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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.