Lessons From the HD Format War 308
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."
Re:Lesson? (Score:4, Informative)
An even better example:
Re:The most surprising thing (Score:2, Informative)
The NTSC vs PAL example doesn't work (assuming you mean that PAL is the superior format).
Where I'm sitting I see PAL DVDs, and it appears that most of the world are in the same situation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PAL-NTSC-SECAM.svg [wikipedia.org]. PAL won.
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
They can stream 720p highly compressed video right now. They can deliver this right now. and guess what the bulk of tv viewers will find it fantastic with only a itty bitty tiny percentage that want 1080p at full bitrate and least compression.
Consumers want better than what they already get. A good upscaling DVD player makes 90% of the people out there very happy with their HDTV set. And the costs of BluRay along with the overpricing of the discs is making many people look at DVD on their HD set and say, "looks good! I'll stick with this."
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
That word doesn't mean what you think it means. In fact, it means the exact opposite of what you think it means.
Also, everyone I know who has seen real HD content (either HDDVD or Bluray) agree that DVD pales in comparison. My wife and I bought 'Hot Fuzz' on HDDVD and watched it about 3/4ths of the way through when we ran into disc corruption problems. While we, of course, got the disc replaced, to finish the movie we flipped it over to the DVD side. A huge drop in quality was quite apparent. Ditto for a straight up DVD version of the movie.
Re:So does anyone buy Blu-Ray DVD players? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Physical Media (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Will it ? (Score:1, Informative)
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.
In what world is it either cheaper or easier? (Score:3, Informative)
Hooking up a home media center and maintaining is, for most people, far LESS easy than simply going to a Netflix web page and saying "I'll take that and that and that" and then just watching as they come.
I'm a media geek at the forefront of having my own media PC and HD DVR's and use iTunes to buy TV shows all the time. But I recognize that movies are far better done on Blu-Ray, and that everything points to that being true for at least five years or longer. Network infrastructure, is just not ready. Movie studios still have a lich-like grasp of DRM they will not shake, severely retarding the usefulness of downloading legal video online. Legal rights snafus tie up most titles from even going to online distribution.
P2P sources for HD media work, but then you have the danger of lawsuits and downloads can take longer to complete than Netflix to mail me a Blu-Ray disc! I'll go P2P for something obscure but for popular media, it makes little sense to me.
Re:Format "Wars" a foregone conclusion. (Score:2, Informative)