Blu-Ray meeting next week. Fox titles and "key partner" announcement

[ethan]

Originally Posted by Zvi

I am rooting for HD DVD (being a BD supporter for very long time for the reasons you listed above). If not HD DVD I really, really doubt BD would be making any moves for improvment at all. And I am sure HD rease would've ben postponed 2-3 years or more. If not HD DVD there would be no baseline. Current HD TV channels suffer from overcompression, downresing and god knows what else. Still it's much better than normal DVDs, but true HD is something entirely different
And if not HD DVD there is or would be no fallback plan if Sony and others manage to screw up this BD thingy completely...
So, whatever helps and pushes BDA to get their act together and deserve our vallet votes works for me.

Competition is necessary, even in this fromat war form.

Look @ M$ for the clear example. Takes them years to roll next version of the product, comes out buggy as hell, then endless patches and missing features and delays and so on... They never bothered to update MS IE 6.0 till firefox started taking market share.

WTF are you talking about ?
Your point is fallacious, and even ironic. What happened is the exact opposite of that you say. THe DVD forum had chosen Toshiba's HDDVD which was a DVD9 and H264 format as an interim format before BluRay. The industry disagreed and started a mass exodus to the BluRay camp because of the stubborness of the DVD forum. Then Toshiba changed their specs at the last minute, supporting inferior capacity and bitrate, but same disc production. It was too late, the BluRay camp won the most hardware support, and also the best studio support because they forced competition to the DVD forum. Now, Toshiba is fighting like a cornered animal.

The BDA created a specification. They are superior in every point. Supporting both format is the best way to make both fail. Hddvd will die, make no mistake about that, but if it takes too long to die it will hold the whole industry back. BluRay will not fail but it will take some time to recover.

That's the whole concept of "Industry Standard"

Once hddvd dies, THEN the studios will compete for the best encoding techniques for bluray, and the hardware companies will compete for the best bluray players, just like what happened with DVD.

The competition is on 3 fronts :

1. the Standard
2. the hardware
3. the software

The Standard

The only way for the consumer to have the ability to "vote" as you say, is to have a standard set in stone, so that any hardware works with any software. You hope the best standard win of course. In that particular case, you seem to agree with me that Blu Ray is the obvious winner.

The Hardware

All the best hardware companies are all on BluRay's side, because they understand the importance of an industry standard. Toshiba is alone because they invested so much in hddvd patents, they have nothing more to loose and are receiving gobs of money from microsoft. Microsoft want both formats to loose because it's in the way of their xbox hd streaming service and a win for bluray would make their pathetic fight against the ps3 even more pathetic. Loosing over one billions a year on their game division already to barely beat the gamecube (while nintendo made loads of cash on their admitedly worst console market share yet), it would only get worse for them, bluray is in their way.

The Software

Studios are waiting for a clear winner. As long as they wait, they have nothing to loose. But if both formats fail, it would be a gigantic business down the drain. It's a gamble for them to give something while holding the most lucrative movies for a big release when there's a big enough userbase. They voiced their support in a big majority for BluRay.


So. Please answer this : Considering the BDA made the industry standard known as BluRay, you want to pressure the BDA to do WHAT exactly ?

If you disagree on the software front, it has NOTHING to do with the BDA, in fact the BDA standard offer them more bitrate for the same codecs, and more storage space.

If you disagree on the hardware front, again it has NOTHING to do with the BDA, any hardware company can put out a good player. And in fact the best hardware companies have already chosen which side to support. There is no competition on the hddvd side, it's the crappy Toshiba or nothing.


I want the best movies in the best format on the best player. Competition will work on the hardware and software front, only if a single standard is supported. We're almost there. I hope the whole industry support the best standard and ditch the hddvd looser quickly. Then I can play my Pixar movies on my panasonic bluray.