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Paramount to Drop HD DVD?
zeromemory writes "The Financial Times reports that " Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD DVD after Warner Brothers' recent backing of Sony's Blu-ray technology, in a move that will sound the death knell of HD DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end." According to the Times, Warner Brother's recent defection to Blu-Ray allowed Paramount to terminate their exclusive relationship with HD DVD. Universal Studios remains the only major studio to exclusively support the HD DVD format, though rumors have surfaced that their contract may also contain a termination provision similar to that exercised by Paramount."
It's not over until Netcraft confirms it!
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Paramount already denied this:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aQMGgh2LV_bU&refer=japan
There's only a clausule that it is permitted for Paramount to drop hd-dvd if they think it's needed.
Paramount had denied this allegation. http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=178864
Warners decision last week to throw its weight behind Blu-ray saw it join Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as backers of the Sony format.
Some big players in the market there.
The Warners move gives Blu-ray about 70 per cent of Hollywood's output, although the format's grip on film content will increase further when Paramount comes aboard.
The words "grip on film content" makes me feel all cornered.
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I'll believe it when Paramount announces it, not the Financial Times...
If Sony wins a format war, does that mean the end times are near? Should I be stocking up on canned goods and water and working on my underground bunker?
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Thank God this war is pretty much over. Now people can stop sitting on the fences and begin actively investing in Blu-ray. Now we don't have to worry so much about "exclusives" anymore.
I sort of feel sorry for HD-DVD supports. If they're looking to blame someone for this though, they should really point fingers at Microsoft. If they had had the foresight (or even just the balls) to put HD-DVD in to the Xbox 360, the article would be the other away around.
And before anyone brings up digital downloads, I do stand by my opinion that we are still a good five or more years away from that. Much of the world is limited to 1MB or 2MB broadband at most; some are still on dial up! And even those with 8MB offerings still have caps in place (British Telecom, I'm looking at you). DDs are not going to happen until we have better bandwidth, lower contention ratios and guaranteed throughput.
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Looks like Sony wins this one.
:)
A more positive way to view it is that Microsoft lost!
Besides, as others have pointed out, lots of companies were behind Bluray, not just Sony.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I don't think the death of HD-DVD (even if it happened) would be a victory for Blu-Ray. All those pissed-off HD-DVD customers, the general ``HD video is a good way to get ripped off'' buzz, in a tightening economy, spells trouble. DCC was `beaten' by MiniDisc, but in the end it was a pyhric victory.
Porn studios showed the way.
The myth that it was the porn studios who cased VHS to win over Betamax has been pretty thoroughly debunked... besides, even if it was so, this does not mean it must happen again 20 years later -
*People can get porn online easily these days.
*Porn might be one of the few genres that DON'T benefit from high-definition.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Sony are DRM-crazed control freaks. This is NOT a victory for consumers. May I remind you which studio was putting rootkits on all their CD's not so long ago? Do you really think they won't use their dominance to try some similar stuff with blu-ray?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I wonder if -- and indeed expect that -- the victory will prove Pyrrhic.
Gates famously said this would be the last format far. I think that it will prove to be the last plus one. Most people are going to be uninterested in buying video in a locked format; unless blu-rays allow you to play your videos on a generic DVD player, rip your video into your computer, play your video on your PSP, iPod, iPhone, or whatever, not enough people will want them to generate economies of scale.
I suspect that 1080 will turn out to be a mere stepping stone to arbitarily large screen resolutions. DVD, VHS, etc. all targeted an otherwise very stable market of equipment: NTSC televisions and stereo (or even mono) audio. The old CE companies have tried to create a new ecology (HD TV + Surround sound) but the real ecology is much more complex and diverse (PCs, laptops, cellphones, iPods, and stuff we haven't even dreamed of yet) and it's not going to stay even vaguely stable for long enough for a deeply flawed and mistargeted technology to gain traction.
Why does everyone assume there is going to be a winner? If you look at the history of previous format wars, you can see that most of the time no one wins. For a recent example look at CD/DVD +/-R formats. We are stuck with somewhat more expensive players because of that stalemate. Although they are so cheap at this point that no one cares except for the manufacturers perhaps. OTOH, some formats obviously lost like DVD-RAM. Of course this is a little different because it is the studios that get to decide.
If in fact blu-ray does end up the 'winner', is there anyone else here who attributes this more to the early success of hackers and the AnyDVD devs at HD-DVD ripping? For all we know blu-ray is in fact unhackable, with that ability to change the DRM whenever they want.
Blu-ray supports region encoding. Don't tell me the studios don't love that annoying ability. Blu-ray discs have a thinner protective layer, so that a scratch can more easily result in an unplayable disc and hence a resale of the same disc multiple times, especially since blu-rays are so much harder to backup. And the much greater data density is also of great value from a copy protection and distribution POV. Hard drive storage of ripped movies becomes much more expensive. Internet downloads are even more prohibitive in terms of both bandwidth (not everyone has unlimited high bandwidth connections) and time (not everyone has the patience to wait 3-6 weeks to download a movie they want to see). It has always been obvious that from the studio POV manufacturing cost savings was the only advantage of HD-DVD. In every other way, blu-ray was a win-win for them.
So from the POV of anyone who would like to be able to backup their HiDef movie collection to something that is not so vulnerable to scratches, this is bad news. Of course from a pure videophile perspective this would be good news. More space should equal higher bitrates. Although in practice we may see the studios don't give a rats arse about higher bitrate transfers. After all, superbit DVDs never really took off even though they clearly had superior picture quality.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Should have known HD DVD would be the loser as soon as they released "Serenity" on it. That show can't buy a break.
The thing is that since the run up to Christmas started, right up to this Warner switch announcement, the weekly ratio of Blu to HD-DVD sales has been static at around 61:39, despite individual big titles on both formats and a non-stop series of Buy 1 Get 1 Free offers on Amazon.com and in stores for Blu.
Far better for HD-DVD than the 2:1 to 3:1 we were seeing during most of the summer, and a hell of a lot better than the 8:1 or more that some Blu fanboys were suggesting we'd see by Christmas six months ago.
No, what really seems to have caused the announcement of the switch isn't the ratios at all, but that the raw numbers, and certainly raw profit numbers were far worse than expected. Loads of people sitting out the battle because they didn't want to back the loser, and loads of loss-leading promotion being run on both sides to ensure it wasn't them.
Warner want one side, any side to win, so the fence-sitters might dive in. They just jumped the way they thought might make the most difference.
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HD DVD can offer unencrypted content, and the mandatory managed copy system means even encrypted content can be stored in a central library, format shifted, and even streamed, if you're willing to use consumer tools to do so.
Blu-ray also has a number of downsides over both HD DVD and DVD, most notably that the BD+ system requires regular firmware updates, and that these firmware updates will be needed for the next year or two anyway because the Blu-ray spec, unlike HD DVD, still hasn't been finished.
And that pretty much guarantees that regardless of whether HD DVD dies or not, Blu-ray never, ever*, will displace DVD. A only marginal improvement in image and sound quality in return for a system unusable to a large portion of the population who neither have the skills nor resources to ensure their players are connected to the Internet.
* Well, ok, it might if they fix the bloody thing. But, at least as currently built, Blu-ray objectively is worse than the technology it supposedly obsoletes. If the Blu-ray consortium freeze the spec within the next six months and remove BD+ from it, then it might displace DVD. Operative word "might", the more expensive standard has to have real, discernible and compelling, advantages over the cheaper, incumbent, standard if it's going to get anywhere, and I'm just not seeing them. HD DVD did.
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and Java also won as every Bluray player will contain a JVM. Thus, bluray will damage the brains of the CS students.
Given Microsoft's involvement, the fear is that any green identifier used would eventually turn red, at which point you would have to ship your HD DVD back to the factory for service.