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.

Comments

Re:Region coding

[orangepeel]

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.