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Lessons From the HD Format War
Posted by
Zonk
on Tuesday March 04, @03:02PM
from the don't-go-down-the-dark-path-forever-will-it-dominate dept.
from the don't-go-down-the-dark-path-forever-will-it-dominate dept.
mlimber writes "The New York Times' Freakonomics blog asks a panel of experts, 'Is the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray really over? What can we learn from it?' The panel suggests, among other things, that Sony achieved a Pyrrhic victory because high-def DVDs will be outmoded before they reap enough profits to make up for what they (and Toshiba) paid out for both product development and bribes to win the support of content providers."
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IT: Freakonomics Q&A With Bruce Schneier 147 comments
Samrobb writes "In grand Slashdot tradition, the Freakonomics blog solicited reader questions for a Q&A session with Bruce Schneier. The blog host writes that Mr. Schneier's answers '...are extraordinarily interesting, providing mandatory reading for anyone who uses a computer. He also plainly thinks like an economist: search below for "crime pays" to see his sober assessment of why it's better to earn a living as a security expert than as a computer criminal.'" The interview covers pretty much the whole range of issues Schneier has written about, and he provides links to more detailed writings on many of the questions.
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Lesson #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Lesson #2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody will learn a damn thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad comparison (Score:5, Informative)
- AC vs. DC: Cheaper and better system won
- VHS vs. BetaMax: Cheaper, worse system won
- 8 Track vs. Cassette: cheaper, better system won. (though 8 Track was so retarded, it would have been hard to lose in any case)
- BR vs. HDDVD: More expensive system won, without a real technological/quality advantage.
So what could have been learned? What sony should have learned looking at the first three is "the cheaper always wins" and they should have packed up and left. Instead, Sony made a more expensive system and clobbered Toshiba with marketing. And won.
Re:Bad comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
Puh-leeze.
VHS is the better product. Why?
Because you could record an entire movie on a single tape right from the beginning. Most people do not view system where you have to change tapes mid-taping as "better".
What I learned (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What I learned (Score:4, Insightful)
-Rick
Re:What I learned (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't clear. With music, DRM is just about dead now: the content providers are really focusing on creating usable/buyable products. That is, they are trying to maximize their profit, rather than, say, Apple's or Pioneer's.
With video, though, DRM is far from dead. They are still trying to lock people into using specific players and monitors. This is perhaps a move to maximize profits, but not necessarily for the content providers. When you have big players like Sony, who sells both media and the equipment to view that media, things get complex. It looks like there's an effort to maximize profit for the equipment manufacturers and proprietary software companies, rather than the content providers.
It's accepted that you can now listen to music on whatever you want. (If I sell MP3s or CDDA/wav, I don't have to worry about who can buy it.) But with movies, there's still a fight over what customers should be allowed to watch the movie on. They're still acting like they don't want a free market in playback devices, even if that costs them content sales revenue.
When the content providers start moving to maximize their own profits (or the profits of their content division, in cases like Sony), you'll know it. It'll be about selling bytes to as many consumers as possible, instead of limiting their sales to the subset of movie watchers who have bought the "right" player products.
Re:What I learned (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What I learned (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, it should be noted that the media companies who will be giving us content on these things are not going to participate in "open, collaborative standards" -- it's just not done.
There will be one, if not two, iterations of the "next next generation" of this technology before you get one that gets adopted as widespread as DVD was. The amount of people with next-gen displays is too small, and too many people are now leery about the next "new hotness" that they'll stay away even more now.
I'm not saying you don't make a good point. Just, they're not really looking out for your interests here, and they figure they can get everyone to buy a new generation of technology every time they think it's due. Once they come up with the next direction, they'll still change it to &^%& often.
Cheers
Will it ? (Score:4, Insightful)
So when you say QUOTE "There will be one, if not two, iterations of the "next next generation" of this technology before you get one that gets adopted as widespread as DVD was. The amount of people with next-gen displays is too small, and too many people are now leery about the next "new hotness" that they'll stay away even more now." ENDQUOTE
Well I disagree. I think new generation teck will NOT bring anything more than DVD brought us. And if it will, it will be at a great loss of liberty (DRM) from a format which for all purpose can be considered to be DRM free so cracked it is... No what i think is that next generations will increasingly go toward the net and drop tv more. IMHO on the "film" playing device field, DVD is the last usable format, and HDDVD/Bluray was the last war. Unless a leap in TV teck happens (3D for example) there won't be any incencitive to really enhancethe format more.
simple (Score:4, Insightful)
What's going to replace Blu-Ray? (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple TV?
I agree that Sony's fiscal outlay was tremendous, but we're talking about the successor to the DVD. Frankly, I think it's WAY too early to be replacing DVDs--presently, only about 15% of U.S. households [tvpredictions.com] even own an HDTV!
But that means, when the HDTV revolution really reaches middle America (presumably, sometime after the present "downturn"), Bu-Ray will be there to pick up where DVDs leave off. Then Sony will be making money hand-over-fist. We tech-types like to talk about digital delivery, and digital delivery may very well take hold eventually, eliminating physical media wherever broadband penetration is significant and affordable, but what this additionally means for Sony is that they may have won the last format war, extending Blu-Ray's dominance as the physical medium of choice indefinitely into the foreseeable future. The "successor" to HDTV is going to have to be more than just a resolution upgrade, I think, and without memory-devouring video driving the technical expansion of removable media, Blu-Ray will become the de-facto standard for non-flash-based computer media as well.
So even if it is overshadowed by flash memory and digital delivery, Blu-Ray is officially here to stay, and in a lot of lucrative consumer markets (especially games and movies). "Pyrrhic" is a pretty short-sighted evaluation, I think.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
The conspiracy theory is that the studios have been doing that specifically to boost the perceived improvement of the HD releases of the sequels and figuring that the people who are DVD-only will never notice the difference because comparing different movies is subjective anyway.
Early Adoption (Score:5, Insightful)
2) If you shell out enough cash to content producers during early adoption, the market never has a chance to affect the outcome.
3) Giving away the razors (PS3 compared to vanilla BR-DVD player) and selling the hell out of the blades is still a viable business model.
The only thing that remains to be seen is whether on-demand streaming content will come to market soon enough and be enticing enough to defeat BR-DVD before Sony sees a return on its investment.
Outmoded? (Score:4, Insightful)
So annoying... (Score:5, Insightful)
1 - Heavy DRM - Yes Bluray has DRM too, but you can TAKE IT WITH YOU. The technology is still prohibitively expensive to start making portable bluray players, and in dash bluray players for cars, but there is NO HD download service I'm aware that lets you burn the files and keep them forever to watch. They are mostly rental services - basically you download them on your Apple TV or computers, watch it in a 24 hour period and its gone. In time, those devices will be made cheaper, and will become reasonably priced.
2 - Downloadable content doesn't look nearly as good a trueHD stuff does. I realize that for many people it doesn't matter, because the majority of TV's that were purchased early on (and therefore a big chunk of the ones in households) are only 720P. But 1080 displays are becoming the new standard and fewer 720 displays are being made. a 3GB 720 file doesn't offer much more clarity than just a standard DVD. Yes I know, many people are going to shout that DVD's are GOOD ENOUGH. Fine. VCR tapes were GOOD ENOUGH too. So are YouTube videos for some people. Big whoop. Watching low quality 720p on a 1080 display just doesn't look as good as a true 1080 picture with 25-35Mbit quality.
3. To get a decent quality picture, you need to have download a big file, and that requires fast internet connections. American download speeds are pitiful compared to the rest of the world. If you wanted to download a 5GB movie, that's going to take you SEVERAL hours to complete, as opposed to just driving a few miles to the nearest blockbuster r RedBox (which WILL be getting bluray discs inevitably)
4. Bluray adoption has taken off faster than DVD adoption did. I somehow doubt people are going to give up on buying discs they can KEEP and watch OVER AND OVER, with a download service that offers inferior quality, short watching time, and long waits to watch. But who knows, maybe in 2 years from now I'll be eating those words, but I doubt. Anything you can say about HD downloads applies to SD quality movies as well, and DVD sales aren't really being eaten into like people predicted it would downloadable content. Begin modding me down...NOW!
Who cares about HD movies? We need data storage. (Score:5, Insightful)
This format war was fought through movie studios, but interestingly most consumers don't really care what discs their movies come on. Whether on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the movies play essentially the same way. Hell, DVDs are good enough for movies -- the resolution is good enough, and the run-time of a DVD is longer than the length of time that you can sit still on your butt.
On the other hand, DVDs will soon become obsolete as a data storage medium. Remember when an entire OS came on a CD-ROM, and you could back up your hard drive onto a couple of DVD+-R? Now operating systems come on DVDs, and only sane backup medium for most consumers is another hard disk. For that, I'm glad that the higher-capacity Blu-Ray standard won, and hopefully Blu-Ray burners will be cheap enough by the time the need arises.
I wouldn't be surprised if Blu-Ray movies never replace DVDs, but Blu-Ray burners become standard on computers.
Digital downloads? How? (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell me please exactly HOW digital downloads are going to happen. There is a reason a new disc was needed for HD, movies take up a LOT of space. Even recompressed a HD movie is several GB, how are people going to download this when there are plenty of ISP's that limit you to several GB per month? That's right, thanks to our ISP's we could MAYBE just download a SINGLE movie before being cutoff. What about the speed? What if I got only a work laptop? Meaning I can only leave it on for a couple of hours when I am home? Do you think your average ISP connection is fast enough for that? Where do I store it all?
Oh sure DESKTOP HD's are getting bigger all the time but what is a blue-ray or HD-DVD movie, 40-50 GB? That means a large HD can only hold 10 movies. Not much if you consider how many DVD's movie BUYERS got. Some people I know got large enough collection to stretch the capacity of pro-sumer level NAT storage, how the fuck are they going to find enough computer storage to store all this in HD?
Then offcourse you need to hook up this storage to the TV, how is this done?
Oh yes, there are solutions and workarounds a plenty, but I don't see any it being adopted anytime soon, just as MOVIE projectors BEFORE VHS were NOT popular.Oh right, some of you younger ones may not know this. No VHS did NOT mean the start of the movie rental business. It was available LONG before. You could always just rent a projector and some movies and real enthousiats had their own setup. But it was far to much of a hassle for the general public.
VHS made it easy NOT just to record your own shows, but to simply pop down the corner rental story, rent a movie and watch it.
This lead to a huge boom in the industry for a bit with countless stores opening.
It lost its luster a bit, partially because many more TV channels became available all catering to their own crowd. Simply watching whatever the tube feeds you after all is still easier.
But watch HD movies from a PC, that is a lot of hassle, NO, we on slashdot CANNOT judge this. People who compile their own kernel are naturally going to be a bit more inclined to be tech savy then those whose VCR has a blinking clock.
iTunes? iTunes is a joke, its sales are pathetic if you consider the market it operates in. Do the math, how many BILLIONS of consumers does it reach and how many SONGS (SONGS! Not full albums) has it sold? iTunes is the biggest online store, but compared to offline sales it just doesn't compare.
There have been several attempt at on-demand and download services and THEY ALL FAILED.
Don't get me wrong, it is OBVIOUSLY the future, but the future ain't here yet. At the moment we just don't have the tech to handle that amount of content without a shiny disc to put it on.
What people tend to forget is how slow things really change. DVD's didn't replace VHS for years. LP's sold for ages beside CD's. Digital download has been a dream for as long the internet came into existence and it just isn't ready yet. Just ask youtube why they don't serve all their vidoes in HD. Their servers, would choke and it would mean you would have to pick your movie now if you want to watch it over the weekend.
And then their is that shiny Blu-Ray disc in a store or rental place, you can pick it up, slot it in and watch it. No PC whining, no ISP complaining, no harddisk screaming for mercy. It just works.
I think downloads are going to have to wait a bit until those parts of the world who are willing to pay for their content can get their downloads as easy as a disc.
What I learned from the format war (Score:5, Insightful)
shhhh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players? (Score:4, Interesting)
As for downloads, they are currently a fantasy. Downloads could succeed if there were an outlet for downloaded movies similar to online MP3 stores. Download from a vast library covering a huge portion of recorded video, and keep the file to watch as many times as you'd like essentially forever... But no such thing exists on a large enough scale. Most content that is available is for limited time use and a restricted number of viewings, and the availability of titles is small. BluRay has nothing to fear from download competition until this is worked out, and there is no sign of progress.
Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Lesson? (Score:4, Informative)
An even better example: