The High Def Format Wars Continue to Hurt
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 4, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Anand
I've refrained from commenting on this for a while but it's time to talk a bit about this rediculous high definition format war. Like many wars, the HD-DVD/Blu-ray war was fought for one reason and justified by another. The justification was that the two camps could not agree on a common media format, the reason for the war honestly had very little to do with media formats.
You see, both sides realized very early on that regardless of whether Blu-ray or HD-DVD won, removable media was not the way of the future. No matter how hard you try and spin it, neither format will achieve the success that DVD has. Online distribution of content is the future and both camps realize this, but its easy to gain support for a war if you can get everyone behind something as simple as media format to argue about.
The truth of the matter is that all parties have their own vested interests in winning the battle. The Blu-ray camp panders to the fears of the movie industry by touting a more secure format thanks to its BD+ security layer that sits atop AACS. Microsoft promises easier implementation of interactive features by using XML-based iHD rather than compiled code. Each side will do or say whatever it takes to win and it's gotten to the point where the movie studios have been convinced into signing exclusive agreements to only distribute content on one format or another.
I don't even have to get into why this is beyond stupid, the end customer of the movie studios are the consumers, not the leaders of the Blu-ray or HD-DVD camps. And by only offering titles on a single format these studios are alienating their own customers, this applies to Paramount as much as it does to Warner. I had hoped that the war would be won not by declaring a victor, but by the proliferation of dual-format players or discs being released in both formats, not by exclusive deals that hurt only the consumer.
Initially I was a fan of Blu-ray, mostly because the disc specs made more sense to me. Obviously HD-DVD has its advantages from a production standpoint, but making discs at a low cost isn't my concern, just give me the content on a single format and give me as much storage space as possible. However, I wasn't a fan of the pricing on most Blu-ray players.
Toshiba did its best to drive HD-DVD prices down and given that two major backers of the standard are Microsoft and Intel, pushing for quick commoditization of HD-DVD players makes a lot of sense. The Blu-ray camp however is full of players (no pun intended) who are far less interested in the commoditization of playback devices and thus we end up with devices that are more expensive than they should be. Given that the internals of modern day HD-DVD and Blu-ray players don't differ enough to justify the price difference (which admittedly has shrunk at times), I believe what we're looking at is a difference of approach in how to handle the high-def war. I tend to side with whoever is giving me the best bang for my buck.
I remember talking about this whole mess with an industry insider not too long ago, who felt that by Christmas 2008 we'd see the end of the war, much in the way that I described it. Both formats will exist, but content will be equally available on both (either that or dual-format players would be the way of the future). The Warner announcement does throw a wrench in that plan, and maybe it will spell the end for HD-DVD, or maybe it'll just make this thing drag out even longer. The quicker we get this war over with the sooner we can get to the war that's really going to matter: online distribution.
All the DRM, lawsuits and finger pointing of poor music sales are going to happen once more as soon as online video distribution really takes off. The statistics speak for themselves, people would much rather get their video content online than off, it's a question of how will you get the content, how are you allowed to use it and how much will it cost?
I'm afraid that the online distribution battle for video will be even worse than it has been for music, which means even more lawsuits, even more throttling and pollution of P2P networks and overall unpleasantness. It took how long for Amazon to come up with a DRM-free music store? Can you imagine how long it's going to take for us to see the same with high defintion movies?
Maybe I picked the wrong time to start building a theater.
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Allen Iverson - Saturday, January 5, 2008 - link
Anand,At least within the next 5 years, it is unlikely online distribution will take off to stage where it can rival optical discs. Eventually, it will take off, but the infrastructure is not ready and won't be ready for some years. I base this on the following arguements:
1) Infrastructure & Bandwidth: iTunes took off because the average size of music songs is 4MB. Compare that to 25GB for a HD movie - BIG difference. Although internet speeds are increasing, not everybody is on a fast enough connection to make downloading such large sizes feasibly. I speak for myself, being on a 256kbs ADSL connection which is nowhere near a decent speed needed for this. Moreover, the strain on servers and on the underlying data lines will be too much on current and upcoming technology.
I've read somewhere that an Australian scientist has developed a really fast internet connection through a phone line, if this materialises (and I'm expecting this or something similar to materialise at least after 5 years on a large enough scale) then that poses a very good argument for online distribution. That said, there are other impediments to online distribution in the near term.
2) Ease of use/installation: One of the greatest convinences of typical home theatre systems is that, after a day of work, you come home, place a dvd in your dvd player, relax on the sofa and enjoy! Not to say that such convinence isn't possible through a HTPC set-up, it cannot be readily set up by anyone other than advanced computer users. Especially by older generations.
I won't mention the benefits of having a physical copy of the movie (with its attractive casing etc) as these don't seem to be too large in the scheme of things (IMHO).
That said, it is very possible, even likely, that online distribution will be very successful in the long term. But what I want to bring to the attention of most people who say this format war is a moot as the real war is online distribution (as mentioned in your post) is to think how long technologies typically last? Blu-ray should last well over 5 years, and the royalties earnt during this period will be a good return on investment for Sony!
jpeyton - Sunday, January 6, 2008 - link
Agreed; I'm not sure what (if any) fact-based argument Anand has that would push digital downloads as a successor to DVD.Even in the music industry, where downloaded content is growing at a frantic pace, physical album sales still represent 90% of the market.
And now Anand wants us to believe that digital movie downloads will come sweeping in, capture movie-goers hearts, and win the battle for consumers dollars. Not likely.
Look at the services available now. Look at VUDU and XBOX Live Marketplace. All I see are high rental costs, high purchase costs (for an item lacking any physical media), zero special features, limited storage, basic surround sound, low-bitrate video, DRM, limited portability, and high-entry costs (remember that set-top boxes, XBOX 360s, broadband subscriptions, etc., aren't cheap).
The industry knows and loves physical media sales. DVD sales are a $40 billion dollar industry worldwide. Studios saw a decline in DVD sales this year, and are looking for new areas of growth...and high definition movies were a definite area of growth this year.
homerdog - Saturday, January 5, 2008 - link
Although it isn't working right now, Xbox Live's Video Marketplace is a direct counterexample to most of the points you make.1) Most new titles are available in HD (albeit only 720p), and most of those files are not much larger than 7GB. Also, your point about the broadband infrastructure not being there for everyone is valid, but you fail to take into consideration the target audience. I would venture a guess that most consumers who are interested Blu-ray/HD DVD and in downloading high def movies have a competent internet connection.
Servers are another issue, but Microsoft is hopefully ironing out whatever problems they are having at the moment. I see this as being more of a problem than end-user bandwidth though.
2) Setting up an Xbox and connecting to Live is not a very difficult thing to do. Certainly much easier than setting up a HTPC (the thought alone gives me chills).
I do agree though that nothing beats a physical copy. That's what DRM cracks are for.
SirLamer - Sunday, January 6, 2008 - link
Don't forget that, aside from the end-user's infrastructure, the supporting infrastructure is just as important. If everyone is trying to download 20GB high-def videos (to reasonably compare with the video quality of a 25-50GB optical disc) then the ISP's infrastructure is going to tank.I cite as an example the sudden spread of broadband internet about a decade back. As an early adopter, I benefitted from substantially improved download speeds over my dial-up modem. But after a couple years, internet was crawling because EVERYONE was using broadband and the infrastructure couldn't deal with it. Around the same time, all the file download sites had to add queueing to deal with the traffic.
Imagine the effect of the release day of a popular film. Assuming the host servers could serve all the traffic, which is unlikely, the main infrastructure will collapse heavily under sudden dramatic load.
So, online distribution is nice but it will be a LONG time because the core infrastrucuture can serve it. The capacity of the end-user's connection is irrelivant in this context.
homerdog - Sunday, January 6, 2008 - link
The same thing has happened to me. My RoadRunner connection was faster 2 years ago than it is today, and less reliable too. It isn't bad, I was just spoiled by a constant >5MBs connection.Alexstarfire - Sunday, January 6, 2008 - link
While it's true that many of us simply don't have the speed, many of you seem to forget certain aspects. Getting extra content on a disc is great, but it's just that, EXTRA. Not all of us want or need it. It's great to have since you paid for it, but that's usually about it. If people downloaded what they want then it's not nearly as big an issue. Also, at least with DVDs, the compression isn't very good. Mpeg 2 is a pretty crappy compression. I'm not sure what Blu-Ray/HD-DVD use, but I'm pretty certain it's not the best either. Using a good codec you can get a DVD quality movie under 1GB, with audio. I can't say what a HD movie would compress to, but I'm sure it'd be well under 10GB. Sound.... HD sound is great, but I doubt the majority of us can tell the difference without a very high end system. Most people simply don't have those types of systems hooked up. They might in 10 years, but I doubt it. I personally can't tell the difference between 96kbps stereo audio and anything above that. I could tell the difference between stereo and surround sound, but above 96kbps on stereo I just can't hear the difference. Also, uncompressed sound doesn't mean it's better than compressed sound. If that's the case we'd watch uncompressed video, but that'd be HUGE. The uncompressed audio is great for the media because I believe they'd have to use PCM or something for the codec, and that's a crappy codec. As far as ISP infrastructure goes, yea it's lagging behind. The thing is, we are 10x times bigger than all of these other countries that have 100MB connections and whatnot. I'd like to see how they set up an infrastructure on our kind of scale. It's not an easy task I'd imagine. As far as servers go, they'll be pretty much left out I think. This is one of the reasons BitTorrent is so popular. Each client contributes to the bandwidth for the whole torrent. Servers are fine for stuff that's up to a few hundred MBs, but that's about it. Once you get into GB territory the bandwidth usage becomes insane. Even if the infrastructure could handle this it'd be insanely expensive to keep a server up, unless we end up making some real cheap ass bandwidth.Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
powerincarnate - Sunday, January 6, 2008 - link
I don't know if Anand is losing his head or simply losing his ability to make sound judgment and a give sound advice.The movie industry will never be as bad as the music industry. Why???? Because if a CD comes out, and say it cost $15 but only have 2 good songs. You can go online, download the 2 songs, it will be in an MP3 format and it is only 8-10MBs large. The thing about MP3s is that it is a compressed format of the CD sound, that a majority of people simply can't tell the difference. Anyone and everyone can invest in a few min to get your song. This is not the case for movies. Even Divx or XVid compressed DVD movies mean you have to invest in about an hour to watch. Yes I know, when I was in college and had access to t1 line and to hubs of people in the school, it was much faster, but now in the real world, where Joe Public exist, you have to invest in about 1 hour, assuming a decent connection. Longer, sometimes a day or more, if the connection isn't pretty good. Unlike music, there is a clear advantage to going HD, especially if you have your nice 50 inch 1080P TV, that Divx compressed movie no longer looks acceptable on it.
Lets say an HD movie is 25GBs, now you have a great codec, that is able to compress the movie so that A. It remains in HD resolution or else, what is the point, and B. The sound is retain in it's multichannel spread and c. there compression is smooth enough so that you are not looking at heavy pixelation and blocks. So let say you have that magic codec and you bring it down to 10GBs. Assuming 1MB per second connection. It would take me 3 hours to get taht 10GBs. We all know, you can't count on having a prestine 1MB/s connection, especially if online download of movies take off, and you begin to have bandwidth issues. At 100kb/s if you keep your connection on for a full day, you would be at 8.64GB, still short of the 10GBs. And even that can't be guaranteed.
Can the general population really stand waiting so long for their content??. I don't think so, Standard definition maybe, HD is just too large. Plus, I don't know about you but, I think people like to have a physical copy of their movie. That way, I can lend it to my brother to see. Or if I'm going to my girl's house, we can watch it their, or let my friend watch it. these things aren't so easily done with a digital HD file. You can for MP3, but that is a 5MB file, flash drives can easily tranfer a whole library of songs on a flash drive. That is the big difference.
Alexstarfire - Sunday, January 6, 2008 - link
Well, if we use BitTorrent, or some other similar program to distribute these HD movies, when it becomes legal, then it'll be much easier to get them. A magic codec that only reduces it to 10GB? After looking at how big movies and audio are on DVDs I don't see 5-7.5GB compressed HD movies becoming a problem. That's still huge, but not nearly as bad as 10GB.I don't have a problem with waiting. I'm sure I'm one of the few though.
JAH - Saturday, January 5, 2008 - link
Those Xbox Live downloads are no where near the same quality as BD or HD-DVD discs, and I'm not even talking about the picture quality either. Storage medium offer other advantages such as uncompressed high definition sound (people keep talking about 1080p picture, but HD sound is as much as important) and much much more extra materials.Even if we all get super high speed connection from Fios or whoever, we still need a machine/HDD to store all those downloads. And the price of those machine/HDD will not be any cheaper than a dedicated player.