Mistah HD DVD–He Dead …
by John Paczkowski
Posted on January 10, 2008 at 7:00 AM PT
Reports of HD DVD’s death may have been exaggerated, but reports of its fast-declining health have not.
Though Paramount Pictures has denied reports that it plans to abandon the next-generation DVD format, news of an escape clause in its HD DVD contract allowing it to release films on Blu-ray has the industry wondering aloud about the format’s continued viability.
And for good reason. Earlier this week Universal’s HD DVD-exclusive contract ended. And last Friday, on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show, Warner Bros. stunned the industry by announcing plans to end support of the format entirely in June. “[That] maybe the pivotal event that resolves the format war,” said Thomas Coughlin of Coughlin Associates. “It certainly changes the rules and the playing field. I think everyone is trying to reassess what this means–including the HD DVD guys. [If Blu-ray does come out on top] it would be poetic justice after the Betamax vs. VHS war. That time, Sony lost.”
But is it truly the format’s death knell? Ovum analyst Carl Gressum says no. “There is a lot of speculation whether this is the end of HD DVD,” he said. “It is not, but we are getting dangerously close to a ‘chapter 11’ for the group. If the other supporting studios now decide to drop HD DVD, the situation will turn dire, and HD DVD could become more of a replacement to DVD on the PC client than as a movie-distribution playback format.”
UPDATE: Universal Pictures flatly denies it’s abandoning the HD DVD format. Said Ken Graffeo, executive vice president of HD strategic marketing for Universal Studios Home Entertainment, “Contrary to unsubstantiated rumors from unnamed sources, Universal’s current plan is to continue to support the HD DVD format.”
Comments
I have no idea whether this is the end of HD-DVD, but as a consumer, I certainly hope it isn’t. The only technological advantage I can see for BD is larger capacity, and it seems unlikely that the larger capacity will ever be used in a way to truly benefit the average viewer. BD is significantly more expensive, and likely to stay that way for about forever. Sony’s not known for value, after all. Without competition from the rival format, they have no reason to drive prices down, and their response to the Warner announcement was to increase the price of the lowest-cost player by a third. Funai’s entry means you’ll get a $250 stripped-bare BD player, but it will be a LONG time before you get a BD player with the features of Toshiba’s offerings for less than $300. It really is a replay of the VCR wars – Sony had a theoretically superior product back then, too, which was more expensive than the competition. This time, the studios made our decision for us because they want the copy-protection features of BD. Sony wins, DRM wins, your wallet loses.
Posted by Fred Ochsenhirt at January 10th, 2008 at 1:34 pmAs a supporter of Blu-Ray before the format came to market, I felt I needed to make a response to Mr. Ochsenhirt’s comments regarding the differences between Blu-Ray and HD DVD. First off, both formats offer a superb picture image and audio and if only HD DVD had been on the market alone, I would have readily supported it. But it wasn’t and as both a long-time movie collector and computer geek, I feel Blu-Ray is the superior format, and this is why it has achieved the success it has. The following is my rebuttal of why HD DVD is superior to Blu-Ray.
HD DVD was originally designed to be a Video only playback system with no capability to record. Blu-Ray was designed to be a multiple-use format that would record and playback both consumer-level video as well as corporate-level computer duty.
Storage capacity. Currently HD DVD can only hold a maximum of 30gigs. Blu-Ray can hold up to 200gigs. That’s over 6 times more information. Remember when we sat back with our IBM-PCs and marveled that with DOS 2.0, and it’s capability of using a 10 megabyte hard drive, how we’d never run out of storage space? HD DVD is already strained to hold all the expected content that comes with a movie on its 30gig disc. The HD DVD camp developed a 3-layer disc that is able to hold 51gigs, but it is not compatible with every existing HD DVD player, so would it be OK for those million people that have HD DVD players to make their investments now obsolete?
There are 2 current Toshiba HD DVD players on the market. Both the current and recently discontinued units that were sold for under $200 were base models that did not have all the features that were available on the higher priced model. The under-$300 Funai Blu-Ray player is fully Profile 1.1 compliant and will have all the feature every current Blu-Ray player has now to date.
As for cost, both format players were expensive to build and both came down as costs were lowered due to the streamlining of production. Toshiba’s cost went lower because they were selling their machines at a loss in order to get more units out in the marketplace. Because of Toshiba’s short-sighted discounting especially over the last quarter, every major manufacturer that was going to make a dedicated HD DVD player stopped those efforts because they could not make a profit thanks to Toshiba’s belief that only sub-$200 players would sell.
As for driving the price of Blu-Ray higher, that is a myth. Everyone realized that the equipment must become cheaper. At the beginning, almost all the Blu-Ray players were retailing at $100. By this summer, they were down to around $500. At CES, Panasonic and others showed new Blu-Ray players that will retail for 350 and will probably street for much less. The same will also apply to the software titles as more companies create Blu-Ray production lines and it becomes commonplace to make those discs.
While I do agree that the corporations have decided the fate of this format war, the consumers did have their say. In spite of the sub-$200 players, consumers chose by a wide margin to purchase Blu-Ray players that were $150 (and up) more expensive than the cheaper HD DVD players.
Finally, it should be pointed out that Sony tried to meet Toshiba more than halfway in blending the Blu-Ray and HD DVD technology together in order to create a single, unified format. Toshiba postured and argued until they finally walked out and declared a format war was in progress. Sony tried to play nice and got burned. Toshiba on the other hand postured, gambled everything, and lost.
I for one am so glad this format war is coming to an end. Everyone has acted like spoiled-rotten children and attacked each other to no end. Now the HD DVD fans are spewing rotten tomatoes because they are on the short end of the stick. It’s over now and can we all just move on and act like the civilized people we are supposed to be?
Posted by Hal Doby at January 10th, 2008 at 8:20 pm