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Topic: Anyone consuming HD or Blu-ray?
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Mark J. Marshall
Film God
Posts: 3188
From: New Castle, DE, USA
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted 01-08-2008 06:25 AM
Uh oh again.
Another Linky Linky
quote:
Paramount in HD DVD blow
By Matthew Garrahan and Mariko Sanchanta in Las Vegas
Published: January 8 2008 02:49 | Last updated: January 8 2008 02:49
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.
Paramount and DreamWorks Animation, which makes the Shrek films, came out in support of HD DVD last summer, joining General Electric’s Universal Studios as the main backers of the Toshiba format.
However, Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner Bros backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.
Paramount is set to have a bumper 2008 with several likely blockbusters, including the latest instalment in the Indiana Jones franchise.
Paramount joining the Blu-ray camp would leave HD DVD likely to suffer the same fate as Sony’s now obsolete Betamax video technology, which lost out to VHS in a similar format war in the 1980s.
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.
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.
It is unclear whether DreamWorks Animation has the same get-out clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp.
However, Paramount and DreamWorks have a close relationship, with Paramount distributing DreamWorks Animation films. The two companies also signed their HD DVD contracts at the same time. Meanwhile, Universal has declined to comment on its next-generation DVD plans since the Warners move.
Sir Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony, on Monday held out an olive branch, saying the company would be “open to dialogue” with the HD DVD camp to “grow the market”. The move came as new figures showed that Blu-ray had opened up a decisive lead over the rival home entertainment format.
Sir Howard said: “We are not going to push people around. We’ll talk to anyone ... we have a lot of work to do to grow the market. We’ll be systematic and open to dialogue at all times.”
He added that Sony still had “a lot of work” to do to get Blu-ray “widely accepted” among American consumers.
“With Warner’s support you saw billboards going up in different places and you saw television commercials getting more and more sophisticated and that’s what we’ll continue doing,” said Sir Howard.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
I wonder if Paramount will immediately pull the plug on all of the soon to be released HD-DVDs like they did with all of the soon to be released Blu-Rays, or if they'll take the more respectable decision that Warner did by announcing that all existing and announced releases that are already in the development pipeline will be released, and after that, they're done.
[ 01-08-2008, 07:29 AM: Message edited by: Mark J. Marshall ]
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Tom Mundell
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 120
From: Silver Spring, MD, USA
Registered: Nov 2007
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posted 01-08-2008 10:41 AM
Apparently (at the moment at least) Paramount is denying a switch to Blu-Ray
Link
quote:
Paramount Denies HD DVD Switch
The Financial Times says the studio is "poised" to do so.
By Swanni
Washington, D.C. (January 8, 2008) -- Paramount today denied a Financial Times report that it's "poised" to endorse Blu-ray over HD DVD.
"Paramount's current plan is to continue to support the HD DVD format,'' Brenda Ciccone, a spokeswoman for Paramount, told Bloomberg News.
Paramount announced last August that it would endorse HD DVD exclusively in the high-def DVD format war. The studio's agreement with the HD DVD group reportedly was set for 18 months.
However, the Financial Times reports that the agreement has a clause that would allow Paramount to drop its support of HD DVD if Warner Bros. backed Blu-ray.
Warner last Friday dropped its neutral stance in the war and announced it was supporting Blu-ray exclusively.
The Financial Times reported that Paramount is ready to use the out clause to drop its HD DVD support.
Bloomberg News reports that Sony, the leading backer of Blu-ray, refused to comment on the Financial Times article.
Toshiba, HD DVD's top supporter, said the report is "speculative."
Warner Bros. issued a similar denial that it would not endorse Blu-ray shortly before it announced that it would support the high-def format.
Link
quote:
Paramount Denies Report It Will Drop Toshiba's HD DVD (Update2)
By Andy Fixmer and John Liu
Jan. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures denied a newspaper report that the studio is poised to follow Time Warner Inc. in abandoning Toshiba Corp.'s HD DVD technology.
``Paramount's current plan is to continue to support the HD DVD format,'' Brenda Ciccone, a spokeswoman for Paramount, said in an e-mail today.
Toshiba, the leading promoter of the HD DVD format for high- definition video discs, fell in Tokyo trading after the Financial Times reported Paramount is poised to adopt Sony Corp.'s Blu-ray format instead.
Paramount can defect because a clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp allows the studio to switch to Blu-ray if Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. dropped its support of Toshiba's standard, the newspaper reported today, citing unidentified people familiar with the plan. Warner Bros. said on Jan. 4 it would drop its support of HD DVD.
Keisuke Ohmori, a spokesman for Tokyo-based Toshiba, said the report is speculative. Masayo Endo, a spokeswoman for Sony, declined to comment on the report.
Toshiba's shares fell 0.1 percent to close at 782 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange after dropping as much as 1.3 percent. Sony's stock rose 3.4 percent.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 01-08-2008 11:15 AM
quote: Joe Redifer
How is Blu-Ray poorly equipped to take on DVD?
Here are some of the challenges:
- Not everyone has an HDTV yet (current estimates have half the US population owning at least one DTV, which presumably includes EDTV's as well as HDTV's), so hooking up a Blu-ray player to an SDTV would show no better video than any decent DVD player costing more than $45.
- The cheapest Blu-ray player costs ~$325 street price. This is more than three times the street price of a halfway decent upconverting DVD player that is most likely going to be marketed by retailers as "HD"
- Blu-ray movies list for $29.99 - $39.99. While recent Buy One Get One Free sales and other promotions have driven down the effective price to around $15 for some titles, the likelihood of such promotions in the future has diminished with the reports of HD DVD's demise. A sample day-and-date release title, 3:10 to Yuma, is being offered on Amazon.com for $26.95. The DVD is $16.99. People will want to know why they are spending almost double for the Blu-ray disc, which is a marketing challenge.
- Even though Blu-ray has outsold HD DVD discs every week for the past year, the total number of discs sold per title is still very very low compared to the DVD of the same title. HDM is a fledgling market and it has yet to gain a foothold.
- Not every studio supports Blu-ray. When someone goes into the store, rental outlet, etc. and wants The Bourne Ultimatum, Shrek the Third, or Transformers on HD, what will they find? This will hopefully flesh itself out in 2008, but it's going to take time. DVD is the no-brainer choice, because "everything" is available on it.
- Not all Blu-ray players are capable of playing all the content that is advertised on the disc. Starting with this month's release of Bonus View (Profile 1.1) titles, there is content on these discs that most non-PS3 players cannot play. When Finding Nemo, Sleeping Beauty, National Treasure, and Chronicles of Narnia are released with both Profile 1.1 and Profile 2.0 (BD Live) features, how much fun will it be for parents to explain to their kids that their Blu-ray player can't play the extra stuff on those discs? While that may not matter to some people, it matters to others, and such content is a big differentiator from DVD that is going to be marketed by the studios. This has been proven by the studio announcements at CES so far.
- Blu-ray discs don't play in portable DVD players, in-vehicle DVD players, and the other SD DVD players that homes already have. The prospect of buying multiple Blu-ray players makes the pricing differential a larger issue.
Don't take this as my bashing on Blu-ray. Some of these items also apply to HD DVD, so if Warner (and Fox) had gone HD DVD exclusive on Friday, some of the same challenges would still exist.
Both Blu-ray and HD DVD were fighting over a very small, almost insignificant, market when compared to DVD. DVD sales are dropping, and studios are looking for the next big thing. All the schoolyard bickering over which format outsold which by what margin is silly when their combined total doesn't even show up on a graph of DVD sales for any given week. I would bet that the latest season of The Waltons on DVD outsold the best-selling HD title this week!
Speaking of Warner and Fox considering going HD DVD exclusive, Bobby was looking for a source for my comment about them making an 11th hour decision. This post on the AVS Forums is from a guy who has contacts at the studios and who has been proven correct on past assertions and observations:
AVS Forum Post
Personally, I find it difficult to believe that Fox would have switched, but what do I know? They've been pretty poor at releasing titles on time, having taken almost all of 2007 off after making such a big deal at last year's CES and then not releasing the announced titles.
My guess was that Disney was wavering. Given their history of creating the HDi interactivity layer for HD DVD with Microsoft, their probable dissatisfaction with the promise of 10 million PS3's in the market by 4Q2007, and their announcement that some premiere titles were going to be released in 2008 without any players being currently able to play the extras, I would have figured they would be looking at the grass on the other side of the fence with longing eyes.
I think it all boiled down to Sony wanting the HDM market worse than Toshiba did. If they paid the $500M or not, such things are business and as such, they don't surprise me. If Warner says that they weren't paid, I would imagine that it's still possible that non-monetary considerations were made to sweeten the deal. Whatever.
I'm ready to move on. Unless the HD DVD group pulls a rabbit of their hat, the future is Blu-ray. I can deal with that.
If nothing else, maybe the schoolyard bickering will simmer down, and we can get down to looking at how the various players perform, and which ones do which, and what kind of value Blu-ray offers to us as movie lovers.
I don't think that this shift will do anything for video or audio quality. Releases on both formats were already much better than DVD (in all but a few isolated cases, of course), and adding 20GB of potential storage (keep in mind that not many 50GB discs were filled) isn't going to result in drastically higher picture quality or sound quality.
What the extra space does mean, though, is that there is more room for extras in HD instead of SD, more next-gen content that takes advantage of the features of the format. Just because we haven't seen really cool implementations yet doesn't mean that we won't, it just means that the entire industry is very immature when it comes to HDM and it's going to take some time and it's going to result in some misfires of bad content before the cool stuff rises to the top.
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Blaine Young
Master Film Handler
Posts: 477
From: Kirkland, WA, USA
Registered: Sep 2006
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posted 01-08-2008 12:56 PM
I am taking Paramount's denials with a shaker of salt. Warner Brothers also 'officially' stated as recently as two weeks ago that their current plans were to continue to support both. Whatever the unannounced plans of a studio are, their 'supported line' will be "[our] current plan is to continue to support the HD DVD format." That will be the company line, even if they intend to drop the format tomorrow, but haven't announced anything - yet.
As for all those Blu-Ray discs that Paramount cancelled, I suspect they're all sitting in a warehouse somewhere - since the HD-DVD exclusive contract was only for 18 months, they were likely to come out some time. That probably only applies to "Blades of Glory", "Top Gun", "Face Off" and maybe "Jack Ryan Collection", but stuff like "Transformers" and "Shrek the Third" were probably not committed to disc masters by the time of the drop of Blu-ray.
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Mark J. Marshall
Film God
Posts: 3188
From: New Castle, DE, USA
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted 01-08-2008 01:11 PM
It has to do with picture in picture stuff and other things that were solidified in the Blu-Ray spec after the early players were released. Some players can be "patched" with an upgrade disk.
This one is for Phil.
Link
quote:
PS3 owners demand porn, Digital Playground steps up to the plate
Posted Jan 8th 2008 12:40PM by Erik Hanson
Digital Playground has moved from neutral to Blu in the format war. Given recent events, it's not a surprising turn, and the studio's Blu-ray library that debuted with "Pirates" will swell to nine movies by January 11. Coming to the roster are: "Island Fever" 3 and 4, "Babysitters," "Jack's Teen America 3," "Jesse Jane: Sexual Freak," "Hush," "Contract Star" and "Jesse Jane Pink." Studio founder Joone (yeah, only one name) does not credit any picture quality issues in the decision, and even said there was no difference between the two formats. The real reason was consumer demand -- specifically PS3 owners. No mention of how the titles might leverage interactive features, although we're willing to, uh, review sample discs.
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