Paramount and Dreamworks ditch Blu-ray

But 1080p isn't even established yet, and 1080i and 720p haven't made THAT deep of inroads. I think it's a longer hike than that.
 
In a Dr. Evil kind of way, I think he intends to skip over 1080p.

Strictly as a consumer, I'm going to end up getting an HD DVD player anyway, but I can't see spending 70% more (at minimum) on a Blu-ray for the performance it yields.

Both were $1k only months ago and HD DVD is already at $250 in major retail outlets. Heck, I think the progressive to 1080 "non-HD" HDMI-equipped players look okay. Those can be had for <$75 for brands like Toshiba, Panasonic and Sony.

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He might; he hasn't delivered anything yet, so anything's possible. But even so, I don't see 4K consumer sets in stores any time soon, and I don't see them catching on in the foreseeable future.
 
I think the disc wars are moot in the long run, we're rapidly moving to internet distribution, and in a few years discs will seem a quaint anachronism, like VHS tape. With distributed media delivery scemes like Bittorrent and the technology behind Joost, we'll soon see a variety of methods of asynchronous (non-real time) media delivery to the home, replacing the Netflix/DVD/post office model with a TBD/Digital/Internet model, the TBD is the player(s) to be determined in this transition. Just like Digital Cassette was too little too late, so is HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Now i'm being provocative here, I can make both sides of this argument, discs are a very reliable method of media delivery for independents, as we're years off before the TBD/Digital/Internet model takes hold. These sure are interesting times, after an almost 100 year reign of FILM as the distribution medium, the move to protean bits has opened up a flowering of media delivery innovations!
 
cinemakinoeye said:
I think the disc wars are moot in the long run, we're rapidly moving to internet distribution, and in a few years discs will seem a quaint anachronism, like VHS tape. With distributed media delivery scemes like Bittorrent and the technology behind Joost, we'll soon see a variety of methods of asynchronous (non-real time) media delivery to the home, replacing the Netflix/DVD/post office model with a TBD/Digital/Internet model, the TBD is the player(s) to be determined in this transition. Just like Digital Cassette was too little too late, so is HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Now i'm being provocative here, I can make both sides of this argument, discs are a very reliable method of media delivery for independents, as we're years off before the TBD/Digital/Internet model takes hold. These sure are interesting times, after an almost 100 year reign of FILM as the distribution medium, the move to protean bits has opened up a flowering of media delivery innovations!
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Internet distribution will be the eventual outcome, it's only a matter of when the bandwidth gets there. I don't think joe blow consumer will have the patience for downloading and won't settle for anything less than ON DEMAND programming, which will require serious bandwidth. North America is seriously lagging behind many other regions. In Japan you can get a 100Mbps connection, an average DSL connection here tops out around 3Mbps, way too slow for delivering HD content.
 
Batutta said:
[...] an average DSL connection here tops out around 3Mbps, way too slow for delivering HD content.
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but in the meantime, we'll have increased use of things like Joost (have you seen Joost? The quality is good enough for lots of things) and asynchronous media downloads (that occur in the background while you do other things). Right now Netflix takes a day or two, and the average Joe has embraced Netflix, so digital delivery in 12 or 14 hours is FASTER than Netflix, it's both a perception and interface challenge. Right now people who watch video podcasts on their Apple TV, Mac, Video iPod, or iPhone are getting much of their video via asynchronous (in the background) delivery, it's gradually happening. HD is not the be all and end all, great content is king, and resolution has little to do with media adoption. People flocked to DVDs not only for the improved picture quality, but for the convenience over VHS. Looking back on the VHS vs. Betamax war, consumers voted they would rather have a 2 hour tape capacity than better image quality. No doubt home cinema lovers (like myself) look forward to HD delivery, but in the meantime, I don't mind convenience and choice.
 
All these blu-ray company people are cry-cry-crying because Paramount - sniff sniff - is only making discs for HD-DVD. And why are they crying? According to them it's "in the name of the consumer", who is confused about the format war and just wants to watch movies without all this confusion. Oh yeah Sony, sniff sniff. you didn't seem to have any problems when Disney went exclusively Blu-Ray did you? No, of course not. That didn't contribute to consumer confusion. Just when Paramount and Dreamworks chose your competitors. And tell me, through your outrage, what exactly should a competing company that has put millions of dollars into their investment do? Lay over and die because Blu-Ray has declared itself the better format for America? Of course they're going to freaking make it difficult. THAT'S CALLED BUSINESS!

This reminds me of when the Red Sox went after A-ROD but couldn't afford him. Then when the Yankees got him they cried out that the current economics of MLB weren't fair.

Stop whining!
 
The Swedes have that crazy new service - something like 100GBps. That's fast enough to watch Speed II : Cruise Control in like, forty-three full res HD windows. Now, we just need a monitor that supports 172K.

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Too bad, I liked bluRay better only because i an buy a bluray burner now and start backing up Data.... HDdvd doenst seem to have any propensity for data yet.

I prefer it only for that purpose. plus the Bluray movies Look AMAZING.
 
Why wouldn't HD-DVD have a "propensity for data"? That's all HD content is.

HD-DVD burners exist; not sure why you couldn't back up data with them like any other burner?
 
David Jimerson said:
DSL is slow. Cable is faster. I get 5 Mbps.
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Depends on where you are. In Palm Bay, Road Runner (Time Warner's cable offering) isn't any faster than a good 56k dial up. I had those people out on many occasions, and they replaced the modem, checked the line, replaced a line filter... then Bell South offerd me DSL and I replaced Road Runner ;)
 
Fascinating article here:

http://www.betanews.com/article/HD_DVD_Were_Not_at_War_with_Bluray/1187630265

It’s easy to get carried away arguing the value of one side versus the other and miss the forest from the trees: HD sales currently amount to barely 1% of DVD sales.
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It reminds me of US presidential elections, where the news reporters come on and say "with 1.3% of the precincts reporting, we now predict that Mr. Candidate A has won the presidential election." Balderdash. This "war" hasn't even begun yet. Right now there's some posturing between studios, and that's it. So far both formats have been utterly ignored by consumers.

And frankly, why shouldn't there be some posturing among studios? What I don't understand is -- why would any studio commit to solely support the format that's under the direct control of one of their competitors? Sony's a movie studio -- Toshiba isn't. So why would Paramount or Warner or Disney want to ensure that their product is -- to some degree -- in Sony's fate? Sony controls blu-ray replication... if I was a studio, there's no way on earth I'd want my competition to have any hand whatsoever in the replication of my products. So from that perspective I can well understand why Warner, Paramount, Universal, and Dreamworks don't want to be committed solely to the blu-ray platform.

But why on earth wouldn't any studio want to make their product available on both platforms? Only (non-conspiracy-theory-related) reason I can think of is because sales are currently so dismal that it doesn't justify making the titles available. There's only two studios whose logic I understand in this whole thing: Warner, who's supporting both, and Sony, who is of course supporting only their own. Everyone else who's committed to only one and not the other... WHY?

With all due respect to all the companies involved, I have always thought that the whole next-generation-DVD thing was designed for the studios/manufacturers, and not for the customers, and because of that it'll flop just like DIVX did (DIVX the "disposable DVD format," not DIVX "the codec"). In fact, here's an article from a year ago that makes similar points:
http://www.hometheaterblog.com/hometheater/2006/07/disney_fox_divx.html

Perhaps the most comical thing I've read yet is that Frank Simonis, European chairman of the Blu-Ray association, has gone on record to predict that Blu-Ray will "win" within three years -- not just over HD-DVD, but over DVD itself!
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/sony/blu...rld-we-will-own-you-in-three-years-244720.php

Three years? That's ridiculously laughable. I can confidently predict that standard-def DVD will be outselling blu-ray and HD-DVD *combined* three years from now, and probably five years from now.

Sound absurd? Consider that in February, the Super Nintendo (SNES) was outselling the PS3, at least on Amazon. (did you just read that right? Yep.)
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/nintendo/wtf-alert-snes-outselling-ps3-on-amazoncom-237633.php

As of today, the PS3 is the #16 best-seller in videogames, and is being outsold by the Nintendo DS Lite Onyx Black, the Wii, the XBox 360, and the Nintendo DS Lite w/Brain Age. Which means that the Nintendo DS is *at least* outselling the PS3 by 2 to 1, and the numbers are probably dramatically higher because the DS Lite w/Brain Age is the #4 best-seller on the list, whereas the PS3 is #16 -- there could be a massive gulf between those two.

Which just proves again -- customers don't buy "technology", they don't care which is "best" -- they just buy what they want, that lets them do what they want to do. If they want to play games, they buy a game system -- right now the Wii is the far-and-away biggest seller there; it's #2 on the list even though it's not high def!

I still think the HD-DVD vs. blu-ray "war" amounts to nothing more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic -- it keeps people busy, but in the end it's all for nought. FI-OS is going to leapfrog them both for home distribution, and Holographic will replace them both for data archiving. The best that either blu-ray or HD-DVD can likely hope for is to go down in history as the next-generation LaserDisc. :thumbsup:
 
And yet, being in Florida, we have learned that votes don't really count, and people often miscount... sometimes on purpose.
 
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