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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.
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?
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson
My initial reaction too was "Big deal! No story here!" But then I got to thinking. Is this really different than Microsoft using various incentives to get governments/schools/other customers to buy Microsoft products? Does it just feel different because it's a bunch of big evil corporations using shady practices to try and outdo each other?
I've been saying since this format war started though that if someone REALLY wants to win, they should just pony up a ton of money to get George Lucas to release the unmolested, Greedo-shoots-first Trilogy in their format.
I see this as the Iraq war, a seemingly endless struggle that will be good for everyone when it comes to an end. Somebody WIN already!
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
This is unfair competition, imo. Here's why...
You should never be able to pay a customer to specifically exclude a competitor. For example.. If you're paying a company a sum amounting to $10 to go with your product Y that costs $100 and exclude product X, it would mean your competitor would have to sell at $90 in order to compete - assuming both products essentially do the same thing. It artifically lowers the competitor's price... kind of like what has happened with AMD and Intel.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
You know, we could live in a world where people had real choices and standards were formed by excellence. Right now you can get both. Blue Ray was the clear winner and that's why the deals were made. It would be one thing if they were just trying to keep their format alive, but they are using it to kill the competition instead. That's one big dumb business scratching the back of another and both of them screwing you and me.
This has anti-trust written all over it and we can only hope there's a conviction and a real remedy this time. It's funny how the Viacom executives did not stay bought and squealed on the deal. Crooked deals are like that because you can never pay off everyone. Now that they are caught, the investigation should start.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
And in 18 months, Paramount will [happily] open the doors to Blu-ray. At these market penetration levels for either format, it doesn't matter much yet but by then they may be tired of having the only next-gen DVDs sitting on the shelves collecting dust. You never know.
Isn't it ironic that the consumer vigorously defends his right to "choice" but won't make a move until the choice is made for him?
Most of the stuff on
If you taught people that capitalism was *really* about the wealthy and powerful increasing their wealth and power at the expense of the common man, you might not get the deep, negative feeling about socialism that we want.
I will be a glad late adopter of HD DVD/Blu-ray since this is the same BS ploy used to delay previous generations next generation technology from being widely adopted (e.g., dvd-r/+r/ram, DAT audio tape, etc).
There is plenty of profit to be made by a) adopting an optical media standard and b) adopting a almost zero cost media encoding method
The least appealing aspect of the new video standards will be that they embed many dollars of fixed hardware costs by using high cost patented technology when almost equivalent low cost patented technology exists.
My guess is that the hardware makers and content producers want to milk their existing DVD investment for another few years.
I'm glad someone's making a revitalizing effort on the part of HD-DVD, even if it means handing out buckets of cash. My biggest reason for supporting HDDVD over BluRay (other than a long-time dislike for Sony) is that HDDVD does not have any form of region coding, while BluRay does. I haven't seen that point raised here on Slashdot before, so I'm at the point of wondering if A) it's even correct, and B) if I'm really the only one who cares.
We've seen big companies embrace globalization when convenient many times before, and then immediately turn around and implement artificial barriers so that consumers can't take advantage of that same global market (the stories here on Slashdot a few years ago about textbook manufacturers come to mind, where they would sell English versions of their textbooks in foreign countries at hugely discounted prices, and then fight over efforts of other companies and individuals to make those same books available back to customers in the USA).
Region coding ought to be universally despised. So far as I know, with HD-DVD I don't have to worry about it. But Sony, showing their true stripes once again, embraced it with BluRay.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
I'd go for Adam Smith rather then the silly upstart you mentioned for the idea of capitalism, and that idea is that in a perfect market economy we will get the best and cheapest goods possible.
Unfortunately, the perfect market cannot exist, and deals like the one discussed are moving us further away from it. Exclusive deals and trusts always hurt everyone except for the parties directly involved, because they hurt the market.
Which is why Smith (and Rand) are wrong, and capitalism works best under some kind of independent control.
Exactly. People are moving all up ons about HD and the next-gen optical media when nothing important has happened yet. Cable can't even carry a decent lineup of 1080p programming, much less provide sufficient HD content to justify a move.
I think what will determine *this* market will be burners. Whoever has the cheapest burner first will cause a move to their format, since people should be able to take all their HDDVDs or Blu-rays and convert them to the opposing format.
+5, Truth
The question you should be asking is how much money the studios can expect to lose by not selling Blu Ray's for 18 months. They would have to sell a ton of discs to profit 150 million dollars in 18 months. Also, if someone has a Blu Ray player and wishes to purchase such modern classics as Shrek 3 and Blades of Glory, there is a possibility that they will be willing to wait 18 months. Looks to me like Paramount just got a ton of free cash to help keep HD-DVD alive for a few more months.
I predict lawsuits out of this. There is no plausible technical reason that two studios would simply jump ship like that unless they were bribed. I could see them go neutral possibly, but completely switching at the same time? This is has anticompetitive behaviour written all over it.
Ever heard of quid pro quo? Clarice? :-P
18 friggin months? Do you have any idea how long that is?
I tell you, if the market hasn't decided what direction it is going in 18 months, either HD has flopped or there will be dual-HD-players everywhere.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Lets say you are a rich guy having those high end Macs or iMacs just for home entertainment. You can afford a $2k/3k thing and obviously you won't bother pirating, you will buy the original movies for your high end HDTV.
:)
Guess what? There is NO HD-DVD option but thanks to Roxio/Lacie you can even burn your own Blu Ray media on Macs.
The XCode, thousands of pages of driver documentation, Apple Inc. is there for help and there is no HD DVD support. People will sure point their fingers to Microsoft, who else?
The HD-DVD is not a choice, it is so close to Microsoft that it is a threat to open/documented standards and future HD content on non Microsoft operating systems.
Even the tactics are Microsoft like. They almost donated huge servers to big multimedia sites just to make them Windows Media exclusive but thanks to Flash and recent success to iTunes (Quicktime must be installed), sites are trying to be much more neutral now. Even Real networks say they will use MPEG4 on high bandwidth content.
Now, those HD DVDs have 2 options for Video codec. Industry standard H264 or Microsoft VC-1 . I wonder which codec they will opt in for?
If I was a very high end consumer who buys first-second generation stuff, I would go for whatever Sony and Apple releases. Why? Well, they have huge expertise on matter and everything you use in professional environment is Sony and Apple. While Apple was being called "dead" in consumer scene, studios were buying $200.000 AVID systems which were Mac based.
Toshiba or other members of HDDVD board doesn't even have a clue about actual movies, consumer needs, professional needs. It is Wintel plots all over again.
I already made my choice: regular DVD is fine.
Spoken like someone who doesn't own a a hi-def television.
They both have H264 and VC 1 codec support. I would go with whatever format opts in for H264 which is open, documented standard rather than VC 1 which is another attempt to take over World with failed Windows media with exclusive agreements like this.
I did exactly the same thing! I went to a store and compared a normal tv to an hdtv of the same size, and I came up with the same answer: "Meh." (This was back when CRTs were cheaper than LCDs, so the difference was even less noticeable.)
The stores are idiotic. They use a 'high def' signal, but from a crappy source, like satellite (lots of artifacts unless you've got a perfect signal). And then use component cables and so many splitters that the signal quality is absolute shit by the time it gets to the TV. No wonder it's unimpressive. I ended up buying my first HDTV for gaming, and when I got HD cable, I was amazed!
Sony finally realized that the stores are doing this, and they provide a player (using HDMI, not component cables) JUST for their high-end TV. The quality is absolutely amazing. When I asked a Circuit City rep if I could see the same signal on the Samsung next to it, I got a curt 'No.'
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
One thing we have now however that wasn't prevalent in the beta/vhs days is units that are both blue ray/hd dvd compatible on one drive.
It will be interesting to see how that affects the market. We see something similar now with Microsoft's proprietary audio/video and iTunes audio/video. Both are used, yet we don't really talk about which format will win here.
Spoken like someone who doesn't own a a hi-def television.
I have a 30" LCD, much prettier than the CRT it replaced. It has an HDMI port, unused. Unless I get a console (doubtful) I have no plans to plug anything into it. Component video works fine. It doesn't show off the full HD capabilities, but I'd rather keep the extra money.
If current trends continue I may get cut off from Hollywood someday, but by then movies will have gotten so bad that it will matter even less than it does now. They're already getting pretty hard to sit through. Hollywood spends too much money on lawyering and lobbying, and not enough on talent.
Not really. People looked at DVD and decided it was clearly better -- DVD got adopted very fast, in no small part because it was compatible with our existing stuff.
But the problem is this depends on two different technologies reaching better market penetration -- HD TVs, and HD DVDs. I bet HD TV hasn't had nearly the market penetration the companies making it would have hoped.
When DVD came out, we all had a TV which was compatible with it. I'm betting the market penetration of HD TV is still pretty low. I personally have no plans to get a HD rig -- my current TV is fine, the majority of what I watch isn't available in HD (I don't watch anything on the 'major' networks 'cause I think it's mostly junk), and I have no interest in buying into a technology which doesn't yet seem finalized (think of all the poor people who bought HD before the requirement for HDMI). As a standard, it seems to keep changing.
I think I may have seen one or two contexts in which I could actually see HD at HD levels -- most of the time I see a High Def monitor, it's hooked up to a standard signal and is stretching the image wider (or has grey bars on the sides). I can't count the number of times I've been in a bar and see a whole slew of flat-panel monitors which are displaying stretched NTSC signals. (Or, hilariously, since the TV is usually watching standard def, you'll even see them rarely on an actual HD channel, but the TV is treating the signal as an NTSC signal and stretches it wider and trims down the resolution.)
It does offer an improved picture, but it doesn't provide any reasons which to me are compelling enough to start going through an expensive upgrade cycle. That would mean replacing my TV, my amplifier, my DVD player, and all sorts of stuff -- I've got a lot of money invested in my current stuff, and I have better things to do with my money than to replace perfectly working hardware.
For now, for me at least (though I suspect a lot of others as well) I don't have any plans in the foreseeable future to even think getting any equipment for HD. It's one of those technologies which falls into the category of "sounds cool, but I don't really care".
So, the choice between Blu Ray and HD-DVD is kinda moot -- I'm not looking to have any HD in the near future, so a format which hypothetically would look better on a hypothetical TV I don't own is at least two steps removed from being something I care about.
I simply don't foresee enough of the huge number of TVs in North America being changed over to HD at a fast enough rate to make adoption of any HD-DVD get anywhere near as good as that of current DVD. At least DVD and VHS was a choice that made sense for most of us.
Cheers
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