Posted by Derek Janssen on 03/10/07 01:26

Aaron J. Bossig wrote:

> There's just too much industry support for BRD (be it official or de
> facto) to see Bluray die overnight, IMO. HD-DVD has Universal, but
> Universal hasn't released many movies that interest me lately, and
> they're not in a hurry to release their crown jewels.

Digital Bits already has next year's Universal HD slate through September,
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/rumormill.html#030107
and they're making a gallant effort, but nothing on the King Kong level
that would clinch the argument.

(Okay, *maybe* "Mystery Men", "Darkman" and "Last Starfighter", but
that's hardly enough to buy the player on.)

>>I'm going on the assumption that LG's Big Mistake scared most other
>>companies out of trying to make licensed dual-players, as if such a
>>thing could be negotiated with two jealous factions--
>>Besides, just about every major company is committed to one side of
>>the battle or the other, and without LG there's almost nobody left who
>>*could* try to go double-agent, unless HP makes a stab at it.
>
> I'm astonished that other companies aren't scrambling to announce dual-
> format players. Thus, I've come to the same conclusion... LG ruined it
> for everyone.

Pretty much, but again, (except for a few fringey all-region overseas
companies) every major company's loyalties are already spoken for:
Sony, Samsung and Pioneer are Blu-committed, Toshiba and RCA are pushing
HD, and Mitsubishi's not even in the game.

> Of course, based on the above, the only reason to
> worry about HD-DVD is Universal.

Universal's slave to their Microsoft co-owners, or they'd have gone
dual-format with Fox and Paramount long ago...

Which is making *them* perceived as the big obstacle in the War right
now (Digital Bits is starting clueless online petitions to beg them to
go dual)--
Not to mention Steve Jobs still can't officially declare Apple's support
for one format over the other, since they manufacture most of Universal
and Dreamworks's movie-editing software, and can't officially cut their
wealthy HD customers out by siding with Blu.
So, right now, like all the rest of us, they're slave to Universal,
who's slave to Microsoft, and once again, It's All Bill Gates's Fault. >_<

>>If I make my second format-war mistake in my life (I'd won a Sega
>>machine in college), and HD pulls ahead, it should be at least a year
>>before we see it pull far enough ahead to affect sales--
>
> I'm not sure which Sega you won, but most every system except for the
> Saturn had a pretty good run.

(The Genesis--Had a cool run, but then the new PS1 era kicked both our
industry hinders...
Still, it was a compliment when 3DO ran their "Sega vs. Nintendo" ads
and said *we* were the aggressive anger-management players while
Nintendo fans were the wimps.) :)

>>I was hoping to get some specific theater-tech arguments about HDI
>>being so much more manageable for disk content, etc., but that does
>>emphasize one of the points:
>
> I did mention to him before that Bluray-Java wasn't all it was cracked
> up to be for a format that's primarily meant for movie playback.

(Noting back to the old Download/VOD/satellite argument of "Never trust
the technology that thinks we ONLY want to see the cool hit movie--They
just don't get it.")

So, on the possibility we may be Stuck With It, just what are the BRJ
shortcomings compared to HDI?--
Sounds like Disney may be doing a lot of bonus-feature disk
experimentation on their upcoming releases, with a little help from
their corporate Apple overlords...

>>HD has the support of the theater-techies who watch the movies on
>>respectable home-theater equipment in their living rooms...But apart
>>from studio support, the most "advantage" that Blu has going for it
>>right now is Rabid Fanboy Loyalty by PS3 gamers, who want to
>>"woof!woof!woof!" that "they're winning" because they didn't have to
>>buy the add-on and can watch it for free. And who, well, end up
>>sounding like Blu-Boy.
>
> It reminds me a lot of when the PS2 was released, and suddenly a whole
> bunch of people got introduced to DVD in a hurry.

PS2 fueled DVD as a cheap accessible format you didn't have to buy the
expensive hardware for, but not in the format war--
Ie., they weren't battling Nintendos that played DiVX...And DiVX was
already a different enough bad idea from DVD to fail on its own by pure
logic.

Here, we have Battle of the Near-Identical Titans, which was pretty much
the gamer-fan situation with PS3-vs.-Xbox to begin with...Only now
they've taken hostages.

Derek Janssen
ejanss@comcast.net

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