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Blu-ray to the world - "We've won!"
Author: Brett ThomasPublished: 8th January 2008
Blu-ray Disc Association leader Andy Parsens of Pioneer Electronics. He even looks like Dr. Breen...
The HD-DVD press conference here at CES was cancelled, and the Blu-ray conference on Monday evening had one solid message: "We won."
As mentioned, the raw sales figures worldwide showed BR discs selling double. More importantly, this wasn't a spike - the entire thirteen week quarter showed these figures to be fairly consistent. In fact, they're continually growing.
To add insult to injury , a last minute addition to the BR Disc Association panel was none other than Ron Sanders, President of Warner Brothers Home Video. For those who missed the news, Warner Brothers announced that it was breaking rank and defecting from HD-DVD to produce Blu-ray only, despite the large possibility of a lawsuit for breach of contract by the HD-DVD group and the format's main hardware producer, Toshiba.
The press conference itself focused mostly on how the format was made successful - illustrations of consumer education, content variety and advertising campaigns broke up the individual speeches. Very little of the conference focused on the future of the medium, but the question and answer sessions shed some light on it.
A couple of the questions skirted around the DRM discussion - Blu-ray Plus content protection was more of a squid in the corner that nobody wanted to ask outright. However, news wasn't really all that bleak about it - Bob Chapek, President of Walt Disney Home Entertainment, mentioned that DRM would be the decision of the individual studios, and mentioned that many studios (including Disney) are realising that a hard-disc copy or transcoding to a portable version (the PS3 to PSP was used as an example) can and even should be considered as part of a consumer's right.
When it came to discussion about region encoding, however, the entire panel was unable to answer. The question was almost embarrassing, being as it was asked last year and met the same response. A follower of the format asked about why the region encoding, which is not published and is actually quite odd, is not considered a monopolistic action - the consortium has very few studios who do not do simultaneous worldwide release, and so it can be reasoned that there's very little purpose to it but "to restrict free trade between world citizens."
Andy Parsons, Senior VP of Pioneer Electronics (and the leader of the Blu-ray Disc Association, chuckled and looked mildly put off by the question. As he looked to the rest of the panel for assistance, he was met with none other than blank stares.
"We may have to just wait and see how things develop regarding that over the coming year," he responded.
"Oh? You told me the same thing last year. Shall we table the discussion another time and pick it up next year," the reporter asked.
Nervous laughter from the audience and a couple members of the panel could be heard for a good ten seconds before Parsons responded - "Yes, well then, next year. Now, onto other things, the next question will be the last for the night..."
In this reporter's humble opinion, the format war may indeed be over now that only two studios (Universal and Paramount) even support HD-DVD in any form. However, we may have a little while to go before we should welcome our new benefactors with open arms...
Do you have a thought on the sales news, the WB defectors, the conference itself or the dodged questions? There's lots of room to voice your opinion in our forums. We won't even table the discussion.
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Comments (29)
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MPAA/RIAA TAKE NOTE PLEASE
Currently, I don't see why I should spend £15-£25 per disc to upgrade my collection to HD, most upscalers do a pretty damn fine job!
/mspaint for the win!
This was not supposed to happen, however, if the Top Dog of BR is from Pioneer, then i don't mind so much.
Sam
THAT was awesome. :) It was exactly how I felt during the conference.
My biggest question is always whats abour pron:D To my knowledge Sony forbit all porn to be released on BR so what about those 900 billion dollar market?
Begins with 'G' and ends with 'oogle'.
Linkage
Damn, are prices really that high across the pond?! I pay, during new release week, about $20 for BR discs. Some can be had even cheaper OL instead of brick n' mortar. Back-catalog stuff tends to be steeper, but really depends on the studio/title.
Depends on your TV, and more importantly, your disposable income! From a technical standpoint, upscalers only do so much, as well all know. 480P jumped to 1080I/P; i.e. adding info to what isn't there to begin with. Even the best Faroudja upscaling chip-integrated players can't compete with true high-def, obviously. When I plunged to BR the difference was like night and day, and that's with a 9-year old Samsung CRT HDTV!
The prices will drop soon enough. The real question is, can ya really wait? :)
I though that guy looked familiar
:? Suing Paramount for possibly exercising their rights regarding the clause set as part of the contract, i.e. ability to opt-out?
With the current 3-for-2 sales on discs at places like HMV they work out at around £10-15 each depending on the titles you choose for your selection.
I have both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD now, but it's still a shame as I try to not support Sony and their evil ways where possible.
Still, maybe we can once and for all declare a winner which will eventually provide a clear choice for consumers and hopefully drive prices down due to manufacturers not sitting on the fence and charging huge sums in case they got their choice wrong and need to recoup the costs.
As for the headline news, I hope they'll get Paramount and Universal on board next. It's pretty imminent and dammit, it's about time we get to see Transformers on Blu-Ray!
I want that too, was gutted when paramount switched as I was ready to buy as soon as it came out.
You should have seen how fast everyone rushed into our TV room when we chucked that on in the office. I've never seen Bindi move so quick!
From that standpoint it will be interesting to see what happens in the coming future.
For myself, I've bought all of ooh 5? 6? DVD movies to date, so the chances of me picking up a new drive for anything but data storage are pretty minimal and I don't really see BR as becoming cheap in that regard any time soon. (nor really being a revolution like holographic could be in a few years)
I never thought HD-DVD would be the victor, though I did think it would get strung out a bit longer, letting the prices on the players drop a little more. Damn you Warner! *shakes fist in an epic sort of fashion*
After having a think about it though, I can't say I'm particularly fussed. I never planned on investing heavily in the films in either format (just renting, not about to replace ~500 DVDs for £15+ each), and after I flog the 7 HD-DVDs that came with my player, I would have ended up spending about the same as I would have anyway on a decent upscaling DVD player. So I've gone from "oh FFS just my luck", and nearly putting the lot on ebay (looks like I would have actually made a tenner out of it actually) to "meh, whatever" in the space of 48 hours :D
As far as I know sony only banned porn production in their own BR pressing plants. Any non-sony BR plants can produce porn until the cows come home
I think whats more telling though, is that there were two racks for the HD movies (combined, two half racks each so the same movies were side by side) but more like 20-25 racks of DVD's.
Who cares about physical media for Porn? You know, we are in 2008, most porn is consumed via streaming video or downloaded.
When Porn went VHS it WAS a big deal. The only other way to consume porn was on theatres, not on the privacy of your home. But we now have teh internets and everybody knows that "teh internets is for pron"