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NYT Confirms Movie Studios Paid to Support HD DVD
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times has confirmed the story that Paramount and DreamWorks Animation were paid $150 million for an exclusive HD-DVD deal that will last 18 months. 'Paramount and DreamWorks Animation declined to comment. Microsoft, the most prominent technology company supporting HD DVDs, said it could not rule out payment but said it wrote no checks. "We provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks whatsoever," said Amir Majidimehr, the head of Microsoft's consumer media technology group.'" We discussed Paramount's defection on Monday.
The reason people get upset when they hear about promotional deals is not because it is unexpected, but because it violates the ideal of capitalism that the best ideas will rise to the top and result in the most efficent solutions. In truth, capitalism has a huge bias towards the ideas winning in the marketplace of those with assets to reinvest and use to promote their agenda. However, when it becomes overly blunt, people have a viseral reaction due to what they learned in 8th grade civics classes (in the US at least).
Your ad here. Ask me how!
if they were paid to support one technology over another, isn't that illegal, anti-competitive and/or monopolistic behaviour by the HD-DVD consortium? If so, would it be illegal if the consortium were innocent but the payoff came from some backer who stands to gain from HD-DVD beating out Blu-Ray?
The market has a strange way of sorting some of this stuff out. While the players are several hundred dollars and the movies are well over $20 each, this is just a niche format at the moment. When the players are under $60 and the movies are under $15, wake me up. In the meantime, I'll stick with a Linux MCE setup and use the format that works in the movie jukebox. The last DVD player I bought retailed for under $30. Pre-viewed movies at Blockbuster are either 2 for $20 or 4 for $20. Only those with lots of cash will bother with the expensive formats. Right now they are in the Laserdisk catagory. Nice format, but limited selection at high prices. I did the Laserdisk thing. It had an advantage.. No copy protection. It met broadcast spec NTSC output unlike videotape.
The truth shall set you free!
There were also a lot of murmurs around during the lead-up to Blu-ray's launch that many of the studios declaring exclusivity to Blu-Ray were being paid to do so.
Everything seems to point to HDDVD region codes:
If anything, you should support BD over HDDVD simply because it's better technology (higher capacity storage), and if you want to go down the "corporate evil" route, Microsoft is far more evil than Sony, so BD wins by default.
First off, BD is not a "Sony" format, anymore than Cell is a "Sony processor"; they're just part of the committees. One of many. Secondly, if anything, the lack of region codes on PS3 and PSP games should point in the opposite direction. The inclusion of region coding is like the inclusion of DRM---it's a feature that studios will want before they support the format, regardless of how ineffective or stupid it is.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Everything seems to point to HDDVD region codes:
To me, no, everything does not seem to point to HD-DVD region codes (thanks for those links though). From that Amazon page, if you follow their "Read more about region encoding and how it may affect you here" link, you wind up at this page. As you can see, regular DVD and BluRay region coding is detailed, but there is no mention of such a thing for HD-DVD.
Furthermore, as you noted the other two links you provided are from last year, and refer to discussions that they were expecting to have this year about implementing region coding. Do you happen to have any information about whether those expected discussions have actually happened or not, and if so what the outcome of those "working groups" were?
I'll also point out that the relevant Wikipedia entry -- that fount of information that is never, ever wrong -- states that, "there is no Region Coding in the existing HD DVD specification, which means that titles from any country can be played in players in any other country." Alternatively, if you check out the Wikipedia article on BluRay (which comes complete with a pretty map), you can see that the opposite is true.
I'm sorry but the very concept of region coding bothers me so much that, until I see clear evidence that the same thing is going to be implemented with HD-DVD some day, HD-DVD easily wins over BluRay. Higher capacity be damned. I'll take at least some level of consumer-oriented freedom over that any day, thanks.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
RTFA!
H D-DVD.html Michael Bay says that he had drank the "Blu-Ray Kool Aid", and is now back on to do Transformers 2, as he likes the $200 HD-DVD player range. He also thinks 300 on HD-DVD rocks!
Here --> http://www.michaelbay.com/blog/files/Michael-Bay-
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
Help Needed: Does anyone have any idea why someone would pay $150 million to try to make HD DVD more popular? There's obviously a lot of money in it for someone, but I can't imagine why.
..." with a raw data transfer rate of 36.55 Mbit/s. [My emphasis]
Comparisons:
Blu-ray: "A dual layer Blu-ray Disc can store 50 GB..." with a raw data transfer rate of 53.95 Mbit/s. HD DVD: "HD DVD has a single-layer capacity of 15 GB and a dual-layer capacity of 30 GB;
More comparisons: Blu-ray scratch resistance "has withstood direct abrasion by steel wool and marring with markers in tests" "HD DVD uses traditional material and has the same scratch and surface characteristics of a regular DVD."
"Blockbuster, the largest U.S. movie rental company, decided in June 2007 in favor of expanding Blu-ray support exclusively to an additional 1450 stores. The decision came following a trial in 250 rental stores, in which both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs were available. In the trial it has been found that more than 70% of high definitions rentals were Blu-ray discs." [My emphasis]
"According to a market research company Nielsen VideoScan, as of week ended August 12, 2007, weekly sales of Blu-ray discs were ahead of HD DVD with 66% of the market. In 2007 sales, Blu-ray leads with 66% of the market. Since inception, market share was 61% for Blu-ray and 39% for HD DVD."
This comment on the CDFreaks.com differences page is interesting, I have no idea whether it is valid: "To make a (HD)-DVD disc you need two moulding machines and an extra process to glue the two 0.6mm substrates together, which means you loose valuable seconds. Also the HD-DVD disc tolerances for flatness & thickness are extremely tight (twice more critical than that of normal DVD). To make a Blu-ray disc you need only 1 moulding machine and you don't have to glue the two substrates, which means less production time. In fact a Blu-ray disc can be compared with an up-side-down CD disc... which is very simple to make. As for disc tolerances of Blu-ray, these are comparable with normal DVD, resulting in an much more controllable production process. This means better yields and that future high-speed discs are easier to make. All in all, you might be able to upgrade DVD lines to make HD-DVD's, but in time the mass-volume production process itself will be less expensive for Blu-ray."
From CDFreaks pros and cons: "Blu-ray requires a much lower rotation speed of the disc to reach the specified transfer rate of 36Mbps."
And "Hybrid Discs -- Here we can find an advantage for Blu-ray, resulting from the new structure of the disc. Since the recording layer for Blu-ray data is only 0.1 mm away from the surface of the disc there is enough space below to integrate a complete 8.5 GB DVD DL disc."
(I have no connection whatsoever with either format, of course. My only interest is that the format that becomes popular be the best format technically.)
Not only the corrupters, but the marketplace also, agree that Blu-ray is better.
If that's the case, and consumers choose what's best, then why did VHS beat out Betamax, which had better video and audio quality across the board? Why is Windows the de-facto operating system for home computers?
You make it sound like the majority of consumers actually make informed decisions when they go out and buy electronics. I can only assume your post was written tongue in cheek, because it appears you infer that people actually go out and research the underlying technology of various products before they make their purchase.
Personally, I give Blu-Ray an automatic 25% edge in the market over HD-DVD because Blu-Ray sounds cooler, and "HD-DVD" has a sort of legacy sound to it. Seriously. I think that, to the average consumer, the name would have more bearing on their purchase than any technical aspects.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
The fact is that Betamax had mildly better video, indescernable to most people.
That's true. Consumers were looking through the marketing filters when they made a choice, though. Betamax actually had a huge advantage over VHS in video sharpness, color noise and audio quality, especially as the battle progressed. Color on VHS looked like a Monet painting - fuzzy water colors. The Beta looked much closer to a direct broadcast signal. Most consumers were buying whatever Billy-Bob down the street had. He had a VHS because the early Beta machines were more expensive than VHS machines (because of the way the tape transports were built). Price usually beats function into second place.
The biggest driving force was the cost of blank tape. The first Beta and VHS tapes cost $22-$24 apiece. You wanted a machine to stretch that cost over as many hours of recording as possible. That got VHS the foothold.
The only time [consumer] Betamax started taking market share back from [consumer] VHS was when Beta-HiFi came out. It took the VHS camp a year to respond and created more expensive "8 head" VHS machines, which the Beta camp could do with two heads. "Gosh, 8 heads MUST be better". No, the VHS format needed that to make a marginally acceptable image at multiple speeds. At the same time, the Beta camp figured out how to make much less expensive tape transports, so cost was erased as a factor.
SuperBeta produced a measurable sharpness increase of 20% but all the VHS camp could do is relax the white clip circuits (VHS-HQ) by 20%. Consumers only saw the "20%" figure and concluded they must be the same thing without actually looking. You could turn SuperBeta on and off and see a real difference. Not so with the VHS-HQ switch. S-VHS was actually more akin to SuperBeta but that came years later and required special [expensive] tape. The VHS camp couldn't even respond to Beta-ED but by then it didn't matter for the consumer. Movie stores started stocking more VHS and that created an avalanche effect driving more consumers toward buying VHS machines. Game over for consumer Beta.
Broadcasters adopted the Beta format over the VHS format for news (originally) because of the dramatic quality differences. The VHS based news recorders were blown off the market within a year by Beta. This started the 25 year dynasty of Broadcast technical progression: BetaCam, BetaCam-SP, Digital BetaCam, BetaCam-SX, BetaCam-IMX, HDCam and HDCam-SR. If you saw the last several Star Wars movies, they were shot with HDCam - a Beta format derivative, not film.
At every turn, the consumer didn't look at quality or function one bit. The Beta transport could skip forward and backward at 20x speed with a viewable picture because of the transport design - something the VHS couldn't do. It made smaller Camcorders when they came out with full recording capacity which the VHS camp couldn't do. With a fresh eyeball, the Beta format was hands down the superior machine with lots of technical headroom, but the consumer ignored the facts and went with the flow. Oh well. Here's an ugly page with some technical differences between Beta and VHS, none of which mattered to consumers.
You can have your two Beta tapes for a movie to my VHS one.
I only recall a few Beta movies on two tapes and those were very early rare birds. The earliest Beta tapes were only one hour long but that was fixed quickly with Beta-II and L-750 tapes (which could do 3+ hours at Beta-II).
Most of the stuff on