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Microsoft Fueling HD Wars For Own Benefit?
DaveyJJ writes "According to Transformers' director Michael Bay, in a story over on Electronista, Microsoft is deliberately feeding into the HD disc format wars to ensure that its own downloads succeed where physical copies fail, he says in a response to a question posed through his official forums. The producer contends that Microsoft is writing "$100 million dollar checks" to movie studios to ensure HD DVD exclusives that hurt the overall market regardless of the format's actual merit or its popularity, preventing any one format from gaining a clear upper hand."
Blu ray is NOT a Sony format, anymore than the CD is a Sony format. They are the dominant member of the industry consortium that developed Blu Ray, and one of the original developers. Microsoft would never have to license Blu Ray from Sony, they would license it from the consortium just as with the regular CD.
What Microsoft does NOT like about Blu Ray is that it requires a java VM.
It's pretty pointless discussing why Microsoft might give Paramount $100M in advertising assistance if it's actually Toshiba that did it instead.
This rant from Bay is about as logical as the plots to his movies.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Thanks for pointing this out, and correcting me. It sounds like Sony would still get the benefit of licensing fees
No, a neutral Blu-Ray forum gets the licensing fees. Sony makes money the old fashioned way, selling hardware and software (media).
Do you know why this (Java support) a big deal to Microsoft? It doesn't sound like there's any practical reason to me
Why don't know why but we know it's a big deal to Microsoft, because the only thing that stopped HD-DVD and Blu-Ray combining a few years back was the refusial of the Blu-Ray consortium to add iHD (Microsofts menuing format) into the Blu-Ray standard.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't speak to the speed of BD-J, though clearly this smacks of the "Java is slow" FUD that Java proponents have been dealing with for years now. Java VMs aren't really "slow" anymore, unless you're dealing with memory-constrained devices. Most Blu-Ray players are going to have plenty enough RAM, so I don't think constrained memory footprint is going to be an issue.
As for the "ill-specced" claim, I'm puzzled. I know that BD-J is based on an already existing standard for embedding interactive Java content in terrestrial television broadcasts and European cable transmissions; this technology is used, for example, in the German version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" (or maybe it was "Deal or No Deal") -- it allows viewers to play along at home using their remote control. BD-J is just an extension of this already existing and deployed standard, so how is it poorly specified?
I attended JavaOne in 2006, and attended a couple sessions on BD-J and related technologies, so that's where I got my information from.
I'm sorry, but at least, say, OOXML pretends to be open. Google for "OOXML Specification dowload" and the very first result has PDFs, linked to directly, not even so much as a free registration required.
I develop HD-DVD applications for a living. On my desk are four volumes of "DVD Specifications for High Definition VIDEO (HD DVD-Video)", totaling almost three inches thick. (I'd tell you how many pages, but the pages are not numbered.) There's probably another three and a half inches worth of updates, which someone else here has read and memorized, that I don't really look at.
We do not have these in electronic form. As far as I know, you cannot get them in electronic form, and they do not come with an index, which makes them a bitch to search until you start to memorize enough of it to have a vague idea of where to start randomly flipping through to find what you need.
This is because on every single page, at the bottom of the page, is the following notice:
"Open" and "public" my ass.
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