Microsoft Fueling HD Wars For Own Benefit? 359
DaveyJJ writes "According to Transformers' director Michael Bay, in a story over on Electronista, Microsoft is deliberately feeding into the HD disc format wars to ensure that its own downloads succeed where physical copies fail, he says in a response to a question posed through his official forums. The producer contends that Microsoft is writing "$100 million dollar checks" to movie studios to ensure HD DVD exclusives that hurt the overall market regardless of the format's actual merit or its popularity, preventing any one format from gaining a clear upper hand."
Summary is awful (Score:1, Informative)
I am skeptical of that development occurring anytime soon, but the summary does a poor job of making the point.
Re:Because heaven knows.... (Score:5, Informative)
What Microsoft does NOT like about Blu Ray is that it requires a java VM.
Re:I call bullshit on this one... (Score:3, Informative)
And his post was "insightful?" The RIAA lawyers must have mod points [slashdot.org] today!
-mcgrew
Faulty premise. (Score:3, Informative)
This rant from Bay is about as logical as the plots to his movies.
Wrong on two counts (Score:4, Informative)
No, a neutral Blu-Ray forum gets the licensing fees [blu-raydisc.info]. Sony makes money the old fashioned way, selling hardware and software (media).
Do you know why this (Java support) a big deal to Microsoft? It doesn't sound like there's any practical reason to me
Why don't know why but we know it's a big deal to Microsoft, because the only thing that stopped HD-DVD and Blu-Ray combining a few years back was the refusial of the Blu-Ray consortium to add iHD (Microsofts menuing format) into the Blu-Ray standard.
Re:Doesn't sound like Microsoft. (Score:3, Informative)
Blu-Ray and HD DVD basically offer the same thing, a way to watch movies.
The different ways of playing games however, offer different means of playing a game. Very different ways of controlling the game for example.
The different ways of playing games will attract different types of players, and different types of games will be made, some which can be ported to different devices, some that can't.
Blu-ray and HD DVD however offer no significant difference to the consumer, therefor one of the formats will go the way of the dodo, because it doesn't make sense for movie producers to have to produce different types of discs which basically do the same...
Re:Because heaven knows.... (Score:3, Informative)
HD-DVD will prevail (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I don't care for the why. (Score:3, Informative)
In terms of backwards compatibility I refer to the fact that HD-DVDs can use a layer of the disc for DVD such that you can buy HD-DVDs now and use them in your existing DVD player and have them play standard def. then when you do make the switch to HD-DVD you've already got a library of HD films meaning you don't have to rebuy your entire DVD collection in HD if you don't wish to. See here for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD#DVD_.2F_HD_DVD_hybrid_discs [wikipedia.org]
I'm not sure why you suggest Bluray DRM isn't more problematic, whilst the underlying AACS layer agreeably isn't, there have been notable issues with BD+ - an extra layer of DRM which HD DVD doesn't use, see here as an example of the issues:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071007-new-blu-ray-discs-with-bd-drm-failing-to-play-on-some-devices.html [arstechnica.com]
Re:I don't care for the why. (Score:3, Informative)
This allows, in the future, for a studio to release only one product, a Twin DVD/HD-DVD combo disc that plays in both DVD players and HD-DVD players with High Definition video for the HD-DVD player. Yields are a bit low for that to be a reality today, I think, but it's certainly an interesting option.
Re:I don't care for the why. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Doesn't sound like Microsoft. (Score:3, Informative)
Europe has already decided on the BR format as well. An estimated 75% of HD movie sales have been BR discs. Personally I have some bias since I bought a PS3 at launch, but the numbers from many sources show BR has a clear and dominating lead. Seeing Hitachi and Toshiba launch super cheap players just reeks of desperation as they fight to keep from becoming the next Betamax. Anyone can visit their local big brick retailer and see the difference in shelf space between the two formats as well. BR dominates the shelves at Target, Super Target, Meijer's, Wal-Mart, Kmart, etc. Even my local Blockbuster has a ton of BR discs and a handful of HD-DVD discs. This is the retailers doing what smart retailers do: responding to sales by offering more of the item that moves more units.
Claims made about BD-J that bear scrutiny (Score:4, Informative)
I can't speak to the speed of BD-J, though clearly this smacks of the "Java is slow" FUD that Java proponents have been dealing with for years now. Java VMs aren't really "slow" anymore, unless you're dealing with memory-constrained devices. Most Blu-Ray players are going to have plenty enough RAM, so I don't think constrained memory footprint is going to be an issue.
As for the "ill-specced" claim, I'm puzzled. I know that BD-J is based on an already existing standard for embedding interactive Java content in terrestrial television broadcasts and European cable transmissions; this technology is used, for example, in the German version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" (or maybe it was "Deal or No Deal") -- it allows viewers to play along at home using their remote control. BD-J is just an extension of this already existing and deployed standard, so how is it poorly specified?
I attended JavaOne in 2006, and attended a couple sessions on BD-J and related technologies, so that's where I got my information from.
How is this open? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry, but at least, say, OOXML pretends to be open. Google for "OOXML Specification dowload" and the very first result has PDFs, linked to directly, not even so much as a free registration required.
I develop HD-DVD applications for a living. On my desk are four volumes of "DVD Specifications for High Definition VIDEO (HD DVD-Video)", totaling almost three inches thick. (I'd tell you how many pages, but the pages are not numbered.) There's probably another three and a half inches worth of updates, which someone else here has read and memorized, that I don't really look at.
We do not have these in electronic form. As far as I know, you cannot get them in electronic form, and they do not come with an index, which makes them a bitch to search until you start to memorize enough of it to have a vague idea of where to start randomly flipping through to find what you need.
This is because on every single page, at the bottom of the page, is the following notice:
"Open" and "public" my ass.
Re:Doesn't sound like Microsoft. (Score:2, Informative)
If that is, in fact, GP's point, then he/she has a good argument. Despite all the miles of dark fiber that have been laid and all the investment in gee-whiz networking technology, we still have tolerably poor consumer broadband access in vast regions of this country. It's practically a Slashdot meme at this point that you can get a faster, cheaper Internet connection in Hanoi than in Honolulu. One would think, as we're ten years or so into the consumer broadband era, that the only people who should be left using "legacy speed" (less than 128 Kbit/sec) services are those who have chosen not to upgrade. However, there are still hundreds of thousands of people in rural and exurban areas who would love to have broadband service but can't get it at all due to expense or lack of availability, and hundreds of thousands more beyond that who have poor quality service but can't get anything better.
Going back to the original topic, those people like the GP with no broadband or poor broadband are the same people who'll be completely shut out of any kind of digital video distribution model, all of which are absolutely dependent on a good, high-speed data connection to function. I can't think of anyone who would willingly wait a week for a 20 GiB HD movie to download when they could drive up to the local movie rental store and take a BD or HD-DVD home within the hour. Those people are the reason why physical media will take a long, long time to die out completely, and until that happens, we'll continue to repeat the format wars over and over again.