Who will win the format war and will it matter?
Are there any advantages to buying either Format now?
Blockbuster just recently announced that after trying both in about 250 stores, they will go exclusive with Blu-Ray. In the stores with both, Blu Ray counted for about 70% of rentals. Blockbuster On-line will still carry the HD DVDs. The news today, is that after that announcement, many electronics stores have had customers call and cancel their orders on HD DVD players.
The war is not over, but this is a big problem for HD DVD right now.
According to sources I’ve read (you can Google for most of this), most major studios are backing Blu-Ray exclusively. I think Universal is the only major exception. Most pornography studios, on the other hand, are backing HD DVD exclusively, and while a convincing argument can be made that that was a major factor with Beta versus VHS, there are several reason why it may mean nothing in this instance. For one thing, manufacturers have developed dual-purpose chips that will play either format, and dual purpose discs that will record HD DVD on one side and Blu-Ray on the other. For another, there was very little choice in medium for pornography prior to videotape, other than 8mm film. But today, there is already a huge (market in the billions) foundation of standard definition DVDs. No one at this point really knows what’s the dog and what’s the tail.
Five years from now nobody will be watching movies on physical discs. I’m sticking with old-school DVD until then.
Any idea why Blockbuster chose Blu Ray? I read the headlines, and knew they did make that choice, but haven’t caught up to the reasons.
And what exactly is the difference (or differences) between the two? Why choose one over the other?
They chose Blu Ray because of the 70% rental rate over HD DVD (I don’t consider this to be a fair evaluation, because of the big movies released on Blu Ray like Spiderman and so forth).
See the wikipedia entry for the breakdown.
Me too. I also suspect (evidenced by the amazing increase in sales EMI has shown since they switched to non DRM mp3s, and the backlash against SONY’s music CD malware) that the crappyness of the DRM on both formats will make them both obselete.
At this point Blue Ray is more likely to win (more studios, more player makers).
But niether winning is a definite possibility. It may end up like DVDAudio vs SACD (both of which I think still exist but niether is mainstream)
Good editorial (from a place that lobbied hard to not have the format war in the 1st place)
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/soapbox/soap060107.html
Brian
There is really not enough bandwidth for large numbers of people to be downloading high def or even standard DVD def movies over the net. I don’t see that changing in five years.
I’m not sure I agree. My cable (and I’m sure many others) already have a pretty effective on demand service available which makes renting a lot of movies pointless to me. I don’t think there would need to be any large leap of technology to make such downloading to a DVR (or whatnot) feasible within 5 years.
My ISP offers 24M down *and * live HDTV through old copperwires from the 50’s. Downloading uses less bandwidth than streaming, so I dont think it’s a problem. Downloading a standard DVD @ 24mbps takes about half an hour.
Yeah but only one person in an area can do that at a time. If it gets popular then the bandwidth needs to go up drastically.
Where do you get that idea? Most of my neighbours and I have DSL using that speed. A friend is lucky enough to live in an apartment offering 100Mbps down and up to everyone in that house for $50 a month. All apartments in that building have that speed.
Does it matter which format wins? Or is winning right now? It’s all too expensive and rare at the moment, at least here in the U.K… Full (1080p) HD screens are expensive, receiving HD broadcasts is expensive, the players cost a bomb, and there are few HD movies to buy.
You are on a network. The bandwidth is shared somewhere. The phone company does not have 100Mbps for each and every one of you to use all at the same time. Networks are great because every body does not want 100Mbps all at the same time.
Besides we are straying far from the original point. Which as I recall was the assertion that most every body would be getting their high def movies not on optical discs. My contention is that the network we have now and are likely to have in 5 years is not going to support large numbers of people downloading arbitrary high def movies. People with broadband internet are still a minority in the US. Only half the US has “broadband” currently. I intentionally put that in quotes because this includes a large number of people with sub one meg DSL.
There will be people that download movies more than do now but the main way people will get non broadcast movies will still be optical discs.
You’re assuming two things here:
One, that bandwidth won’t widen between now and five years from now; and
Two, that file compression algorithms won’t improve in the next five years.
Historically, neither assumption is valid.
I work for a company that believes it must do everything it can to increase bandwidth for it’s very existence. Everthing I’ve heard leads me to believe the rate of increase in both bandwidth and storage capacity will render the current model of movies on disc obsolete in only a few years. Look at iTunes did to CD collections.
And people are not going to be downloading high def movies 24 hours a day any more than they have 24 hour Blockbuster video rental marathons every day…
I have to say that based on the number of high def tv episodes I download per week without problem, this isn’t going to be an issue. If the cable company can provide the data capacity for 500+ continously streaming TV channels in addition to 100+ movies on demand, the internet can certainly handle the purchasing of one or two movies a week from the average consumer.
iTunes has done very little to CD sales. Really it is a drop in the bucket of US sales. 5 to 10 % depending on how you want to measure it. The industry is sort of cranky because CD sales are down but the vast majority of music in the US is sold via CDs.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2006-01-04-music-sales-main_x.htm
CD sales are 95% or album sales.
Eventually people will get their movies via the net but it will not be a large percentage of movie sales in 5 years.