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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.
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.
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.
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.
Really, they should support the format they think's going to lose. Then, if that format loses before anyone really bothers to come out with dual-format players, they could sell the people who bought a copy in that format a copy in the other format as well.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Anyone holding such a ridiculous opinion has no business discussing any aspect of cinema, you are just too ignorant to have any insight whatsoever. Which is probably why your claim about the ICT was total bunk too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
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.