Blu-ray and HD DVD Wars Round 2 - BD-Live versus Microsoft's HDi

[saprano]

Is this ever going to stop?

BD-Live versus Microsoft's HDi


If you thought the high-definition movie format wars were over then think again. The two camps, Blu-ray and HD-DVD, are reforming to fight for control of network distribution of interactive optical disk content. It's BD-Live vs HDi.

When Toshiba caved in and ceded defeat for its competing HD-DVD technology against Sony's all-conquering Blu-ray we thought that was it. One high-definition movie format for optical media and that's that - one ring to bind them kind of thing.

Only it might not be. Microsoft is stubbornly refusing to confirm it is adding a Blu-ray drive to its Xbox 360 games console, which has lost its HD-DVD drive, and Toshiba shows no signs of building Blu-ray players.

Instead both are involved in HDi, which started out as an interactive layer in the XBox HD-DVD area, whereby gamers could have interactive content added to HD-DVD playing and gaming experiences. The thought is that HDi could be added to DVD players. Such DVD-plus players could be used to add newer content to DVD movies, such as picture in a picture or sound track modification.

The Xbox 360 already has HDi capability. Through adding it to DVD players, content providers could use HDi technology to add interactivity to DVDs for movie previews and other things. The network could start making up for the limited capacity of DVDs.

Meanwhile Blu-ray generation 2 is largely BD-Live, the addition of interactivity via Internet access to Blu-ray players, The first BD-Live players, from Sony and Panasonic are available, and BD-Live movie titles from Disney are ready too. A BD-Live version of the Blu-ray player is given Internet access via an Ethernet cable. Presumably it is plugged into a broadband internet router - neither Sony nor Panasonic are clear on that point.

This could actually be problematical. If Blu-ray player is in the living room and the broadband router is in the den then who wants an orange cable snaking across the huse floors? WiFi would get rid of that clutter of course but it needs a whole new Blu-ray standard, so Ethernet it is.

Then, with BD-Java, the player can add interactivity via the TV screen to offer audio soundtrack modulation, picture-in-a-picture, and the downloading of ring tones or move sound track excerpts to mobile phones - all rather underwhelming and indicative of engineers producing solutions to problems no one realises they have yet.

Java has been present in Blu-ray players since 2005 and is reckoned to provide a more flexible, smoother and slicker interactive experience than Microsoft's HDi.

There is a chicken and egg problem. To have lots of BD-Live content (eggs) you need an installed base of lots of Blu-ray drives (chickens) but the drives are too expensive, being $300 or so for a basic drive now with BD-Live players being more expensive still. The tipping point to Blu-ray takeover of the global gaming couch-potato living room is reckoned to be a price of $200 or less, expected to be reached by the end of this year.

But - this Blu-ray saga is chock full of 'buts' - couch potatos still have to buy the things and there is a suspicion that they won't because they can't see any noticeable improvement over DVD movies. This doesn't affect gamers as the Sony PlayStation is a Blu-ray device but world-wide couch potato take-up isn't about gamers buying more PS IIIs, it's about the mass replacement of DVD players, currently costing less than a small bottle of perfume and available in the same super-market.

Without lots of Blu-ray players installed then interactive BD-Live services, which hardly sound compelling anyway, won't take off. BD-Live is the player end, the Internet feed, and then the vital bit - the content produced by movie companies and other unspecified content creators attracted by a vast installed base of Internet-accessing Blu-ray players - once there is a vast installed base.

But there is a vast base of DVD players and adding HDi to replacement DVD boxes might be quite cheap.

Sony won't put HDi into Blu-ray - global warming would need to metamorphose into an Ice Age first. Equally Microsoft may not actually - seriously, deeply, I mean really, really deeply - want anything to do with Blu-ray at all, preferring to dip its sensitive parts in acid before that happens, and not wanting to kow-tow to Sony and play a bit part in IT and the Net's great game.

All we need for truly historic fun and games to start is for Sony to get Google facilities added into BD-Live and have Microsoft looking askance at a Sony-Google combination that will make Ballmer's office chairs fear for their safety.

It ain't over yet

I would love for the insiders to comment on this....that is if theres anything to comment about.

http://blocksandfiles.com/article/5139