After Time Warner Inc.’s announcement today that they’ve chosen to support Blu-ray exclusively, here’s the current breakdown of studio support for each format—and things aren’t looking good for HD DVD.
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So the future is tilting more and more toward Sony’s Blu-ray format, it seems. Honestly, though, will anyone be buying movies on discs by the time this is all settled?
[8:14pm 1/4/08: Updated to include more studios pointed out in the comments below.]
“Warner Bros to back Blu-ray DVD format exclusively” [Reuters]
(Photo: Getty)
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I don’t quite understand why people are waiting for a $500 dual format player when you can get a $100 HD-DVD if you watch the sales, and a $3-400 Blu-Ray player… Is it just the space and convenience?
i thought a blu-ray disc could hold up to 50gigs? i thought that was the number 1 reason to adopt it. think about having every season of the sopranos all on just one disc. but then again, when your ONE disc gets scratched, your f’d. which side of the sword do you prefer?
Call me kooky, but just as I still buy CDs instead of iTunes, I don’t plan to give up buying movies on disc. Beyond the DRM thing, the physical disc is (counterintuitively, since it’s more than 5″ across) just more PORTABLE than a download-based system. Right now the wife and I watch DVDs everywhere from the big LCD in the living room (upconverted, of course) to the ancient 27″ TV down by the exercycle to the small TV in the bedroom to our laptops when we’re on the semi-go. (While she also watches downloaded video on her iPod, the whole idea gives me a headache.) Couple that with my love of DVD extras and I’m pretty darn happy in the disk-y present and not at all psyched about our all-downloaded future, especially a future around fallible hard drives.
Now excuse me while I go feed the horse and chop some wood….
Download? Yuck. And what do you have to have in the way of network and storage space and connectivity to get a movie from the Internet to play on your high-def TV and surround sound? I don’t want to be involved. I rent movies I don’t want to own, and buy the ones I do. Then watch them whenever I want. I don’t need to account passwords or monthly bills to be part of some movie download club.
Oh and porn? Do you really want to see the pores and all the pubes and pube stubble in high definition? I think not. Porn is something that should remain low-res. Otherwise the fantasy becomes too real.
What a shame.
The region locked format wins.
I would have liked to order discs from overseas and been able to watch them. Too bad.
They should just combine and form Blu-HD-DVD-Ray format and stop this retarded “war”.
That or form voltron whichever comes first.
This sucks, I hate Sony cause u can’t trust any shit they come out with, once they win they will probably start implementing more DRM into the movies. HD DVD is region free, new discs will have larger capacity, HD DVD discs work in old players when you flip most new discs, it also plays in 1080P now, is cheaper, and already is standardized across the manufacturers so that the online content works with all players.
Dammit, lets bury the argument that porn will win the format war this time around, right now. Back in the VHS vs DVD war, the internet wasn’t a factor when considering distribution. Now thanks to the internet (i mean, that’s what its for, right?), the stuff is widely available. No one hardly buys the stuff on DVD when its readily available online for free.
Not that I..y’know…
I’m totally uninterested in any of these physical formats. I’m happy downloading HD video files online and will continue to do so.
I’ll start caring when my job starts paying me enough to afford a somewhat decent HDTV… thanks bush economy / sub-prime meltdown
Hopefully the end of the format war will mean people will understand the format and technology better. This comment thread is chalk full of so much wrong information I don’t know where to start.
@ajn007:
Won’t help.
And there’s not much misinformation here.
The key points where BD and HD-DVD differ are:
1) Capacity
2) Copy protection.
Most people can barely tell the difference between DVD and HD formats as it is. You can’t produce higher quality than the original recording. Short of CGI and other post-production effects, this means that you don’t get much better than DVD-quality video for most movies anyway. This makes quality a nonissue. One could also point out that most people own Sorny and MagnaBox TVs, in addition to those amazing JPL and Panosonic receivers. $100 HDTVs and $5 7.1 stereo systems don’t exactly show the difference.
Capacity is only important for storage – and BD-R drives are so ridiculously expensive, as are discs, that this is also a nonissue.
Copy Protection (/Region Locking) is a much bigger issue. If you play a BD on your Sorny TV with your Panosonic system, you’re never going to get anything more than DVD quality. You’re actually going to get *LESS* than DVD quality, since the player will automagically downgrade the signal. The reason this hasn’t generated many complaints (yet) is because, well, the people who can afford Blu-Ray players are people who can also afford expensive, compliant TVs and receivers.
Blu-Ray also allows the studios to make your player worthless with updates to the BD keys. I shouldn’t even need to state why this violates many, many laws, including Magnuson-Moss.
There’s a shitstorm brewing, and it will hit just after BD players have reached sane selling prices. By then, it will be too late.
I am an HD-DVD user, and I love it. My only problem is that the
studios have really screwed themselves with this stupid format war.
Now, I can’t buy movies by certain studios, and they, as a result, lose
out on the revenue from a certain segment of the market. While it’s
obvious Sony pictures has a real stake in who wins this format war, I
can’t say that anyone else really stands to gain anything. I can’t
think of any precendent for this moronic decision on the part of the
studios. Why forego a revenue stream from one segment to get exclusive
rights to another, smaller one? It boggles my mind.
Here’s my question: Who the hell needs to see Sponge Bob Square Pants in Hi-Def? I can see certain things benefitting from being put out on Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, but come on, some things just don’t warrent the treatment…
Does the consumer net any gain from a format war? No. We net gains from competition over content, including its quality, features, and the media involved (tape, disc, download, etc.), but not over similar formats.
People without DVD players watch movies from or on DVDs. People without CD players listen to recorded music from or on CDs. Make that easy to do with HD, and you will win. Right now, both formats are niche players, like SACD and DVD-A (both of which economically fail against vinyl).
Oh my… I picked a winner in a format war for once?!?
I need a moment…
I work in a company that makes some of the cases and artwork for the porn industry. I can say that 95% of our next gen releases are HD and maybe 5% Blu-ray. One of the reasons why HD is being used is that Disney is part of the companies that controls BD. Disney is not allowing any of the porn companies to make movies on BD if they can help it. The ones that are being made on BD are from pirate or small shops running BD disks.
So as far as porn companies like Vivid, Digital Playground and PHE go its HD over BD. As regular dvd’s go we still make about 20,000 dvd covers and cases everyday so I don’t think Internet streams and downloads are as big of a piece of the pie as people think.
@RvLeshrac:
You’re spot on about the copy protection stuff. However, I’m going to slightly disagree with you on image quality.
The comment that got me going in the first place was someone up there who said that HD-DVD had better image quality than Blu-Ray. Poppycock. Anyone who says that just doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about. 1080p is 1080p in both formats. It’s the same thing. In fact, I met an HD-DVD rep and he told me that the only difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is the extra features (more specifically the HDi functionality of HD-DVD). He said image and audio quality are the same in both formats (though the latter is debatable and certainly depends on your equipment).
As for what you were saying about image quality, you may be correct in saying that most people can’t tell the difference (thought I’d wager that more people couldn’t tell the difference between HD audio than HD video). But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference between DVD and HD. If a studio doesn’t bother to do a new HD transfer of the original film negative and uses their original MPEG encoding, sure, there isn’t going to be a difference. But I’m pretty sure all of these HD disks are new transfers. And I don’t know exactly what film’s “resolution” is, but I’m pretty sure it would come out to be more than 480 lines (standard DVD resolution). It is hard to make a direct comparison like that because film is analog. But I certainly have noticed the difference. And if someone’s got the TV for it, unless they are blind, I’m going to say they would notice the difference too.
I’m not so sure that we disagree, but I wanted to make that point.
@Nemesis_Enforcer:
Interesting. I read somewhere (maybe it was this thread, I don’t remember) that because of the internet, porn is not going to have the influence in this format war as they did between VHS and Betamax, or even the adoption of DVD. As I understand it, the vast majority of porn is sold through downloads, people aren’t buying disks anymore (this may be a bit of a overstatement, though I’d love to see the numbers).
If this is the case, and if history holds true, porn will be more responsible for paving the way for the popularity of HD downloads, I suppose.
@ajn007:
You need a decent HDTV to notice the difference between DVD and HD (BD, HD-DVD) formats. Most people don’t have decent HDTVs.
Image and audio quality are, assuming you have a compliant TV, the same for now. BD offers more room for growth in that area… but not until studios begin using far more expensive (Sony) equipment. For the filmmakers that refuse to use all-digital recording (Spielberg, Lucas, Smith) (for not-bad reasons), they just aren’t going to see any difference at all without a forced switch.
And no studio is ever going to be able to tell Spielberg or Lucas how they ‘need’ to film a movie. As insane as they are, they’re like tiny gods. They aren’t the only filmmakers like this, either, and more are generated every year.