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Blu-ray, HD DVD Target of EU Antitrust Probe
rfunches writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that EU antitrust regulators are turning up the heat on the Blu-ray and HD-DVD format consortiums. The European Commission has demanded evidence of Hollywood studios' communications and agreements on the new generation of DVD formats. From the article: 'The European Commission, the European Union's executive body, appears to be particularly interested in the activities of the Blu-ray group because of its dominance in Hollywood, according to people familiar with the situation. The commission is investigating whether improper tactics were used to suppress competition and persuade the studios to back their format.' The article points out that all of the major Hollywood studios except Universal are backing Blu-ray; Universal is backing HD-DVD. It also notes that while one industry watcher believes the first format to have an installed base of two million homes will come out on top, there were millions of Betamax units already sold when VHS won out in the format wars of the 80's."
The US certainly doesn't give a damn. At least some regulatory board is investigating, even if it turns out to be a red herring.
Consumers have the choice of purchasing a Blu-Ray player, a HD DVD player, both or neither.
VHS beat Betamax because you could find a VCR much cheaper from one of the many COMPETING suppliers. Sony held Betamax closely and didn't want others to compete on the technology. Result: It died.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
One of the differences between PAL and NTSC is the frame refresh rate. And that is based on the line frequency of electricity being delivered to the consumers in the various countries. So even if everyone used PAL (or NTSC), you would still have different products based on the different frames per second.
United Kingdom != European Commision.
Secondly, where's the evidence to back up this serious allegation? Thirdly states that make up the EU are sovereign, if companies want to sell their products there they have to abide by the rules. If not, they can take their wares and go home.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
We and Amazon are going to be publishing 1000 HD DVD indie movies via their Manufacture on Demand system.
Since HD DVD can be written on a DVD-5 or DVD-9 media for shorter content, doesn't require AACS for replicated content, and has cheaper and more readily available replication, it's proving to be a much more prosumer-friendly format for authoring.
My video compression blog
Right now Indie film makers are embracing the standard DVD players that support Divx 6 pro HD codecs. Giving you full 1080i HD pleasure on a standard DVD disc and on a player that costs around $99.00 and honestly does a fantastic job at it.
BluRay has no plans for supporting a consumer created Disk format. HDDVD can in theory be burned at home and played on standalone players but nobody has their hands on a HDDVD player yet to try it. All of these consortiums are intentionally ignoring the home and indie user and that is incredibly dangerous.
It truly saddens me that so much disinformation gets 5 points.
First of all, almost NONE of the DVD players that support Divx support Divx in HD. To imply otherwise is just wrong. There are a very few expensive ($200 US minimum) DVD/media players that support the format such as the Avel I-O Link Player and some Helios players, but ZERO players under $100 US that can play HD Divx files. Right now, you can count on one hand the number of standalone players that are even capable of playing the format.
Secondly, while you may not know anything about people with HD-DVD players burning and playing their own discs, people on the Doom9 forums have reported being able to burn HD-DVD format to burnable media (usually DVD-9 as HD-DVD media is very expensive) and play them back correctly on HD-DVD players. And there certainly are plans for BluRay to be supported as a consumer format. There are recorders available right now, but they are very expensive.