conversation with R. Enderle

[radagast]

I thought I would share this with all of you.

R.E.

"To be fair the HD-DVD stuff was fully cooked and it did come out of the DVD working group, it really was supposed to be the follow on to DVD. Sony thought they could do better and started a war. So, while I agree, Toshiba could have done better, it was stupid for Sony to enter knowing they couldn't either hit the needed price points or get the damn thing done in time. They damn near put the company under and I'm still convinced the market is now going to move to downloads and away from optical (Jobs appears to agree). One of those lessons...

**** Rob Enderle

My response:

"The problem with the "DVD Forum" is that they appointed themselves as the "governing authority". How convenient.

There is apparently some "revisionist history" going on in regards to the history of which started first, hd-dvd or blu-ray. I say that because I contacted someone who, as an insider, has been around for a while and has watched the format war. His reponse to my asking for a brief history was as follows:

"Sony started thinking high-def first. I heard Warren Liebefarb give a speech a year or two ago in which he said that Sony first approached him about a high-def version of DVD around 1999, when it became clear that DVD was going to be a huge success. The Japanese market was already embracing high-def, so it made sense to start thinking about a high-def upgrade to DVD. But Lieberfarb and Toshiba weren't all that interested. They didn't want to start clouding the success of DVD by talking about a new format already. They wanted to wait a few years to reap the benefits of DVD. So Sony went off and started making their own plans. By the time the DVD camp started thinking about high-def, Sony was already planning an end run around the DVD Forum. They'd gotten screwed on the disc structure royalties for DVD, and they weren't going to let that happen a second time with high-def."

This agrees with every other history of the format war I have read. Sony and Philips started working on Blu-ray first. There were a lot of technical problems to overcome. When digital television was approved, along with the HD standards, Toshiba realized thet Sony and Philips were going to beat them to the market and Toshiba would lose all those wonderful royalties they were getting with standard DVDs. Toshiba developed an simpler format that could be brought to market sooner and use existing DVD production lines, rather than cooperate with Sony and Philips. Hd-dvd was able to come to the market sooner (it was simpler to develop) because it was technically inferior to Blu-ray. For Toshiba it was all or nothing. Well, it's going to be nothing. Because of Toshiba refusing to accept Blu-ray as a standard, and rushing hd-dvd to market, Sony and Philips also had to bring Blu-ray to market sooner than they liked. It's crazy to criticize Blu-ray for being an unfinished spec, when Toshiba is the reason it wasn't. However, similar things happened with DVD. Dual layer DVD-9s came later and were not playable in early DVD players. DTS audio was a later feature as well. Where were all the Blu-ray nay-sayers then?

On the subject of downloads, there are plenty of people, including myself, who are convinced that it will be a long time before downloads are able to match the quality of Blu-ray. Like the following to links show:


http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=959

http://www.tvpredictions.com/zdnet011808.htm


The problem is that just because the end result is a signal that is either 720p or 1080p, that doesn't mean the data has all the resolution available. There are plenty of examples of this in the audio industry in regards to digitizing audio. A good analogy would be taking a 78rpm record and recording it straight to a CD recorder. Sure the result is a recording that is 16 bit, 44.1 khz PCM, but that doesn't mean it's "CD quality".

B.R.