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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.'"
What's better...
HD DVD
Blu-Ray
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.
By requiring the player to phone home before playing the content. This would give customers better products and shareholder more confidence when trading technology and entertainment stocks. One can only hope.
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.
I don't see how this qualifies as "pushing MS around". The success of the XBox360 and MS isn't really based on whether movie studios support the HDDVD's, but the PS3 and Sony's fortunes are heavily dependent on studios supporting Blu-ray since they are taking a loss on the units to promote it.
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.
In France (and Belgium), BD is Bande Dessine'e (comics). Given that Disney are an international company with a very young target market, perhpas they wanted to avoid the possible confusion.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Well, your fair weather friend isn't necessarily against you in bad times. Just not supportive when you're in a sea of troubles. (Unless you subscribe to the "you're either with me of against me" philosophy.)
Get with the picture. The only real difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is the frequency of the laser, and thus, the density of the bits on the disk. AFAIK the encryption for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are just different enough to be incompatible. They were both "broken" pretty much simultaneously. However, all AACSLA has to do to "close" the hole is to change their keys, leading to a new cycle of cat-and mouse. AACS is no more broken than RSA; they just lost their key.
Blu-Ray has some extra stuff like BD+, which allows the player execute arbitrary code to search for debuggers, patch the player, install rootkits, and so on. Blu-Ray also has something called ROM Watermarking. However, I gather that these thing are just another annoyance, and not a serious problem.
No, as someone else said, this is probably political. Disney is associated with Jobs Who is associated with Apple, and Apple backs Blu-Ray. Their just digging their trenches deeper.
Ok, CDs and DVDs were not specifically designed for use in computers or anything besides standalone players. But what is the excuse for products introduced in 21 century? Where is support for building a library on a hard drive of a computer or DVR? Where are the computer drives that can play and record movies for a reasonable price? Where are the on-demand/online services to deliver an equivalent-quality movie over the wire? Both formats should go the way of Sony's minidisc and memory stick ATRAC players as consumers revolt and find other forms of entertainment.
since they are taking a loss on the units to promote it
If they make a loss on an $600 unit which is crippled compared to a PC, it's one of the worst corporate inefficiencies in today's world. For the same price, you can buy a used car, pay a rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in many parts of the country, get a decent desktop from Dell or feed 100 children in India for a month. Don't tell me 100 parents can not assemble one playstation 3 in a month.
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.
More likely, it's due to a couple of bad weeks for HD-DVD (security keeps getting cracked). That'd be more motivation for keeping to the other one if I was an idiot executive. Who cares if one gives a better quality video? One of them is still capable of manipulating our customers^W^W^W protecting our content.
Such is the fate of those who bought gaming consoles hoping to use them as media centers. Both MS and Sony have a stake in one particular format which puts console owners at a significant disadvantage when it comes to media support.
Console buyers should have anticipated the eventual emergence of multi-format players. Also, Disney announced their loyalty to Blu-Ray some time ago. Anyone who really wanted to watch Disney movies on their gaming console pretty much had to go PS3.
It is usually appropropriate to market a product with a different name in a county where the English word can be misinterpreted, still that does not always stop the other country taking offence, real or imagined.
Communication is always a problem when you have different languages and cultures. This is why French became the language of Diplomacy since (I think) 1700's since the language was basically codified such that it was very difficult to misinterpret. Of course that did not stop some of the most horrendous wars in history it just made it easier to tell the other guy you did not like him and why.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Just to nitpick: The laser frequency is the same, a blue 405 nm wavelength.
Insomniac's Brian Hastings had this to say about the space issue: If you ever hear someone say "Blu-Ray isn't needed for this generation," rest assured they don't make games for a living. At Insomniac, we were filling up DVDs on the PS2, as were most of the developers in the industry. We compressed the level data, we compressed the mpeg movies, we compressed the audio, and it was still a struggle to get it to fit in 6 gigs. Now we've got 16 times as much system RAM, so the level data is 16 times bigger. And the average disc space of games only gets bigger over a console's lifespan. As games get bigger, more advanced and more complex, they necessarily take up more space. If developers were filling up DVDs last generation, there are clearly going to be some sacrifices made to fit current generation games in the same amount of space.
Granted, some really great Xbox 360 games have squeezed onto a DVD9. Gears of War is a beautiful game and shows off the highest resolution textures of anything yet released, partly because of the Unreal Engine's ability to stream textures. This means that you can have much higher resolution textures than you could normally fit in your 512 MB of RAM. It also means that you're going to chew up more disc space for each level. With streamed textures, streamed geometry and streamed audio, even with compression, you can quickly approach 1 GB of data per level. That inherently limits you to a maximum of about 7 levels, and that's without multiplayer levels or mpeg cutscenes.
Sometimes people ask us, "If Resistance takes 14 gigabytes, why doesn't it look better than Gears?" Well, for one, Resistance didn't support texture streaming, so we had to make choices about where we spent our high-res textures. Resistance also had 30 single-player chapters, six multiplayer maps, uncompressed audio streaming, and high-definition mpegs. That all added up to a lot of space on the disc. Starting with Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction we are supporting texture streaming, which will make the worlds look even better, and will also consume even more space on disc.
There's no question that you can always cut more levels, compress the audio more, compress the textures more, down-res the mpeg movies, and eventually get any game to fit on a DVD. But you paid for a high-def experience, right? You want the highest resolution, best audio, most cinematic experience a developer can offer, right? That's why Blu-Ray is important for games, and why it will become more important each year of this hardware cycle.
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.
1.) Given the parts, I doubt they could assemble it.
2.) I doubt much of the cost comes from assembly.
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.
As long as prices fall quickly I don't give a rat's ass which format "wins". My motives are selfish. I have a bunch of old videotapes I want to archive. I thought DV was the answer, and it is to a point. But even though DV is a decent compression method, once I archived a few dozen tapes I found I was STILL reluctant to trash the old VHS/Hi-8 analog tapes.
I want enough space on a burnable disc so I can capture all my video (all SD and all lo-fi) with a lossless scheme. Only THEN will I toss my old tapes and not give it a second thought. Then I can experiment with different codecs until the cows come home and know I didn't sacrifice anything from the originals. I'll probably only actually do that on a handfull of the recordings I have, but hey, you never know. Someday one of my grandkids-to-be might develop an intense interest in a vacation I took years ago to Wally World. More likely is that all my precious footage will end up in a landfill somewhere. Such is the life of a pack rat.
The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
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.
:)
Yeah, it's all about capacity. OK, and name too. 'HD-DVD' is too tied to HD programming. 'Blu-ray' is just a name - if they will sell me a season of 24 on a single Blu-Ray disc, in SD, I'm buying. I care far more for the amount of shelf space it will take up than being able to see the pores on Kiefer Sutherland's face. (OK, if they want to do it in 720p and call it 'HD' - whatever, I don't care).
And if they're smart enough to sell it for $24, that'll just be a marketing coup.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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