Interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

The PS3 will have a Blu-Ray drive (not HD-DVD or the new HVD) and will be cable of playing High-Def Movies. If the air that the PSP breathed into Sony's UMD format is any indication (even my local WalMart has a UMD movies section now), it's looking like Sony will win the war before HVD gets to market.

I think the war may take a few battles before it is won. Just saw this today.

Richard Hunter

Intel and MS to Support HD DVD

Both of the quoted articles taken together with what happened to DVD audio and its compeditor makes me feel a lot of us will be storing our movies, both our own and movie on demand recordings as data files on RAM discs. This offers a solution NOW, is cheap and fully intergrates the PC and Home Theater. If the war between HDV and Blue-Ray gets dirty then both technologies could die in favor of a contender coming from behind.

Strangely enough, the worlds of porn and exercise videos will probably have more effect on whichever format eventually wins than the movie industry!

HAHAHA.
Sad... but frightingly true.

funny how sony announced that they would support blue ray for the PS3, then intel, microsoft, toshiba, sanyo, nec and memory tech decided to go the other way...

Ol' Billy is making moves for his little X360 toy. Be funny if Sony was holding back their trump card all along.

As a recent article in a local PC mag pointed out never underestimate Billy's ability to pull rabbits out of hats. When Apple unleashed the dogs on a local Apple forum that was supposedly leaking inside info on where Apple was heading Billy did exactly the opposite, opened up his skunk works to all and sundry, even provided free forums for them.
Now he has an army of unpaid publicists crying the virtues of Billy's next OS, an army of free beta testers and market research that even his money couldn't buy.
Bob.

Just read this piece with more information behind the Intel/MS decision to back HD-DVD.

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050927_190208.html

An informative link here from pathlight. Basically MS and Intel have said Blue-ray is all hype and no substance. Blue -ray can not deliver the goods in time.

If Blue-ray IS dead, are there implications for us Vegas HDV users?

No implications one way or another, except that Sony would have to put HD-DVD driver sets in their software vs Blu-Ray.
Blu-Ray is far, far, from dead. After just yesterday having seen a 12 x18 x 12 room stacked floor to ceiling with Blu-Ray disks (used) in a production environment at a fairly small broadcaster, I can only imagine what larger facilities must have.

There's one hell of a difference between using BluRay disks in a production environment (XDCAM) versus using them to deliver HD consummer content!
The XDCAM disks are protected in a caddy, the consummer versions are not. Local authoring houses are already gearing up to deliver content on HD DVD, Sony lost this battle years ago, even back then no one seemed to have any interest in BluRay for consummer content delivery.
What becomes the dominant acquisition medium (P2, BluRay or Rev) is a different battle entirely but one that's probably of more interest to us here.
Bob.

I have to disagree with you Bob. Almost every house in Japan, America and most of the rest of the world is going to have a Blu-Ray player in it as soon as the Playstation 3 is released. It will have instant and widespread market penetration that I can't imagine HD-DVD could match, even if it is released wel in advance. It has equal studio support and is technically superior (if it delivers as promised.)

Many of us here may purchase HD-DVD when its initially released, whatever the cost, but the average consumer won't buy one until the prices drop low. By then I think the Playstation 3 will be released and priced competitively.

Remember how much demand there was for the Playstation 2 when it was released. There were literally waiting lists for it. If Blue-Ray HD movies are available at that time at a competitive price then that is likely what consumers will buy. Why would the average consumer buy an HD-DVD player when they just bought a PS3 that can essentially do the same? It would have to be a lot cheaper and have a much better selection of movies to be remotely competitive.

Look at the success of PSP. I would have never thought movies for the PSP would have caught on like they have. Playstation 3 will be an order of magnitude wider in its market penetration. Its just my opinion, but I think the popularity of the Playstation 3 will be the thing that puts it over top of HD-DVD, if it delivers as promised. Now if Blue-Ray is released way too late, not priced competively, or has technical problems, HD-DVD may catch on. Just food for thought.

Th eonly problem with PS3 is going to be the huge costs when released. I have seen all kinds of numbers being bounced around (as high as $699) and Im sorry, but there is no game or movie worth spending $700 on the console and then having to shell out another grand for a monitor to view it it on. That doesnt even include the costs of the movies that will be released.

I watched a show today on HDnet that was a HD conference with Mark Cuban and others. The one thing I took away from watching it is that it will be up to the content owners to figure out a way to deliver the highest quality picture. With most DBT/CableCo using the spectrum to squeeze more channels and not more quality with compression, the consumer will be the one suffering. Cuban talked about one day sitting in a studio and working and watching uncompressed HD video and then he walked outside and had to adjust his eyes to get to used seeing what was real as the quality was amazing.

Unfortunately, both camps will heavily compress their video to fit that and trailers and crap like that. The consumer ends up with yet a still inferior product. Satellite and Cable HD will be worse as they try and stuff 19MB into 7MB streams.

While Sony will have a big market with PS3, M$ has a lot more opportunity to invade the home with name recongition and their OS. If anyone thinks for a second that M$ will not use its software marketshare to help further thier XBOX sales is missing the point. Cant you just see the ads now; "Use your Vista OS to author your Hi Def home movies and then export to HD-DVD in WM9 HD and watch it back on your Xbox 360."

It will still come down to price point for the consumer. Then selection. But if a product isnt released, then consumers cant buy it and will buy something that is released. Still way too early to tell what will happen though.

Here's the thing. You need to be very careful how you judge success in the marketplace. One can well say that a technology is a success if it meets market prediction. On that basis PSP etc is a HUGE success as are iPods etc.
Whilst no doubt they've all made squillions for their respective companies the bigger question is are they ubiquitous. Just to give an example. One of my clients shoots kiddie football matches, been doing it for years, started out delivering product on VHS. Then a few years ago clients wanted DVDs, but for the first year they were just maybe 1%, the next year 5%, the year after 98%. What happened to drive DVD to be a huge success?
Cost and convenience, once the players were so cheap they were literally been given away that's what drove the success of DVD. Today not owning at least one DVD player makes you part of a minority. Those that own PSP or a portable mp3 player or even a games console of any form are a minority, even those that own a games console tend to have it not as part of the entertainment centre.
Now if what I'm reading is correct, that HD DVDs can play in existing DVD players then that's a huge leg up to the format, furthermore if they only cost a few cents more to make then what I can see happening is every video will come out on HD DVD for one simple reason, it means no increase in inventory cost.
But I think there's a much bigger hurdle for either of the formats, the general public isn't that excited about HiDef anyway. I'm not saying there will not be a big demand for it, perhaps enough to make it profitable for the manufacturers but that's orders of magnitude behind it becoming as ubiquitous as say VHS was.
One could compare this to what's happened in audio land, SACD and DVD Audio is an extremely niche market compared to regular CD, sure you can go into a Sony shop and buy a few titles on SACD and yes they'll play in any CD player but they hold less than 0.1% of the market, they're simply irrelevant formats, why, they're too expensive to manufacture.
For anything new to be a success you need to get the cost of the players down below a certain price point, probably down here it's $100. The software needs to be around the same price as what it replaces also. I think how the market works isn't by there being a compelling reason to buy something, it's when there's a no compelling reason NOT to buy it, when you can throw one in the shopping trolley without blowing that weeks grocery budget, then it'll become a runaway success.
Just as an interesting aside, my biggest client has largely switched from releasing audio titles on CD to mp3 disks, what drove that was DVD players being able to play mp3. That didn't happen though until they were so cheap that it was cheaper to buy the audio title as an mp3 disk AND a DVD player, than buy the title on CD. Certainly spoken word is a niche market but quite a large one. Just to give an example of the economics of this, the first title I did for this client was being sold as a 15 CD set for $350, we released it as mp3 and it sold for $35! Throw the cost of a DVD player in and the customer is still $200 in front.

What farss says about the need for this technology to be affordable will be even more true as the world heads from a run of unprecedented prosperity to a period of correction. I believe MS and Intel clearly see this coming and so have supported the technology that can best be manufactured in China and not Japan.

I absolutely agree that if Blue-Ray is considerably more expensive for a player and media than HD-DVD it will not win the market share. I may be wrong, but I wouldn't think Sony is going to charge $600+ for the Playstation 3. That would seem to make it cost prohibitive as a gaming system. And if Blue-Ray movies cost twice as much, I won't be lining up to get a Blue-Ray player either. But if both players cost $300, and both media were $20/movie, I would pick Blue-Ray.

We always talk about how one format must surely win and continue on and the other must fail and go into extinction, like the VHS vs Beta war. Is it not possible for both formats to coexist successfully? For 20 years there have been competing video game systems that have coexisted without killing off the other. We have SACD and DVD-audio formats that coexist, albeit in a niche market. We have Macs and PCs, cable and satelite. We have 1080i and 720p - and we all know which is the best of those two ;) It seems almost inevitible that company will make a player that will play both formats, and solve a lot of problems in the process.

Forget the VHS / Beta thing, think DHR 1000.

someone should just create the ultimate video machine. it'll be able to play:
beta
vhs
eight track tape
minidisc
blue ray
hd dvd
hvd
dvd
cd
dv
dvcpro
vinyl
cassette tape
and that funky hologram from R2D2's head.
have a firewire port
and a transporter from star trek so it can magically appear on whatever tv you're using. sell it for about $150, and that'll pretty much solve all our problems.

Everyone is forgetting the bean counters. Blu-Ray--One billion dollars to build a factory. HD-DVD--zero dollars to build a factory. Blu-Ray will never recoup the initial investment if it is in a war with HD-DVD. How many Blu-Ray discs do you have to sell to recoup one billion dollars?

JJK

I have a 1920's Eddison steel wire recorder with a few old reels. Will it play those? If not it doesn't have a chance of any serious market penertration.

Bigsole, you're on the right track, but you forgot two additional formats:

--the phonograph player needs to have one of those big-center adaptor thingys so you can also play 45's. A lot of great stuff on 45's.

--I'm shocked--SHOCKED!--that you failed to include an adaptor for Edison wax cylinders. Your bias against Edison is offensive to me and all other middle-aged men who are beginning to look more and more like him as we age.

I've got an old Edison disc player that is still in very good shape. I've got about 30 discs, the original manual, and even a jar of the original Edison grease! It's definately a treasured conversation piece.

I wonder if those old recordings are out of copyright now? I'd love to post a bunch of MP3 files. Many of them are quite amusing to listen to.

It's actually closer to three-million to build a new production line. HD-DVD can be made on current disc manufacturing equipment with a little modification.