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Lessons From the HD Format War
mlimber writes "The New York Times' Freakonomics blog asks a panel of experts, 'Is the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray really over? What can we learn from it?' The panel suggests, among other things, that Sony achieved a Pyrrhic victory because high-def DVDs will be outmoded before they reap enough profits to make up for what they (and Toshiba) paid out for both product development and bribes to win the support of content providers."
An even better example:
The NTSC vs PAL example doesn't work (assuming you mean that PAL is the superior format).
Where I'm sitting I see PAL DVDs, and it appears that most of the world are in the same situation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PAL-NTSC-SECAM.svg. PAL won.
Why? just because some over zealous luddites want 1080p content does not mean the bulk of the Tv viewers do. 720P is more than enough to make people really happy. Hell most customers oooh and Ahhh all over their new 720P set watching Comcast HD signal that is so compressed it looks bad. but it looks way better than they know.
They can stream 720p highly compressed video right now. They can deliver this right now. and guess what the bulk of tv viewers will find it fantastic with only a itty bitty tiny percentage that want 1080p at full bitrate and least compression.
Consumers want better than what they already get. A good upscaling DVD player makes 90% of the people out there very happy with their HDTV set. And the costs of BluRay along with the overpricing of the discs is making many people look at DVD on their HD set and say, "looks good! I'll stick with this."
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
just because some over zealous luddites want 1080p content does not mean the bulk of the Tv viewers do.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means. In fact, it means the exact opposite of what you think it means.
Also, everyone I know who has seen real HD content (either HDDVD or Bluray) agree that DVD pales in comparison. My wife and I bought 'Hot Fuzz' on HDDVD and watched it about 3/4ths of the way through when we ran into disc corruption problems. While we, of course, got the disc replaced, to finish the movie we flipped it over to the DVD side. A huge drop in quality was quite apparent. Ditto for a straight up DVD version of the movie.
The same is true of almost any genre of stuff you can find on TPB. It is the way it is because it's a public tracker. Private ratio trackers have more incentive for people to seed older stuff.
Random and weird software I've written.
you are totally wrong. First off, when you download all of that content, where are you going to store it? On physical media. It would get very expensive doing so on your HD so, i suppose you would want a disc drive. Blu ray will be very useful for cheap storage of media and data content for such purposes. As well, I do not think that this sudden surge of downloading is going to go over well with ISPs, the internet infrastructure might be a bit to go before it can handle 50 gb downloads of HD movies. Eventually downloading of movies will become more common but even then you will want a physical medium to store it.
Try Groklaw. Slashdot looks positively ecumenical compared to that echo chamber.
Are they really that similar?
- AC vs. DC: Cheaper and better system won
- VHS vs. BetaMax: Cheaper, worse system won
- 8 Track vs. Cassette: cheaper, better system won. (though 8 Track was so retarded, it would have been hard to lose in any case)
- BR vs. HDDVD: More expensive system won, without a real technological/quality advantage.
So what could have been learned? What sony should have learned looking at the first three is "the cheaper always wins" and they should have packed up and left. Instead, Sony made a more expensive system and clobbered Toshiba with marketing. And won.
Downloading HD media from iTunes or Live is actually MORE expensive currently, and Netflix has a far larger selection of HD content (not to mention the even more vast library of standard DVD's on tap as well!).
Hooking up a home media center and maintaining is, for most people, far LESS easy than simply going to a Netflix web page and saying "I'll take that and that and that" and then just watching as they come.
I'm a media geek at the forefront of having my own media PC and HD DVR's and use iTunes to buy TV shows all the time. But I recognize that movies are far better done on Blu-Ray, and that everything points to that being true for at least five years or longer. Network infrastructure, is just not ready. Movie studios still have a lich-like grasp of DRM they will not shake, severely retarding the usefulness of downloading legal video online. Legal rights snafus tie up most titles from even going to online distribution.
P2P sources for HD media work, but then you have the danger of lawsuits and downloads can take longer to complete than Netflix to mail me a Blu-Ray disc! I'll go P2P for something obscure but for popular media, it makes little sense to me.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley