CES Final Thoughts From Digital Bits

[hyperdine]

Nice summary from thedigitalbits.com today. It's so good I almost posted the entire thing

"Looking at the HD-DVD side of things, I'm a bit puzzled. Over the years, I've spoken to many people who work in the consumer electronics sector, who have said that the main reason the hardware manufacturers were eager for a new high-def format to take off, was that the profit margins had dropped out of the DVD player business about 5 or 6 years in. Why did this happen? Because $50 and $100 players suddenly flooded the market from Chinese manufacturers. If you're a hard-working parent in Cincinatti, and your kids want a DVD player for their room, are you going to buy them a $50 Lite-on from WalMart, or a $300 Sony? Probably the $50 player, right? So how can getting those same manufactures involved in making cheaper HD-DVD players in the format's first year help the format long-term? In the short term, I can absolutely see this as beneficial because it could encourage more people to buy HD-DVD players... but in the long term, doesn't it hurt the major hardware manufacturers' bottom lines? The business wisdom of this just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

On the Blu-ray side... well, it's pretty hard not to be impressed by the selection of titles that are on the way - titles that are exclusive to the format. The Rock, Crimson Tide, Cars, both Pirates films, Casino Royale, Ronin, A Few Good Men, Rocky Balboa, Jerry Maguire, Dirty Dancing, Ice Age, Master & Commander, Man on Fire, Edward Scissorhands, Predator, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Independence Day, I, Robot, Cast Away, A Night at the Museum, The Usual Suspects, Dances with Wolves, The Silence of the Lambs, Platoon, The Graduate, Battle of Britain, A Bridge Too Far, To Live & Die in L.A., A Fistful of Dollars, Bull Durham... how does HD-DVD compete with that? If Universal had announced E.T., Back to the Future, Jaws, Jurassic Park (and I'll admit that I honestly expected them to announce at least one of those titles this week)... okay, maybe. But they didn't. As we used to say back in the early days of DVD, a home video format is only as good the films you can watch on it. It was true then, and it's true now. It's all about the movies. I love the fact that Bandai Visual is releasing anime on HD-DVD, but anime has a VERY limited appeal to most consumers. Frankly, I think the best thing that happened to HD-DVD this week was New Line announcing that they'll support HD-DVD via Warner's THD disc, potentially bringing Lord of the Rings to both formats. But when you look at that list of Blu-ray exclusive titles... man. What makes this list even more striking are the titles that AREN'T there, but that you know are probably on the way. With The Rock and Crimson Tide coming, can Armageddon be far behind? Sony says they're doing Ghost Rider this year... but does anyone think they won't release the Spider-Man movies on Blu-ray in 2007, what with Spidey 3 arriving in theaters in a few months? What about Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, Starship Troopers, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction? And what about the bigger titles that are probably several years off, but that will almost certainly still be Blu-ray exclusive - titles like Alien, Aliens, Die Hard, True Lies, The Abyss, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the older Bond films, classic Disney animated titles, the bigger Pixar films, the Star Wars films?"

Some really great points from a reliable and objective source!