpensive area, but I don't. I have bills to pay, damnit, why the hell would I waste my money on an HD setup?

2) I have kids. Autisitc kids with a penchant for running up to the T.V. and giving the screen an open-palm slap just because they like the sound. How long do you think a $3000.00 LCD or Plasma is going to last under that kind of punishment? And if I can't expect the T.V. to last, why the heck would I shell out for the player if I can't view all that "HD goodness" on my old 480P NTSC tube T.V.?

The problem is that the hardware and media guys, in all thier excitement to re-energize the home entertainment market by forcing upgrades, have forgotten that a large percentage of the population either a) just doesn't give a damn, or b) are like me, and can't get an HD setup even if they want to. So really, WHO GIVES A SHIT about HD other than the videophiles with more money than brains? Let THEM buy into all the HD hype, and the rest of us will just wait until the dust settles and we can guy a 27" HD T.V. for the same price that we can buy a 27" regular T.V. today.

Re:I really don't care...

[d3ac0n]

I'm not entirely disagreeing with you...

BUT

You forget that a LARGE percentage of the population (At least in the U.S.) has children and small disposable incomes. Yes, there are plenty in the correct income range that have the disposable incomes to blow on HD equipment, but there are plenty more that don't, and don't want to have to blow the money.

My kids also watch TONS of DVDs. So many so, that we just had to replace the DVD player AGAIN because the old one wore out with use. (Autistic kids like the familiarity of DVDs, so we watch alot of them) What kind of DVD player did I buy? I bought a $120.00 DVD-VCR combo unit as our VCR was also wearing out. No HD-DVD, no Blu-Ray, just plain old DVD. I go through about one DVD player every 2 years or less because we play so many DVDs.

I actually use DVD shrink and duplicate all of our DVDs because if I didn't we would be re-buying all of our DVDs each year too because the kids are so rough with them. If you think I'm upset about the cost of the HD players, how do you think I feel about the cost of the HD Burners and the DRM contained on the Discs?

This whole HD format war debacle has me furious because it's just so damned obvious that the players involved don't give a damn about what the customers want, they just want to line thier pockets at our expense. At some point I'm just going to have to invest in 15 to 20 DVD players and about 300 DVD-R's because the format will go out of style and I won't be able to afford the new equipment anymore.

I'm just praying that the DVD Shrink people will figure a way around the DRM inherent on the new HD stuff because I need to be able to continue to duplicate my DVDs, as I can't afford to replace 30-40 HD-DVD's or BR-DVD's each year.

I hope the format war continues

[DoofusOfDeath]

DRM is a major factor in my disinterest in buying HD-related products, from sets to players to disks. And it's not that I'm generally a scofflaw: I willing pay licensing fees for my music and movies. The reason I avoid DRM-infected products and content is that they don't let me fully exercise my fair-use freedoms (backup, time-shifting, etc.)

So I'm thrilled that the studios and hardware people are having a rough time of this. I doubt that they'll ever say, "DRM is preventing an resolution to the format wars", but at this point I pretty much just want DRM pushers to suffer.

Yeah, this is profoundly dumb.

[JayBlalock]

Here's the thing. NEITHER of the high-def formats gives consumers a compelling reason to upgrade their libraries again.

The reason DVD was huge was not because it was so inherently great as a format. (in fact, it has a number of glaring flaws) It's because it was a huge leap forward over VHS in practically every area. Better picture, better sound, more compact on the shelf, longer run times between disc\tape changes, easy chapter seek, and all those glorious extras for people to play with. There were so many benefits that it was worth it to people to upgrade their libraries.

But what does HD/BR offer? Better picture, to roughly 10% or 15% of the public. And better sound to an even smaller percentage than that. And that's about it.

Why in the hell would people pay to re-buy their libraries AGAIN? Especially as it was just in the last couple years that the DVD collection became "complete"? There's just no reason at all. And that's leaving out how, in the grand scheme, increasingly few movies really benefit from high-def. There was little real improvement in your average romantic comedy from VHS to DVD. The shift from DVD to HD produces even less of use. Do you really want to get distracted counting the pores on Meg Ryan's nose?

Both formats were doomed, from the very outset, to be a specialty niche product, pretty much like Laserdisc. It amazes me that both camps were (apparently) totally blind to this and sunk millions and millions into them anyway. The BEST outcome would have been if the PS3 or 360 became big and people picked up a handful of compatable discs to play in it. (big name titles, like King Kong or such) They're not going to re-buy the library. Ever. Not until a new format offers as much of an improvement over DVD as DVD offered over VHS.

About the only way the studios might be able to force a format shift would be if they decided to just drop support for basic DVD and swallow the profit losses that would incur. (since it would destroy home video sales for a couple years) But even that might not do the trick. At that point, piracy would start looking like the viable alternative to all but the most steadfast consumer.

The studios have really painted themselves into a corner, and I'm curious how they're going to get out of it.

Remember - No Free markets.

[zotz]

"But the Blu-ray camp believes a library of exclusive titles and the power of PlayStation 3 - which has an in-built Blu-ray player - will see the format pull ahead in the next 12 months."

I keep saying that there are no Free markets when it comes to "goods" protected by copyrights and / or patents.

This is a good example of people with monopolies in one area trying to leverage that to win in another market.

"exclusive titles" = copyright monopolies.

other market = media format / players.

Yes? No?

all the best,

drew

Re:Sigh.

[Chris Burke]

It would be nice if it came down to which format was more technically excellent. Yeah, I know, it doesn't work like that. It's sad.

Yeah, I used to feel the same way, that tech never seemed to win because it was better tech but because of externalities. Then I started to realise that those externalities are as much a part of the tech as what I as an engineer geek would call the tech. Is the format that plays only 1/10th of the movies really a better format even if it has higher resolution, better scratch resistance, or whatever else? In a very real and practical sense I'd say no. Just like a "better" Internet with newer routing protocols and every other wiz-bang thing you could improve about the internet wouldn't actually be any "better" if it never connected to more than 100 hosts.

I feel the same way about software licenses. People say "use whichever is best for the job!" but forget how significant an effect the software license can have on how the software does the job. I learned this the hard way when a very good hspice simulator wasn't up to the task because we didn't have enough licenses to run the simulations we needed in the time frame we needed them.

It depresses us geeks that our great work can be ruined by an accountant, marketer, or lawyer, but that's just the way it is. The product isn't done until the accountant, marketer, and lawyer get their hands on it -- because without them, it would never be a thing that is sold. I've learned to just accept this as part of engineering.