Universal needs to see beyond the line, truth is MS 'hates' HD discs

[Petra]

Universal as a major Hollywood studio, should realize that they're just mere puppet of MS. MS intention was never to win the HD war but to limit the HD-disc growth until their master plan, HD-download becomes reality.

Universal needs to realize this and end the war RIGHT NOW!!!.

http://www.joystiq.com/2006/02/17/mi...d-dvd-to-fail/

http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/15/s...sidents-discs/

Microsoft wants both Blu-ray and HD DVD to lose. You see, before Microsoft and Intel backed HD DVD, Toshiba was just about the only major consumer hardware brand backing HD DVD. Now, since Microsoft and Intel have hopped on to the HD DVD bandwagon and at least dragged HP part of the way there, HD DVD has become a much more viable option

Microsoft knows that even with its and Intel's support, the standard isn't strong enough to beat Blu-ray in the marketplace per se. However, with them on board, HD DVD is just strong enough so that there's a good chance that neither standard will be able to claim a clear victory..."
"How is that good for Microsoft?

Microsoft really has nothing to gain from either format winning. Just listen to any of Gates' recent interviews and how he talks about discs as a necessary evil until the world is ready for media-free distribution. That said, Microsoft has much to gain from both formats losing. Think back to the format war between DVD-Audio and SACD. Both formats lost and it was a computer company that stepped in to become the new center of the digital music universe

[JTK]

"Money talks, and bull@#$% walks."

Great post and thread Petra.

Again it's simply going to come down to some suit somewhere looking down the road at the prospects of another big holiday season, where the PS3 is a year old, a bunch of new BD hardware is out there while the same festering, crappy Toshiba and cheap Chinese HD-DVD hardware is floating out there...someone's going to see the BD/HD-DVD sales ratios...and someone's going to finally have an epiphany of common sense.

Hell, even greed ought to be sufficient enough reason to simply get past this nonsense and at least go the way of Paramount and Warner, if nothing else.

Personally, I have very little doubt that we're going to see some kind of Universal BD prescence in time for Holiday Season 2007.

There's just too much money they're missing out on by snubbing BD, even now to say nothing about another 6-12 months or so.

All that has to happen is for current trends to even hold, let alone if they head more upwards for BD, as I expect them to. That's all that has to happen for x number of months until someone gets a clue.

[What'sHD]

Downloads may be the way of the (far) future but I dont see MS leading the charge. They will try but I reckon apple will lead, based on current trends.

Whoever wins in d/ls, they will have to wait at least until after 2015, IMO. There is something about slipping a disc out of a shiny package and popping it in that appeals to everyday consumers.

When the (napster + itunes) teens of today become the HT nuts of 2020 and beyond, only then will the majority of mass-market be made up of download-friendly people (as opposed to shiny disc owner-types).

[JTK]

Originally Posted by What'sHD

Downloads may be the way of the (far) future but I dont see MS leading the charge. They will try but I reckon apple will lead, based on current trends.

Whoever wins in d/ls, they will have to wait at least until after 2015, IMO. There is something about slipping a disc out of a shiny package and popping it in that appeals to everyday consumers.

When the (napster + itunes) teens of today become the HT nuts of 2020 and beyond, only then will the majority of mass-market be made up of download-friendly people (as opposed to shiny disc owner-types).

^^ Anyone want to place any wagers or timetables on how long it will take to get FIOS like fiber optic networks out to the boonies and up in the mountains?

The answer to that question will give you the approximate timetable as to when digital downloads MIGHT take over.

Keep in mind: You have a lot of people that prefer to own something concrete for their money .

[Iceman_II]

The big winner in d/l is GOOGLE! They are positioning themselves to be a major player, whats in it for them? hmmm... you do a google search on "ski vacations" at work. That evening, while you are getting your "seinfeld fix" you conveniently see many commercials for what? You guessed it, ski vacations. Its all about targeted advertising, and privacy be damned, all they have to do is put that they will be datamining from your search habits, and because they are the 800lb gorilla, we will all line up to led to the slaughter (melodramatic, yes, but I couldn't think of any other cliche )

Microsoft will win because the only way this can happen is by using their "lossey as hell" hightly compressive codecs. If the disc format stays around, their codecs will eventually be ignored, there is just too much space on BD to put up with the crappy M$ PQ. They are backing HD-DVD and using it as a test bed to work on the codecs they will be selling to google.

Think its not happening? Think again.

Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.

And this push started back in 2004, shortly after some research papers were published about "GloVE" (Global Video Environment)

Too darned coincedental for my taste.

Prepare yourself for GTV

[bluearth]

The Xbox Live movie download service shows Microsoft's true intentions

It goes against common sense to have a Xbox movie download service and a Xbox HD-DVD add-on competing for sales against eachother. Microsoft doesnt lack common sense. So two things you can learn from this:

- Microsoft doesnt care much about HD-DVD disc sales

- Microsoft is very interested in HD movie/episode download services

Ever wonder why PS3 doesnt have a movie download service and probably never will? Sony wants consumers to buy blu-ray discs, not downloadable HD movies and TV episodes.

Has Batman Begins appeared on Xbox movie download yet? If so then it's pretty much assured M$ has made $ deals with Warner. I'm sure the same is true with Univeral.

But if Blu-ray can somehow get full suport from either of these studios the format war would be over in a matter of months...but due to Microsoft's hidden intentions this is going to get dragged out for at least another year....

[onanie]

Great post!

Universal and Warner are probably aware of Microsoft's hidden motives. Are they embracing online content distribution already? Could online distribution be the lesser evil to them than a "Sony" controlled form of distribution? Margins are likely to be smaller when selling to an online crowd, and the audience limited to the fortunate few who have real broadband (let alone HDTVs) - they'd have to hate Sony very much to sit out on the profits until online HD becomes viable.

And Warner is only too happy to create an artificial need for a combo disk just to have a token patent in the ongoing format war - they will drag BD down with HD DVD if they could make money at the same time. Anyone need Superglue(tm)?

[ceros]

Let's say online distribution becomes mainstream. How much space would you need for an HD movie? Let's say it's around 20GB and let's say the average person will buy 50 movies, a lot less than the number of HD movies that are available on either format. That equals to 1000GB. A 750GB hard drive sales for around $350 on newegg.com. Not bad considering it's a lot less than what you pay for the least expensive hddvd or bluray player. So a hard drive and some other components makes up a player with a hard drive, an ethernet port and/or a wireless card. It basically amounts to around the same price as you would pay for a bluray player.

So now you have a player with a hard drive. Now it's time to download your movies. With current broadband services in just the U.S. alone, 2 or 3 movies will be downloaded and ready to play on a good day. Ok doesn't sound too bad. Then you get to the maximum storage allowed on the hard drive, but you want more and you don't want to delete other movies just to make space. Well you only bought a player with a hard drive. It probably came with only one slot with one hard drive so you can't just add another one. You're only choice then would be to get another hard drive with a higher capacity and pay more money. Than you got to either redownload all the movies you had on the other hard drive or figure out some way to transfer the movies from the old hard drive to the new hard drive. But maybe you already had a hard drive with the largest capacity to date. So now you have to keep switching hard drives when you want to watch a certain movies. What if the hard drive failed? You're going to have to replace it. Maybe it happened during the warranty period, or you purchased an extended warranty or a replacement plan. You get another player. What if the warranty expired when the hard drive failed. You're out of luck, you're going to have to buy another player or hard drive. On top of that, all or most of you're movies are lost on the old hard drive and you have to redownload you're movies. At current speeds in the US, it's going to be a while.

This is just the problems anyone might encounter on a player with a hard drive. Computers are far more prone to problems than a player. For some, this seems trivial, but for others, they either don't have the knowledge or don't have time. To the average joe consumer, it's far more beneficial to get a player with a warranty and the movies on disc. It's more of a burden to get a player with a hard drive that has limited space and could potentialy fail.

It's just like what What'sHD said. Online distribution of HD is not going to be mainstream anytime soon. We're going to need to have 1Gbps guaranteed download speeds at least and 1TB hard drives need to be available for something like $25.

[Iceman_II]

You are thinking too narrowly, and you are missing the point, its not about online distribution of something you can store, its about video on demand, its about Internet TV, its about targeted advertising.... in none of these scenerios does storage play a factor. online delivery of HD content is just the tip, and this whole format war is a proving ground for M$ to work on their crap codecs while keeping enough confusion going so neither format wins big, and the public will look at M$ as a solution to all the HD confusion.... don't think small, I can gaurantee you that Mr. Gates isn't!

[ceros]

Originally Posted by Iceman_II

You are thinking too narrowly, and you are missing the point, its not about online distribution of something you can store, its about video on demand, its about Internet TV, its about targeted advertising.... in none of these scenerios does storage play a factor. online delivery of HD content is just the tip, and this whole format war is a proving ground for M$ to work on their crap codecs while keeping enough confusion going so neither format wins big, and the public will look at M$ as a solution to all the HD confusion.... don't think small, I can gaurantee you that Mr. Gates isn't!

Well I was thinking about online rentals so it can be counted as video on demand. You have a good point about IPTV and targeted advertising. Wasn't thinking about that. Still though, I don't think this would have an effect on the adoption of bluray or hddvd, nor will it cause both formats to fail.

[Iceman_II]

Think big, think corrupt....

BD does not need microsoft and their crappy codecs, the disks are big enough to do without.

HD-DVD however DOES need their codecs, and by fomenting this "conflict", not only does M$ keep either from gaining a critical mass to fend off future video on demand (neither has to fail, only be too weak to fend off IPTV), it also gives M$ a test bed where they can further develop their crap...

Most importantly, it gets people used to seeing and justifying M$'s crappy products - justification such as that garbage about how as a softer codec, it blends out the grain from the original film... If you say something loud enough, and often enough, people will eventually come to mistake it for the truth.

[What'sHD]

Originally Posted by Iceman_II

Think big, think corrupt....

BD does not need microsoft and their crappy codecs, the disks are big enough to do without.

HD-DVD however DOES need their codecs, and by fomenting this "conflict", not only does M$ keep either from gaining a critical mass to fend off future video on demand (neither has to fail, only be too weak to fend off IPTV), it also gives M$ a test bed where they can further develop their crap...

Most importantly, it gets people used to seeing and justifying M$'s crappy products - justification such as that garbage about how as a softer codec, it blends out the grain from the original film... If you say something loud enough, and often enough, people will eventually come to mistake it for the truth.

These are rather good points.

I should add that MS is a gorilla in the IPTV software market. So, their game-plan is quite clear. So, if we dont like what MS would have in store for us as high def lovers, we can do our best to ensure that highdef on disc takes hold.

If each adopter of BD gets 5 friends educated about and into BD (or high def on discs in general), we can make a difference. There can be a geometric effect.

I, for one, have my friends primed for the PS3 when it releases here in March. None of them have bought the 360 even though it was available (for free for a while). They want to buy only one next gen console and thanks, in part to my assiduous marketing, they are going with the PS3.

I suggest we all do the same. I do this at work too and there is a healthy pent-up demand for PS3 there now