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Disney - Blu-ray's Fair Weather Friend
An anonymous reader writes "One day they're out, the next day they're in. Back in March, Disney CEO Bob Iger seemed to indicate that his company (which has exclusively backed Blu-ray since the start of the high-def format war) was on the verge of supporting *both* high-def formats. What a difference a couple of months of good press for Blu-ray makes: this week, the CEO reversed his earlier position, saying 'the single greatest thing we can do right now is to not waffle, but to be very, very blunt about it, (and) to continue our support of Blu-ray because we sense a real advantage.'"
Disney's largest shareholder probably gave Iger a bollocking. After all, Apple is on the blue ray Association Board of Directors.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
My media server doesn't care what kind of "optical disc" Disney backs.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Blu-Ray has additional copy protection in addition to AACS, so any media mogul who is depending on DRM to protect his profits would naturally be waving the Blu-Ray banner at this point.
Of course, Blu-Ray will have all of its protections defeated too - it's just a matter of time.
What's the advantage of supporting Just one of the formats? What's in it for Disney to diss HDDVD?
According to Template:HighDefMediaComparison , HD-DVD's don't have any regions, whereas Blu-Ray's have three. Presumably, Hollywood executives who get off on exercising control really dislike it that HD-DVD gives them less control, thus they prefer Blu-Ray. For that same reason, you'd think consumers would prefer HD-DVD...
I was thinking the exact same thing as I read the transcript in the article. Bob Iger talks about Consumer Electronics support. I saw that as doublespeak for "Microsoft: you just got burned bad with the XBox360 HDDVD player firmware vulnerabilities." I agree - HDDVD's protection is totally broken.
The PS3 is a little harder to crack. I know it'll happen, but for someone like Iger, being able to push Microsoft around is probably the stuff of his dreams. I'm sure he doesn't care about the other HDDVD partners, and dual-format players will just make it easier for media houses to produce their content. Like you say, Whuffo, The writing is on the wall.
Microsoft has lost another battle.
So cute. Pathetic, but cute.
Well they could call it BD (short for Bluray Disk) or would you prefer calling HD DVD "High Definition Digital Versatile Disc". I think you will find that many people are confused with HD DVD verses DVD but not with Bluray verses DVD since the Bluray PR people have really been out "informing" the people.
It must be noted that a good marketing campaign works well if you have some catch word that is relatively short and can be perceived as "cool", is easy to remember and can easily be abbreviated to a few relevant characters. At the moment Bluray fits that criteria.
As to which format will win, well it is far to early to tell which format will dominate, however the Bluray consortium does have more money. Still time will tell.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
A fair weather friend is one who is with you in the good times and against you in the bad times.
According to the summary, Disney has been exclusively signed up to Blu-Ray from the beginning. They have never not supported Blu-Ray.
They have never rubbished Blu-Ray, nor released any plans to withdraw their support of that format.
So how does this make them a "Fair weather friend" ?
If they had supported one then the other then the first again, according to economic climate then the statement might be true, but they haven't done that at all.
With Blu-Ray, Disney can easily put an entire hour of un-skippable high-def commercials, trailers, disclaimers, warnings, notices, and animated logos in front of every movie, even if the next Pirates of the Caribbean is 3 hours long.
So in their shoes I'd be thinking Blu-Ray too.
Transporting gigabytes of data on a small cheap plastic and metal disk is currently the most efficient form of delivering video. The answers to your questions appear to be simple economics. Until the majority of consumers have efficient/reliable 8mbps connections and huge hard drives, there is not much point to mass investment in non-DVD delivery. I have often given up on a tedious video download to walk to the nearest DVD store. Not only is there better quality and convenience, but also, after factoring in a reasonable estimate of bandwidth cost, it works out about the same $-wise.
First of all, modding pedants up always rubs me the wrong way. I'm a pedant myself, and sometimes even a grammar nazi, but I don't expect (or even hope) that such posts of mine are modded up. I completely fail to see how someone giving their definition of a "fair-weather friend" is insightful. If I point out that fair-weather friend is supposed to be hyphenated, does that make me insightful? What about if I point out that technically, only the B in Blu-ray is supposed to be capitalized?
Second of all, it seems to be your definition of fair-weather friend that needs adjusting. As pointed out above, a fair weather friend is not the same thing as a foul weather enemy. It's a friend that is "loyal only during a time of success." There's no implication that such a friend actually turns against you when the weather isn't so fair, just that they don't support you.
Just because Disney has been contractually beholden to the Blu-ray format does not necessarily make them a supporter. If their contracts lock them into using Blu-Ray but they were out there touting how great HD-DVD is and how much Blu-ray sucks, would that make them a supporter? No, and there have been some instances where something like that has happened. (The row between Howard Stern and Clear Channel comes to mind, when Stern was actively ridiculing Clear Channel on the very stations they owned.) In this case, Disney trying to straddle the fence with their public comments can certainly be taken as non-loyalty towards Blu-ray.
Or it could fit on one 50GB Blu-Ray disk. I think we see one of the reasons HD-DVD is going to have issues.
Now my take on this.
1. The PS3 has a built in Blu-Ray player and like it or not there are 3 million of those already out there and will probably be over 6 million produced this year. Granted it isn't 10 or 15 million but it is still 6 million. Will HD-DVD even produce 500k?
2. Because of the PS3 and producing millions they have reduced the mfg cost, and can now start to lower the cost to consumers. So the cost difference is slowly going away and putting huge pressure on HD-DVD (Toshiba) to take even more loss in their system. Microsoft is obviously giving them money, or else they would have folded already.
3. The content providers lined up behind Blu-Ray and are reluctantly supporting it.
4. The "average" consumer doesn't care about either technology now and if either player cost more than $40 more than a "standard" DVD player they won't buy one. So both are "premium" items for the foreseeable future. Thus it will be the gaming market to drive sales of either brand and again, because of the PS3 Blu-Ray wins.
Lets be honest here. If it wasn't for Microsoft, this battle would have been over in the U.S. already. I understand that the last thing they want to do is to have to license Java from Sun again, but with Java now going GPL'd they may be able to work something out. I also understand Microsofts mantra of "If it isn't invented here... kill it". But this is one instance where they couldn't leverage their desktop to win the war and it shows. They could have put an HD-DVD player in every 360 but they chose not to and thus will probably sell more 360's for the next few years over the PS3 but at a cost of this format war and now they will probably have to eat some crow and work with Sun again.
Sony on the other hand could wind up third in the console war this time, but win the format war. If they don't address the price of the PS3 this year then it is obvious that their sales will not reach 10 million and that will be seen as a failure in a lot of peoples eyes. Granted they have other issues as well, like getting out more games, but the price is the largest issue.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
There's something this guy failed to mention, maybe because it completely blows his argument out of the water. But for people like me that have been gaming for a long time, we know the answer.
Mutli-Disc games. Yes that's right, Final Fantasy did it, so did many other games.
Sure you've got to put a lot of redundant data in there but acting like you're limited to 1 disc per game is a straw man argument. Need more space? Add more discs. Simple.
Mutli-Disc games. Yes that's right, Final Fantasy did it, so did many other games.
Sure you've got to put a lot of redundant data in there but acting like you're limited to 1 disc per game is a straw man argument. Need more space? Add more discs. Simple. Something you've forgotten is that when trying to "make money" you want to keep costs down. One of the most expensive costs is manufacturing and packaging. If you are stuck to multi-disc distribution for your game you will be eating profits because you couldn't squeeze it into one disc. I'd imagine the company FUNDING the game would rather make the mpegs a little more gritty and the sound quality more compressed rather than expand to a second or third disc.
The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!