I just have to smile...

[conchyjoe7]

Now that Sony has won the "war" for HD discs, I can't help but smile. They announced last week that version 1.1 discs will be out and that will allow access to the net with the 1.1 discs. Problem? Why yes as a matter of fact: None of the current BD players have the 1.1 firmware and therefore cannot take advantage of this new "feature" on the new BD discs. In addition, as soon as someone does that, Sony is encouraging further interactivity with BD discs and has a version 2.0 in the works...

Now, as to what makes me smile...all of this "new Sony BD feature" was and is already available on HD-DVDs and (mostly) playable on even the least exepnsive HD-DVD player CURRENTLY (and sadly it looks like EVER) available. So, once again we the public have clearly made the wrong choice. Sony's Beta was better than VHS, but we chose VHS. Now, Sony's BD is NOT better (or, IMHO anywhere near as good) as Toshiba's HD-DVD, but again we chose wrong and took BD over HD-DVD. Oh well, in general we certainly are a lot of bunglers who deserve exactly what we get. Oh, and BTW...anyone notice the immediate increase in BD hardware and software across the board already?...hehehe: SURPRISE!!!

[superchad]

AMEN! HDDVD was a fully developed format that lost to a format still going through growing pains, marketing wins once again and we all loose.

[lcaillo]

Think where we might be right now if neither Toshiba nor Sony had been so determined to have it all their way and we had one format from the start. The competition to get the best players to the market and the software support for one format would likely have resulted in greater market penetration AND more well developed product by now. What a distraction the whole mess has been. It has kept a lot of us from choosing either format and now hesitant to accept Blu Ray.

[tonyvdb]

conchyjoe7 wrote:

anyone notice the immediate increase in BD hardware and software across the board already?...hehehe: SURPRISE!!!

I have noticed that the BluRay players prices have gone up or at the very least not moved. I still have not seen the Samsung BDP 1400 go for the price I got it for on Boxing day. $299 in Canada, its still at $399 or more in all the stores.

[Sonnie]

lcaillo wrote:

Think where we might be right now if neither Toshiba nor Sony had been so determined to have it all their way and we had one format from the start. The competition to get the best players to the market and the software support for one format would likely have resulted in greater market penetration AND more well developed product by now. What a distraction the whole mess has been. It has kept a lot of us from choosing either format and now hesitant to accept Blu Ray.

I think we would be nowhere as close as we are now. I think the competition helped get Sony moving a tad faster. Obviously is still was not fast enough, but I don't think we would be seeing BD players near as low as they are now if HD-DVD had never been around. BD technology would be lagging even further behind.

I am not sure Blu-ray would have ever taken off on its own and still may lose the war to SD-DVD.

[wbassett]

conchyjoe7 wrote:

...So, once again we the public have clearly made the wrong choice. Sony's Beta was better than VHS, but we chose VHS. Now, Sony's BD is NOT better (or, IMHO anywhere near as good) as Toshiba's HD-DVD, but again we chose wrong and took BD over HD-DVD. Oh well, in general we certainly are a lot of bunglers who deserve exactly what we get. Oh, and BTW...anyone notice the immediate increase in BD hardware and software across the board already?...hehehe: SURPRISE!!!

Thing is (in my opinion) the public didn't decide this. If Sony and Bluray hadn't offered a financial deal to Warner, the 'war' would still be going on. There were some vibes that Warner may have been thinking about going HD DVD exclusive prior to that deal, and if that happened, we might be sitting in the reverse situation today. (Or it would have been over by this summer)

I still buy HD DVDs if I catch a good deal, but I have also noticed that movie prices in my area immediately went up some for Bluray content. I haven't been watching BD player prices closely since I've had my player for a year now, but I've heard some say they've gone up slightly, but if anything, they certainly aren't coming down in price. Toshiba had the mind set to get player prices down to where anyone would buy a player, even on an impulse buy. Bluray has a long way to go before they hit that mark, and that could mean the format never gains full adoption before the next format that will ultimately replace both SDVD and BD arrives.

I have 300 on HD DVD and rented it on BD to see if there was a difference. As far as the movies go, they both looked stellar. The HD DVD though had more content and even a Civilization style 'game'. Granted the game is crude, but it was interesting.

I think most consumers were leaning BD because of marketing hype, but 2007 was a great year for HD DVD and the last quarter was a huge change in tides. I know what they were saying as far as numbers, but I always wondered if that last quarter of 2007 was being taken into account. HD DVD was at the point that back in December (PW, Pre Warner) I honestly would have put my money on HD DVD being the winner before 2008 was over. Come January and with one announcement, it was over.

I have both players and have been format neutral for some time, but I was hoping HD DVD would win. I think the players were more mature and fully meeting their specs, and the video codecs were an improvement over mpeg2 that BD commonly uses.

I'm hoping for some Bluray disc sales, but haven't been seeing too many of them now that the 'war' is over. I don't think Sony won as much as I think we lost.

[tonyvdb]

wbassett wrote:

I don't think Sony won as much as I think we lost.

That really sums it up. This just makes it more difficult for the average consumer to buy into Blu as the price is just to high. Up here in Canada most BluRay DVDs are $35 or more where you can get a new release SD dvd for less than $25

[SteveB]

I agree that we, the consumer, lost this battle. I was in Fry's today and looked to see if there were any deals on HD dvds. Some were as low as $9.99 but nothing I need. The BD dvds were right across the aisle and I glanced to see what was there. The average price was $29.99, a lot of them at $39.99 for single discs, where most of the HD were at $19.99 with the exception of some new releases.
I didn't look real hard at the BD since I don't have a player but I didn't see a lot of titles that I would have to have.

[superchad]

Any word on the Oppo Blu Ray unit launch date? I was thinking awhile back of going HDDVD because of the friends I have and demo's I thought HDDVD was as I have said before a more market ready unit but never bit the bullet even when I had a chance to add a decoder driver to my XBOX, I didnt go there becaue of fan noise. Oh well I am probably going to go with Oppo when it comes out.

[conchyjoe7]

Tonyvdb...That is roughly the same price there in Canada as the BD discs are here in Atlanta, and we have a SERIOUSLY competitive market here. In looking at some of the comments posted, I do agree with most. I don't think Sony won as much as they think they won...I won't be buying a BD player anytime soon or this year for that matter, and I have a LOT of friends who feel the same way. SD discs are so cheap now, it's unreal. I can pick up excellent titles to fill in my collection of ~800 for $3.99 - $9.99 with really good titles that are relatively new for around $6.99 in the weekly Sunday paper ads. A good new SD disc played back on my Toshiba HD-DVD player looks outstanding (FYI, I'm buying another HD-DVD player for it's astounding upscaling, and they're now cheaper than dirt)...certainly outstanding enough that getting a disc for $6.99 is a no brainer problem when compared to the BD at ~$30.00. I think before Sony sees enough market penetration to make a profit, it will all be over for BD as well. Sandisk is now out with 30gig SD (secure digital NOT standard definition) cards with 50gig around the corner...can you say bye bye BD!

[conchyjoe7]

In keeping with what I was saying about SD (standard def) prices being so good...I was in the old WalMart picking up dog food yesterday and just on a whim...they had a huge amount, but I didn't have time to really look, but; I bought "T2 Extreme Edition". Yeah yeah, I'm well aware it's far from new, but I had so many versions of T2 I said I'd never buy it again, but who can turn down $5.00? To tell you the truth; played back on my Toshiba HD-DVD player, you'd be hard pressed not to think it's fully HD...love it!
Cheers,
Konky.

[bobgpsr]

From Andy Pennell's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/andypennell/ar...war-daddy.aspx

Andy Pennell's blog wrote:

What did you do in the Format War, Daddy?
My kids are 2 and 4 yrs old so have little concept of what Daddy does, though they do know the words DVD, Xbox, and Lightsaber. However in a decade or so they might be able to understand what Daddy did in the format war, so here’s how I plan on explaining the last three years of my work:

In early 2005 Daddy joined what was then called the Professional Content Group at Microsoft, who were working on the replacement for DVD. At the time the team was mostly program managers who were working on the advanced interactivity aspects of the formats, then called iHD. There were two competing formats, one mostly from Sony called Blu-ray, and another mostly from Toshiba called HD DVD. Blu-ray was originally a very primitive high definition recordable format, while HD DVD was created by the same forum as DVD as a high definition replacement for it.

While the program managers worked on the standards committees specifications themselves, us developers started implementing iHD. It was designed based on certain tenets from studios like Warner and Disney, with features to match. Before I got to the team it had produced a demo with Disney called “WayVD” [strange name, that’s another story] that had helped convince the DVD Forum to accept iHD. However not long after Disney switched to the Blu-ray camp, for reasons never made public. The BDA (the cartel of Blu-ray supporters) voted to accept iHD as well, but due to complications this decision never stuck, and in the end they went with a Java-based solution called BD-J instead. For this and other reasons Microsoft ended its format-neutrality and became HD DVD-exclusive.

Toshiba licensed the iHD code that Daddy’s team produced and used it in every HD DVD player they shipped, starting with the HD-A1, which became available in April 2006, at a reasonable price of $499. Along with the three launch titles it got rave reviews, which surprised many as Blu-ray had been talking a lot of smack in the years before release and fooled many people into thinking HD DVD was dead before it even launched. The A1 proved a lot of people wrong.

A few months later the first Blu-ray player appeared, the Samsung BD-P1000, along with launch BD titles, for $999. The reviews were not so great for this player, as it deliberately softened the picture and its 1080p output was really the same 1080i output the Toshiba had, but put through a de-interlacer. It was also twice the price of the Toshiba competition. The poor BD launch continued when Sony themselves released The Fifth Element on BD, and it looked terrible, worse than the same title on DVD. Over a year later on AVSForum the BD folks admitted they launched BD about a year earlier than they were ready to, because they couldn’t let HD DVD be alone for that length of time. The Fifth Element proved such an embarrassment for Sony that they eventually re-mastered it in 2007 and offered the poor owners of the original free replacements.

While some of Daddy’s team continued work on the Toshiba code, Daddy moved on to help out with the Xbox version of the software. This was a full end-to-end solution, where we owned everything (unlike the Toshiba which ran their Audio-Video-Network stack), which was over 5 million lines of code. The Xbox HD DVD drive shipped at $199 and proved very successful: it quickly became most popular HD DVD player and remained so for over a year.

When Daddy was young there was a similar format war, between VHS and Betamax, but it was different in an important way: all the movie studios produced tapes for both formats. Only the player manufacturers “took sides”. Betamax (from Sony) eventually lost, so to make sure that didn’t happen again, Sony bought Columbia Studios. When the high definition format war came around, Sony didn’t want a level playing field like last time, as they knew they would have serious trouble competing on disc and player costs with HD DVD if everything else was equal. To avoid this they made their studios Blu-ray exclusive and then started trying to “persuade” other studios to do the same. They had some success, but Warner Bros, the biggest, stayed HD DVD exclusive for a while, though eventually produced discs for both formats. In the end it would be Warner that brought the war to an end.

Another thing that was different for this format war was the internet: the format war was a very hot topic on discussion forums and web sites, and news & rumors spread very quickly indeed (even when they weren’t true), generating huge amounts of discussions, taunting, abuse and FUD. Daddy participated in AVSForum, as did several of his co-workers and his VP, and so did a bunch of BD folks. However while us Microsofties were proud to show our names and employer, the BD folks all hid behind anonymizing screen-names, not revealing who they were, what they did or even who they worked for. While we all took great care in what we said and used respectful tones, they were free to say whatever they liked, how they liked, with no comebacks on them or their employers. The Industry Insiders Thread on AVSForum lasted for just over a year and ended with around 13,500 postings on that single thread.

The second Blu-ray player to come out was Sony’s PS3 which was really a games console with a BD drive in it. At $499 it was substantially cheaper than the other BD player and remained so for about a year, until BD player prices started to fall once the original ones started to become obsolete. Not only was the PS3 the cheapest player, it was the only one that could run the BD-J software at a vaguely decent speed, as well as play PS3 games of course. Although the attach-rate for PS3s (that is movies-per-player) was low, the sheer number of PS3s substantially helped the overall sales numbers of BD discs.

Due to the premature launch of Blu-ray, there were a bunch of features missing from the original players. They became known as Profile 1.0 players, and had additional problems when discs using BD+ appeared. BD+ was an attempt to add another layer of protection onto the discs, pushed mostly by Fox, but when the discs appeared many BD players had serious trouble playing them. The BD folks then created Profile 1.1, which added picture-in-picture, audio mixing, and persistent storage to Profile 1.0, in an attempt to catch up with the HD DVD feature set, but players didn’t have to conform until late 2007. They also created Profile 2.0 which made a network jack mandatory. Yes kids, I know it’s hard to believe, but in 2008 the BDA didn’t think that internet connectivity was important enough to include in every player. Of course HD DVD had all these features back in 1.0 and that was done in late 2005, with every player supporting every feature.

During 2007 things got a lot more interesting: new players from both side, with BD players consistently being around twice the price of HD DVD players, and still all Profile 1.0 (the most primitive version). Similar numbers of movies came out for each side, and much time was spent talking, ranting and misleading about the format war on the web. Daddy spent much of 2007 working on an HD DVD Emulator, which was a special version of the Xbox player that made it much easier for content creators to make cool HD DVD titles. I also helped out on the various updates that were done for the Xbox player itself. As a "thank you" to the team everyone got a special black Xbox HD DVD drive, and Universal also gave everyone a boxed set of "Heroes Season 1" (which Mummy & Daddy had previously missed on TV but got to really enjoy from those HD DVDs). Another perk of the job was access to the team's HD DVD library, which contained every HD DVD there ever was worldwide. Daddy so enjoyed his work that he even changed the license plate on his car to "HD DVD".

One surprise was that Target announced they would not sell any HD DVD players except the Xbox, as a result of a deal with Sony. This was weird, as Sony were paying for a store to not sell a competitor's stuff. While Microsoft has been in trouble a bunch of times for anti-trust issues, no-one seemed bothered by this highly unusual behavior. Sadly it would not be the last time that Sony would do this.

In August 2007 we got another surprise: Paramount, which had been supporting both formats, announced that they were dropping Blu-ray and going to only produce HD DVDs, which also meant Dreamworks would do the same. This was fabulous news for us, but it got Sony very worried indeed. So worried that the Sony CEO (Howard Stringer) personally called up a bunch of other CEOs and tried to "persuade" them to ditch HD DVD. As the format war had just entered a new phase, a phase where the underdog (us) suddenly looked like it stood a chance of winning, everyone passed on his kind offer. However, about five months later, it looked like many of those same CEOs would return the call to Howard and see if the offer was still open.

Christmas 2007 went pretty well for HD DVD, with Toshiba reducing their 3rd generation player prices further and even forcing the BD companies to cut their heavy prices a bit. Rumours began to emerge that Warner was going to make a decision and pick a single format: as the largest studio they had some serious clout, and they knew it. After a lot of high-level wrangling among various CEOs, Warner was close to picking HD DVD (along with Fox, a long-time BD supporter), but Sony got wind of this and came calling again with their check book. After a rumored $300-$500 million deal (along with $120m for Fox) both companies decided instead to dump HD DVD on January 4th 2008, the day before CES opened. This was Daddy's Black Friday, a real shell-shocker of a day for him and his team. It was pretty much all downhill from there. CES was a glum affair for us and the cool demos the team had been working on never got a public showing.

In the weeks that followed we were told privately of what Toshiba's (and the HD DVD Promotion Group's) response would be, but only the first phases of that ever came about: both Toshiba and Microsoft cut hardware prices, but it wasn't enough. One by one other companies started dumping HD DVD (coincidentally it was the same companies that Sony's CEO had called in August after the Paramount deal) until the pressure got too much, and in February 2008 Toshiba had a board meeting and cancelled HD DVD. After that the remaining studios (Paramount and Universal) had no choice but to give in too.

In the weeks that followed Daddy went out and bought up all the best titles on HD DVD and another Xbox player as a backup, so he could be sure of playing those titles for as long as he could. He also decided to add certain companies to the family "No Buy" list (which had consisted of just Apple for years up to that point), as well as adding Amazon, Universal and Paramount to the family "Favored Companies" list.

After doing HD DVD in, Blu-ray's next battle was with DVD. Unfortunately for them Sony couldn't just write checks to get people to stop making DVDs, so that battle proved to be a lot harder.

And that is how it all happened kids.

[with apologies to the Blake Edwards movie]


Published Friday, March 07, 2008 4:06 PM by andypennell

[conchyjoe7]

Bobgpsr: What an excellent article cut from that blog. I now have 4 HD-DVD players, having bought 2 more as backups for the eventual replacement of the ones in use now failing someday in the distant future hopefully. In addition, for the price I paid for the additional 2 players, I could not have come close to getting the performance in regards to upscaling alone from a regular dvd player. I would imagine to a lot of people that makes me look rather naive, or even worse; just plain stupid. Please allow me to explain my errant thoughts and ways...Yes, I am aware that I'm crying over spilled milk.

I think everyone (now that they don't have HD-DVD to ponder or slam) is starting to find out the sad truth about Sony and their BD. Most of the BD players currently on the market as described above are still profile 1.0, with a few being 1.1 and to my knowledge a grand total of 1 being profile 2.0. despite their elite pricing. None, except the aforementioned 1 profile 2.0 player can compete in terms of features with even the least expensive HD-DVD players. Every time I watch one of my HD-DVDs on one of my players (last night it was "The Hulk") it brings tears to my eyes it is so beautiful..."The Hulk" is a rather mediocre film made visually incredible by the stellar output of HD-DVD. Friends; keep all of your HD-DVDs (and if you want to sell them cheap, please contact me first), as HD-DVD despite overwhelming odds may not be the first or last "phoenix" to arise from the ashes. The differences between HD-DVD and BD is so unbelieveably pronounced and technically superior in favor of HD-DVD, I still shake my head in wonder at the shell game being played on us all right now (although let's face it; to a certain extent the decision was made for us in smoke filled rooms of rich fat cats that care of nothing but cash). Sony purchases? You can keep all your versions of your root kitted merchandise: NEVER EVER AGAIN!!! (and I once spent a LOT of money with Sony).

As I have written before. I do so hope that SanDisk puts their Secure Digital prowess into the game and smokes Sony with HD movies on a chip the size of a fingernail; and then bye bye BD (and good riddance!)
Cheers,
Konky.


HD-DVD...tell me it aint so!

[conchyjoe7]

Oh, forgot to mention...anyone wanting to sell their HD-DVD discs, please contact me through a PM here. I'm looking and I'm buying!
Cheers,
Konky.