I was scrolling through my daily alerts and what not coming across a few articles that touched on this topic and as what often happens I felt differently than everyone else about the situation.
Firstly let me explain what HD-DVD and Blu-ray are since everyone claims that nobody knows about them. HD-DVD (Toshiba) and Blu-ray (Sony) are an attempt to be the next generation of hard media, replacing today’s DVD. They are Higher capacity discs using a Blue laser in order to fit more information. This then allows them to have much greater detail and sound in the image (High Definition) as it were. So instead of watching your standard DVD which is highly compressed, you are able to watch HD content (1080p) from your disc player. If you had not already noticed, playing a DVD and then watching an HD program on your television can be quite different.
So this has brought up a lot of discussion for a few reasons.
1. A new media format is extremely lucrative
- Obviously which ever new format comes along and becomes a standard is going to gross a good amount of money. You can only see how many VHS tapes were made and now how many DVDs are being pumped out. And whoever owns that standard reaps the benefits.
2. Reminds us of the old Beta max vs. VHS wars
- Not incredibly long ago we had a similar format war in trying to choose between Beta Max (Sony) and VHS (I don’t know). VHS ending up winning mainly because of support for the industry. It was widely known that Beta Max was a superior format in almost all ways.
3. Brings into question how ready the world is for High Definition content.
- How many of you have HDTV ready televisions? How many of you are willing to plop down another $200+ or even $400+ on a player that plays the same movies your current player already can. Are you in need of HD content that badly?
4. A “format” battle occurs causing a separation in the industry which ends up hurting everyone. A battle which may never see an end.
- These format wars are not like the product wars in computers or the consoles today. This war is dirty and ugly and costs everyone money. Studios support one or the other format even if the majority of owners have the other format.
Final Thoughts
So to combine all my thoughts on this. I am not a supporting of either HD-DVD or Blu-ray yet. Some would say I do support Blu-ray because I own a PS3 but having Blu-ray was not the largest reason I got the PS3..it was more like an added bonus. I guess you could say that if Blu-ray won then I would be happy since there is no new hardware for me to buy; but if Blu-ray didn’t win I would still use my PS3 for everything else other than playing Blu-ray movies.
Go find out about High Definition formats. There are players all over store shelves and for god sakes if you have a Playstation 3 gaming console…you have had a Blu-ray player all along!!
Why not netflix some movies…no need to buy them yet:)
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Side Note:
Digital Distribution:
- One outcome of all of this that some are trying to pass is that before this war is over and we pick a new format that media will be distributed via the internet in HD and whatever in such high volumes that there simply won’t be a new format.
Let me explain why not only will this not happen but that it would be the absolute worst situation for consumers period.
1. Do these people realize that not only is there still a huge population of people without broadband internet but that even those with standard broadband internet (756k - 1.5MB) would take extremely long to download content? If a 3 minute long trailer in HD is 400MB how big do you expect entire movies to be? Well at least the 25GB-50GB allowed on HD Discs. Now anyone who has ever downloaded anything of any substantial size knows that even with top of the line connections that downloading 25GB would be a huge undertaking. Not only that….after downloading said huge file of a movie you then need hard drive space to store the movies. So in just 10 movies you have already filled up 250GB of space. How many of you have 250GB of space…..for just 10 movies!!!
2. Control!! If we allow this to become the future of how we receive content then we surrender all control to the studios and publishers. We will no longer be able to easily share our media, re-sell our media or anything else. We would be stuck with our copy forever wasting money. A studio would lose nothing and be gaining profits from one download! They would be so many anti-copy protections on these things that they would be rendered useless outside of the box that downloaded them in the first place. Oh ya…you’re gonna need to hook up some kind of downloading computer device to do all this in the first place!!!
Anyone take any of these things into consideration??
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Trust me, there will most definitely be a new real format and I am willing to be there will be several more afterwards as well.
Ciao Ciao
-Ed (boo)