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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."
No one really cares.
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The lesson I draw is that content providers are wholly opposed to consumers interests, and that open, collaborative standards are the only healthy way forward.
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Yeah, Brian, so now that the war has ended, go and buy that hd-dvd player you've been wanting! Don't forget to pick up a car load of hd-dvd movies while you're out!
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If someone would have made a cheap combo player fast enough that could play both formats, they could have both been making profits instead of one losing money and the other probably still losing money from so many bribes. It's sort of like a betting on a drag race and then spending $20,000 to upgrade your car while the other guy spends $25,000 and the bet is only $1000 so that's all you win. By the time they start turning a profit on blu-ray, the next format will be released.
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The merits or flaws of either side can be overcome by paying people off
1) If you have not figured it out yet, early adoption can bite you is the ass. (Just wait for DR-DVD v2 to render every player but the PS3 obsolete.)
2) If you shell out enough cash to content producers during early adoption, the market never has a chance to affect the outcome.
3) Giving away the razors (PS3 compared to vanilla BR-DVD player) and selling the hell out of the blades is still a viable business model.
The only thing that remains to be seen is whether on-demand streaming content will come to market soon enough and be enticing enough to defeat BR-DVD before Sony sees a return on its investment.
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I get really annoyed every time this gets brought up with the claims that any benefits Bluray gives will soon be overshadowed by HD download services. HD download services are great, except I see a few problems with it.
1 - Heavy DRM - Yes Bluray has DRM too, but you can TAKE IT WITH YOU. The technology is still prohibitively expensive to start making portable bluray players, and in dash bluray players for cars, but there is NO HD download service I'm aware that lets you burn the files and keep them forever to watch. They are mostly rental services - basically you download them on your Apple TV or computers, watch it in a 24 hour period and its gone. In time, those devices will be made cheaper, and will become reasonably priced.
2 - Downloadable content doesn't look nearly as good a trueHD stuff does. I realize that for many people it doesn't matter, because the majority of TV's that were purchased early on (and therefore a big chunk of the ones in households) are only 720P. But 1080 displays are becoming the new standard and fewer 720 displays are being made. a 3GB 720 file doesn't offer much more clarity than just a standard DVD. Yes I know, many people are going to shout that DVD's are GOOD ENOUGH. Fine. VCR tapes were GOOD ENOUGH too. So are YouTube videos for some people. Big whoop. Watching low quality 720p on a 1080 display just doesn't look as good as a true 1080 picture with 25-35Mbit quality.
3. To get a decent quality picture, you need to have download a big file, and that requires fast internet connections. American download speeds are pitiful compared to the rest of the world. If you wanted to download a 5GB movie, that's going to take you SEVERAL hours to complete, as opposed to just driving a few miles to the nearest blockbuster r RedBox (which WILL be getting bluray discs inevitably)
4. Bluray adoption has taken off faster than DVD adoption did. I somehow doubt people are going to give up on buying discs they can KEEP and watch OVER AND OVER, with a download service that offers inferior quality, short watching time, and long waits to watch. But who knows, maybe in 2 years from now I'll be eating those words, but I doubt. Anything you can say about HD downloads applies to SD quality movies as well, and DVD sales aren't really being eaten into like people predicted it would downloadable content. Begin modding me down...NOW!
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This format war was fought through movie studios, but interestingly most consumers don't really care what discs their movies come on. Whether on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the movies play essentially the same way. Hell, DVDs are good enough for movies -- the resolution is good enough, and the run-time of a DVD is longer than the length of time that you can sit still on your butt.
On the other hand, DVDs will soon become obsolete as a data storage medium. Remember when an entire OS came on a CD-ROM, and you could back up your hard drive onto a couple of DVD+-R? Now operating systems come on DVDs, and only sane backup medium for most consumers is another hard disk. For that, I'm glad that the higher-capacity Blu-Ray standard won, and hopefully Blu-Ray burners will be cheap enough by the time the need arises.
I wouldn't be surprised if Blu-Ray movies never replace DVDs, but Blu-Ray burners become standard on computers.
Tell me please exactly HOW digital downloads are going to happen. There is a reason a new disc was needed for HD, movies take up a LOT of space. Even recompressed a HD movie is several GB, how are people going to download this when there are plenty of ISP's that limit you to several GB per month? That's right, thanks to our ISP's we could MAYBE just download a SINGLE movie before being cutoff. What about the speed? What if I got only a work laptop? Meaning I can only leave it on for a couple of hours when I am home? Do you think your average ISP connection is fast enough for that? Where do I store it all?
Oh sure DESKTOP HD's are getting bigger all the time but what is a blue-ray or HD-DVD movie, 40-50 GB? That means a large HD can only hold 10 movies. Not much if you consider how many DVD's movie BUYERS got. Some people I know got large enough collection to stretch the capacity of pro-sumer level NAT storage, how the fuck are they going to find enough computer storage to store all this in HD?
Then offcourse you need to hook up this storage to the TV, how is this done?
Oh yes, there are solutions and workarounds a plenty, but I don't see any it being adopted anytime soon, just as MOVIE projectors BEFORE VHS were NOT popular.Oh right, some of you younger ones may not know this. No VHS did NOT mean the start of the movie rental business. It was available LONG before. You could always just rent a projector and some movies and real enthousiats had their own setup. But it was far to much of a hassle for the general public.
VHS made it easy NOT just to record your own shows, but to simply pop down the corner rental story, rent a movie and watch it.
This lead to a huge boom in the industry for a bit with countless stores opening.
It lost its luster a bit, partially because many more TV channels became available all catering to their own crowd. Simply watching whatever the tube feeds you after all is still easier.
But watch HD movies from a PC, that is a lot of hassle, NO, we on slashdot CANNOT judge this. People who compile their own kernel are naturally going to be a bit more inclined to be tech savy then those whose VCR has a blinking clock.
iTunes? iTunes is a joke, its sales are pathetic if you consider the market it operates in. Do the math, how many BILLIONS of consumers does it reach and how many SONGS (SONGS! Not full albums) has it sold? iTunes is the biggest online store, but compared to offline sales it just doesn't compare.
There have been several attempt at on-demand and download services and THEY ALL FAILED.
Don't get me wrong, it is OBVIOUSLY the future, but the future ain't here yet. At the moment we just don't have the tech to handle that amount of content without a shiny disc to put it on.
What people tend to forget is how slow things really change. DVD's didn't replace VHS for years. LP's sold for ages beside CD's. Digital download has been a dream for as long the internet came into existence and it just isn't ready yet. Just ask youtube why they don't serve all their vidoes in HD. Their servers, would choke and it would mean you would have to pick your movie now if you want to watch it over the weekend.
And then their is that shiny Blu-Ray disc in a store or rental place, you can pick it up, slot it in and watch it. No PC whining, no ISP complaining, no harddisk screaming for mercy. It just works.
I think downloads are going to have to wait a bit until those parts of the world who are willing to pay for their content can get their downloads as easy as a disc.
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I learned that the kind of insane balkanization of consumer products that we see with gaming consoles is spreading to other areas. That the us vs. them rhetoric that was once only found in the realms of religion and politics is now bleeding into online flame wars about which corporate-backed digital movie format is better.
Electricity wars (AC vs DC), tape wars (VHS vs BETA, 8 track vs cassette) or HD Format wars are nothing new and if nobody learnt then, why should anyone learn this time around?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.