HD DVD format war is far from over
By Gareth Powell
In Britain, in The Independent today, is the headline Truce brokered in DVD war between Sony and Toshiba. At a guess it was written by a sub-editor who did not have a blind idea what is going on. Even the article hedges its bets better than that.
The HD format war is not over yet
Yes, we can all be jubilant that LG Electronics (the South Korean company) plans to launch a DVD player that will run both types of discs. And that Warner Brothers has announced it is working on a single disc that can play films and television programs in both formats. Although it throws away the advantage of the large capacity of the disk with having three versions of the same movie on a single disk. Bah! Humbug!
The fact is that none of this is resolved. It is future hopeful rather than present actual. There are reports, from people I trust, that the LG DVD player will not play ALL of the formats. Just quite a few.
The public does not know which way it is going to go and does not have a dog in this fight so will sit back and wait.
We have the totally daft situation at the moment with Sony’s film studio is releasing high-definition titles only on Blu-Ray, as is 20th Century Fox and Disney, while Universal Studios is issuing titles only in HD-DVD.
LG has a press release saying the new dual player is a ‘technological breakthrough to end the confusion and inconvenience of competing high-definition disc formats for both content producers and consumers’.
No it is not.
It is a splendid attempt to make the two compatible but it does not always work. And Warner Brothers may have developed a disk that will play on both opposing players — and one would hope the LG offering as well — but it still has to sell that idea to other film studios and the public which has shown clearly that this is not something it wants.
We are dealing here with seriously crass stupidity.
Barry Meyer, chief executive of Warner Brothers, told The New York Times that he believed neither Blu-Ray nor HD-DVD was going to go the way of Betamax quickly. His advice, incredible though it may seem, was:
‘The next best thing is to recognize that there will be two formats and to make that not a negative for the consumer.’
How it can it be made not negative for the customer when there are two formats?
Screen Digest, a market research group, says sales are very disappointing. Perhaps half of what was hoped for. And that hoped-for figure was ridiculed by industry seniors who said the forecast figure of 300,000 was too conservative.
On the bright side high-definition television is definitely going to happen. The day of the cathode ray tube is drawing to a close. It will be all flat screens and high definition telly.
But NOT high-definition DVD players of uncertain standards and morals because the customer is far, far more intelligent than the industry figures involved and will not lay out serious money for something which may not turn out to be the standard.
The two factions are — despite the remarkably daft headline in The Independent — no closer to a resolution than they were when the blue laser technologies were first introduced.
And consumers simply do not care. DVD as it stands is fine.
The standard DVD of The Lord of the Rings looks totally wonderful on a wide LCD screen. How much further can you go than ‘totally wonderful?’
Film companies tell you about all the bollocks they can add with one of the new formats. But that is what it is, bollocks. It is stuff you would never look at in a million years.
A plague take all their houses.
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