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Topic: Anyone consuming HD or Blu-ray?
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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today
Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99
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posted 12-05-2007 10:54 PM
quote:
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/12/05/michael-bay-talks-hd-dvd-and-microsofts-dirty-secret/
Michael Bay has been sipping the "Kool-Aid" again. Several months after the director's infamous night with a band of Blu-ray owners and a few glasses of alternate-reality drink (ending in a brief holdout with Transformers 2 on the line), Bay is back to blasting HD DVD. Despite a sobering HD DVD screening of 300 in late-August and newfound acceptance of Paramount's decision to partner with Microsoft, Bay has fallen off the wagon, stumbling onto a trail of deceit leading to a "dirty secret," a corporate plot to annihilate all forms of our beloved polycarbonate discs -- with explosions, lots of 'em.
Bay writes, "Microsoft wants both [HD DVD and Blu-ray] formats to fail so they can be heroes and make the world move to digital downloads. That is the dirty secret no one is talking about. That is why Microsoft is handing out $100 million dollar checks to studios just [to] embrace the HD DVD and not the leading, and superior Blu Ray [sic]. They want confusion in the market until they perfect the digital downloads. Time will tell and you will see the truth."
While we can't verify just how many $100 million checks have been cashed (we know of just the one we received to ensure the Sony bias keeps flowing), we do know what Bill Gates told us nearly a year ago: "HD DVD is great ... It's neat. But over time, eventually online is going to be more important." That don't sound like no secret to us. Sony was early to the HD movie market and Microsoft didn't want its competitor to run away with a new format before it could get the proper digital distribution network and hardware in place. HD DVD certainly can be viewed as a stalling tactic, and two formats with varying Hollywood support is definitely confusing to consumers, but let's not mistake reality for Michael Bay's vision of Armageddon.
Digital distribution is a lame idea. Lame, lame lame.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 12-10-2007 03:48 PM
Wow, I'm away for a while and this thread explodes! ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
re: Region Coding
Blu-ray discs can be region-coded, and most commercial discs are. HD DVD does not have any region coding built into the format. You can buy European HD DVD releases of titles that are Blu-ray exclusive in the U.S. and play them. Xploited Cinema is a popular importer of such titles.
re: Paramount Blu-ray titles
Paramount has issued a recall of all Blu-ray titles from warehouses, so any remaining inventory is to be returned to Paramount. Whether that happens or not, who knows. I don't know what the effective date of that recall is, but Amazon.com still has Blu-ray editions of Mission Impossible for sale.
re: Samsung BD-P5000 dual-format player
Reports are mixed about when this player will be available. Amazon is reporting 1/15/2008. Some sites are saying that Samsung is telling them that the players are being shipped to dealers right now and will be available before Christmas. Who to believe? I'll believe it when I see them on the shelf and the proof will be the reviews. My guess is that the unit will not have Profile 1.1 functionality before February, and it will need a few firmware updates to resolve post-release bugs (I don't have much confidence in Samsung to release a fully functional unit).
re: HD DVD vs. Blu-ray - What will swing the balance?
If the studio situation stays the way it is now, nothing will swing the balance of the two formats. HD DVD is selling a lot of standalone players with the recent specials since the beginning of November, and the latest reports of Blu-ray sales have placed a huge percentage of those sales on the back of the PlayStation 3. If I recall correctly, the number is 2.5 million PS3's and 200k standalones. HD DVD has said that 750k standalones and XBox 360 Add-ons have been sold so far.
The swing vote is in the software arena. It's the reason why there's a war in the first place. If all studios were to release on both formats, the war wouldn't matter. If all studios were to release only on one format, the war wouldn't exist. The cards are all in the hands of the studios, because they make the movies that we all want to enjoy in HD.
Warner Bros. is that swing vote. They have said that hardware sales in 4Q2007 were going to be key in their decision about whether to back both formats as they have been doing, or to put their support behind just one. They've been doing both formats from the beginning (as Paramount was before their switch), so they have a really good grasp of the benefits and costs of each.
If WB switches to either format exclusively, it will cause a massive shift in the format war. If they go HD DVD only, Disney and Fox will buckle (in my opinion) and begin releasing on HD DVD. Sony/Columbia will come along very grudgingly. If they go Blu-ray, the same thing will happen on the other side. Universal will contemplate a change, and Paramount will be looking at the fine print of their agreement with the HD DVD group.
re: Hardware Mfrs, and the number making HD DVD players / Blu-ray players.
How many companies are making Xbox 360's? How about Playstation 3's or Wii's? Given the incredibly small sales of the non-Sony machines capable of playing Blu-ray discs, I think that the number of manufacturers behind each format is pretty much a non-issue. The competition that should exist between Blu-ray manufacturers just doesn't seem to have helped us consumers any. Where is the innovation? Where is the price competition?
I think Toshiba has done a very good job of providing consumers with a wide array of players at various price points and with multiple levels of functionality at those price points. Would Pioneer be able to sell a $1,000 HD DVD player? I doubt it. What could they do to make it appealing when there are full-featured Toshiba HD-A35's out there selling for $360? Slap some woodgrain panels on the side and put an "Elite" label on it? The reviews for the Toshiba's are too good for them to be able to do that.
If one side wins this war, one thing is certain: customers will lose. Anyone who bought a player that only plays the losing format will be out that money in regards to future usability. They will be able to play the discs already produced, but going forward, they'll have to buy the winning format. Considering the price of these players (on both sides, but even worse for people who shelled out $500 - $1000 for a Blu-ray player or top-of-the-line HD DVD player last year), that's gonna sting. It's going to impact the adoption rate of the winning format (esp. if the winner is the one with the $400+ players), because the money spent on the first hardware purchase doesn't auto-magically reappear, and software sales are going to be impacted because people will have paid for new hardware.
The only winning proposition for consumers is for all studios to produce discs in both formats. I don't buy that multiple SKU's are that big a pain, because if they were, studios wouldn't put out widescreen, full-screen, and widescreen special editions of the same title on a regular basis. Creating one HD encoding is being done now, and it comes down to the interactivity layer that has to be done twice. Warner seems to be up to the task, as tomorrows Harry Potter release demonstrates.
Studios could make the format war go away tomorrow if they came out and publicly said that they were going to be releasing for both formats from now on. We all win, they all win, and we can get back to enjoying movies instead of debating formats.
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