April 23, 2007 10:58 AM PDT
Blu-ray besting its high-def DVD rival
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HD DVD backers promise 200 movies
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As format war heats up, Blu-ray accounted for nearly three out of four high-definition discs sold in March, according to sales figures.
The story "Blu-ray besting its high-def DVD rival" published April 23, 2007 at 10:58 AM is no longer available on CNET News.
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No, it's looking like Blu-Ray is anything but "DOA". It could always die later if people found that they cared about DRM (most don't), but I wouldn't bet on it.
it?
Finally we have some content to justify the enormous screens in
our living rooms. The DRM will go away as soon as content
makers realize that people do PAY for content that is worth
watching. Only when content is so ridiculously overpriced does
the DRM make sense.
Do you really want to pay $30.00 for Click in HD? Come on
content makers, make some content that I WANT TO PAY FOR!
Sure the foreign piracy market is strong but you know what, the
content doesn't make much sense to them anyway, why pretend
that they represent lost revenue.
Why do you think there is an HD-DVD camp in the first place.
They are looking for the most absolutely cheap way to deliver
overrated content. At least Blu-Ray gives us other benefits in
capacity and performance. DRM or no, if we are buying good
content we are all happy. Bad content just drives the whole
opportunity into the ground.
The content producing industry should stop complaining about
piracy and do something about content quality. The medium for
high quality content delivery is now available. Fill it up properly
please. WE WILL BUY GOOD CONTENT! As for crap content,
buyer beware, maker despair. Pirates will eat your lunch.
I could not care less about DRM on my movies. I BUY a LEGIT copy, and it's mine. There are programs out there that let you make a backup copy, so what's the issue?
Either format will be good for maybe 5-8 years before the next big thing hits... Those format I predict will have DRM in some form on them.
There are better windmills, Senior Quixote.
Some of us have a full 1080P hi def 7.1 set up and want to be able to watch and record HD content, and then move it off our HD Tivos to a format that will not take 10 disks to store 1 HD movie. For US, 10 disks per movie is NOT good enough.
And back to another post, the implications of DRM are again, irrelevant.
BluRay will eventually win out, but it might be a while, both sides have alot invested... Ask Philips about how important it is to set the standard. I have a BluRay burner, and it has worked flawlessly. I have installed 6 in the last 2 months on customer's systems as a backup device, replacing Travans and Revs (none of which I installed). In that role they work great and fill a need. Once the media drops a bit (already has) more, more units, economy of scale...
The PS3 will decide this battle and it's doing so already. When you aready have a hi-def player in the house why get another one?
Blu-ray? Thanks but no thanks.
I predicted that Blu-Ray would outsell HD-DVD about a year ago, when the first drives were released, primarily because of the significant advantage in storage space (particularly if/when the ~100 GB disks hit the streets in volume), which is one of the main reasons that VHS killed consumer Betamax (technically, professional Beta was a success in the commercial world). The relatively small differential in drive/media costs, will likely go away as volume ramps up, if history is any guide, and if these initial sales numbers are any indication, Blu-Ray may have already won. With PS3s now selling in Costco, it appears that volume production of players is not going to be an issue.
The vast majority of consumers could care less about DRM, as long as they can play a movie on whatever player winds up attached to the giant HDTV they bought because the Joneses next door just did. Since real HD content such as Blu-Ray makes it pretty obvious that there really is a noticeable difference in quality and the viewing experience over a standard DVD, this stuff is going to continue to sell in increasing numbers. "Con"cast, DIRECTV, and other cable and satellite providers are having to scramble to try to increase the distribution of 720p and 1080i (with 1080p, eventually) content, Blu-Ray is already starting to eat into their lunches, too. We are living in very interesting times, indeed.
Well, time to sit back, relax, and enjoy Casino Royale in Blu-Ray on my 120-inch projection system, my friends. What's in your wallet? Not much left in mine, at the moment ;)
All the Best,
Joe Blow
Why you ask.
Take programs for example, automata theory says that a program is merely an integer, the the set of all programs is a proper subset of the integers => not everything is computable.
The key point here is that it is a number. Yet, they are protected by copyright. :)~
Yet according to Wikipedia, his involvement was quite a bit more involved than simply stealing the encryption keys off a licensee server. Just where do you get your information, anyways? Personally, I'd tend to believe his programming skills over your contention that he's nothing more than a thief that hit the DVD encryption mother lode, particularly since it's believed that he had two others that actually developed the DeCSS hack itself by decompiling a version of the Xing DVD player software.
One of the great disadvantages that both of these formats face is that they provide zero benefit unless the owner owns a reasonably large-sized HDTV. At smaller TV sizes, the quality difference is trivial relative to upscanned DVD, and the picture is identical on an SDTV.
DVD had a huge advantage when it hit the marketplace. Using the exact same TV, you could get a vastly superior picture by buying a DVD player. Even today, I know half a dozen people that just bought their first DVD player in the last year, and you can get a player for $30 these days.
Beyond that, DVD stored 8 times what a CD held on a single layer (the new formats are only 5 times that). The scale factor here is just completely out of whack. These formats are already too small to be particularly viable as backup storage mediums, and at present are far less economical than tape.
Even in the software space, it's only in the last year that it's started getting common for software to be released on DVD. Even then, it's not very common. BluRay for software distribution is easily 5 years out, if not more. By then, how much of the pie is going to move over to digital distribution?
The message is the war is just beginning and these numbers cannot be taken seriously yet. Most people have better things to say about HD-DVD than Blu-Ray and many people just plain HATE Blu-Ray and Sony. As such I think HD-DVD will survive this as a stronger media.
However, until the players are under $100 the war hasn't even started...
The PS3 has basically replaced my upscaling DVD player, become a media hub for viewing HD Home videos and MP3s from the couch and is my sole Blu-ray player.
From where I stand, I am considering purchasing a Blu-ray burner in the future and right now there are several to choose from as well as software support in OS X in the form of Toast Titanium 8. There is currently no support for HD-DVD burners on the mac.
I don't understand this irrational hate of all things Sony.
Neither platform has sold enough to be make or break at this point, so at this point they're both just spinning the numbers.
- One-trick pony??!?
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by Redsand7
April 25, 2007 1:16 PM PDT
- I think it's interesting how everyone attaches Blu-Ray to Sony and compares the format war to Betamax - when in fact, from a company support perspective, Blu-Ray has more supporting member companies on the board than HD-DVD does...
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Reply to this comment
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See all 33 Comments >>Blu-ray is approved and promoted by the Blu-ray Disc (BDA) association which currently has more than 100 members around the world, the most important and board directors are: DELL, HP, Hitachi, LG-Electronics, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK, Thomson, 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney, Texas Instruments, Sun Microsystems, the game giants Electronic Arts, and Vivendi Universal Games.
HD-DVD is endorsed and approved by the DVD Forum, and is promoted by the HD-DVD Promotion Group, which currently counts 63 member companies. Some of the most important are: Toshiba, Sanyo, NEC, Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, New Line Cinema and the Warner Bros Studios.
There is no question that the war is heating up, but I think that HD-DVD really missed an opportunity to put a significant lead on Blu-Ray with the launch of the first players, movie titles, etc. early in 2006 - only to see that perceived lead disappear in a seemingly short period of the few months both formats have been available from retailers (on-line and B&M).
If studios continue to release titles on the schedule they have paced for 2007, Blu-Ray will not only have a significant lead in available movies (and let's face it, content is always king) - but the manufacturers releasing Blu-Ray players give consumers several different options for movie viewing (outside of HD-DVDs Toshiba-only solution) and are continuing to drive down costs in both manufacturing of players and discs (I am able to purchase newly released Blu-Ray titles from Amazon for $20-28, same price as the HD-DVD releases of the same title - so if production costs are more for Blu-Ray, it doesn't appear to be affecting consumer pricing). In addition, while there have been several exclusive HD-DVD titles that make the format compelling, the Studios solely backing Blu-Ray certainly have much more control of "must have" titles that there is no question we will not see on anything other than Blu-Ray for the forseeable future (Sony, Disney, etc.).
If the HD-DVD camp had really wanted to put a stranglehold on the market they should have negotiated with Microsoft to include an HD-DVD drive in the Xbox 360 (or more importantly, in the newly released Xbox 360 Elite)... missing this boat again only further adds to the potential question in consumers minds that in spite of a year's worth of production efforts, sales in 2007 seem to be favoring Blu-Ray over HD-DVD.
No question that only time will tell, but the early indicators clearly seem to be pointing in Blu-Ray's favor.