Paramount to Drop HD DVD?

zeromemory writes "The Financial Times reports that " Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD DVD after Warner Brothers' recent backing of Sony's Blu-ray technology, in a move that will sound the death knell of HD DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end." According to the Times, Warner Brother's recent defection to Blu-Ray allowed Paramount to terminate their exclusive relationship with HD DVD. Universal Studios remains the only major studio to exclusively support the HD DVD format, though rumors have surfaced that their contract may also contain a termination provision similar to that exercised by Paramount."

'Get out clause"

[Aladrin]

That's one of the weirdest clauses I've ever heard of... I wonder how truly useful it is, and if Universal really has it as well.

And I'm wondering if they -really- care. Most of their movie sales are going to still be DVD anyhow. And the exclusive contract won't be in effect forever, especially if HD-DVD throws in the towel. I think the most harmful thing would be if they were forced to release all their movies on HD-DVD even knowing they won't sell.

IMHO, the format war is far from over, anyhow. HD DVD players are half the price of the Bluray players, and that means a -lot-, especially while the market is just forming. There are -very- few people buying their second high def player. Almost every player sold is to a new household.

And as far as I can tell, they are getting out of their 'exclusive' contract, but that doesn't mean they'll flop the other way. They might just produce discs for both now.

Winner is the Consumer

[bhunachchicken]

Thank God this war is pretty much over. Now people can stop sitting on the fences and begin actively investing in Blu-ray. Now we don't have to worry so much about "exclusives" anymore.

I sort of feel sorry for HD-DVD supports. If they're looking to blame someone for this though, they should really point fingers at Microsoft. If they had had the foresight (or even just the balls) to put HD-DVD in to the Xbox 360, the article would be the other away around.

And before anyone brings up digital downloads, I do stand by my opinion that we are still a good five or more years away from that. Much of the world is limited to 1MB or 2MB broadband at most; some are still on dial up! And even those with 8MB offerings still have caps in place (British Telecom, I'm looking at you). DDs are not going to happen until we have better bandwidth, lower contention ratios and guaranteed throughput.

Porn studios showed the way.

[siyavash]

Well, This was almost clear from the start... as with VHS back in 80s... porn studios go mostly BlueRay then HD-DVD... One example is Vivid Entertainment that decided to publicly back Blu-Ray. :)

Re:Seems like HD-DVD is dead

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Looks like Sony wins this one.

I guess it's about time they won one of these format wars after the failures of their memory sticks, mini disks, DAT, etc.

Re:If Sony Wins a Format War . . .

[elrous0]

It means you had better get comfortable with DRM, because you're going to be seeing a LOT more of it. Just pray we don't start seeing computer blu-ray players with rootkits and stand-alone players that require internet connections to play discs (similar to the evil that was Divx [wikipedia.org] [spit])

Re:already denied by paramount

[LarsWestergren]

Paramount already denied this:

There has been a blitz of these "the war is over, HD DVD is doomed" stories last couple of days, and sites post them very uncritically. Same with political "assassinations" online, doesn't matter how many times they are refuted, the lies live on and will probably enter the history books one day.

Re:Winner is the Consumer

[rasjani]

On unrelated matter to the whole topic but related to your comment, one of Finland's biggest cable operators Welho is going to start digital downloads (iptv) during first half of the 2008. Their best bandwidth offer so far has been 10MB cable connection but on a consumer fair few months ago they announced that they will start to offer 100MB connections covering their whole network (without any need to modications to existing infrastructure except change of the enduser modem).

Finland is also one of the first nations (not the first per se) that went thru changing the whole tv broadcasting from analog to digital. This happened last autumn.

Re:Mountain?

[ilovegeorgebush]

Indeed. The visual improvements in DVD compared to VHS were just a bonus. I upgraded because VHS was slow, hard to use, and had a short life. DVDs were fast, easy to use and 'the next big thing'.

I don't really think people see (or even understand properly) the aspects of these new formats: bigger capacity and 'better quality' (really, is there much of a difference?).

Quite surprising that Sony won for once, though. *cough*minidisc*cough*

Maybe it's the name

[Jeff1946]

Over Xmas, I would hear people in electronics stores using the term Blu-ray. I think it is a name with a better cachet to it and believe this has had some effect on its success. The buying public often will pay more for a "better" name so they can say "I have a Blu-ray player." Sometimes the technology or other features will take second place to the name. Remember most of the folks buying these things are not literate /. readers.

Re:no more price war?

[0111 1110]

Why does everyone assume there is going to be a winner? If you look at the history of previous format wars [wikipedia.org], you can see that most of the time no one wins. For a recent example look at CD/DVD +/-R formats. We are stuck with somewhat more expensive players because of that stalemate. Although they are so cheap at this point that no one cares except for the manufacturers perhaps. OTOH, some formats obviously lost like DVD-RAM. Of course this is a little different because it is the studios that get to decide.

If in fact blu-ray does end up the 'winner', is there anyone else here who attributes this more to the early success of hackers and the AnyDVD devs at HD-DVD ripping? For all we know blu-ray is in fact unhackable, with that ability to change the DRM whenever they want.

Blu-ray supports region encoding. Don't tell me the studios don't love that annoying ability. Blu-ray discs have a thinner protective layer, so that a scratch can more easily result in an unplayable disc and hence a resale of the same disc multiple times, especially since blu-rays are so much harder to backup. And the much greater data density is also of great value from a copy protection and distribution POV. Hard drive storage of ripped movies becomes much more expensive. Internet downloads are even more prohibitive in terms of both bandwidth (not everyone has unlimited high bandwidth connections) and time (not everyone has the patience to wait 3-6 weeks to download a movie they want to see). It has always been obvious that from the studio POV manufacturing cost savings was the only advantage of HD-DVD. In every other way, blu-ray was a win-win for them.

So from the POV of anyone who would like to be able to backup their HiDef movie collection to something that is not so vulnerable to scratches, this is bad news. Of course from a pure videophile perspective this would be good news. More space should equal higher bitrates. Although in practice we may see the studios don't give a rats arse about higher bitrate transfers. After all, superbit DVDs never really took off even though they clearly had superior picture quality.

Re:Paramount Denies

[Durzel]

Lest we forget that Warner issued a not-too-dissimilar statement just before they went all-in with the Blu-ray boys.

Moral of the story: Never believe anything you read or hear, especially when it's said in corporate circles.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:It figures because "Serenity" was HD DVD.

[powerlord]

No kidding. Its at the top of my list of "Movies I would buy if they were out in Blu-Ray."

On a related note, if you enjoyed watching Summer Glau (River) kick Reaver butt, check out the "Sarah Conner Chronicles". Not sure how good the show will be, but she's playing the "Good" Terminator. :D

Oh ... They are also setting the series after T2 (effectively ignoring T3?)

Re:Winner is the Consumer

[ArsonSmith]

1997
The huge size of a an audio song encoded in either raw au or mp3 format (about 5 MB!) will make it too daunting for people to download full CD tracks

2005
The huge size of a two hour movie encoded in either mpeg or other format (about 1 GB!) will make it too daunting for people to download full Movies

2008
The huge size of a two hour movie encoded in either VC-1 or AVC format (about 30 GB!) will make it too daunting for people to download full HD

2015
The huge size of the internet encoded in either xhtml or other format (about 30,000 PB!) will make it too daunting for people to download the entire sum knowledge of human kind

Re:Seems like HD-DVD is dead

[Chosen Reject]

You make absolutely no sense. Let's assume Warner got paid. There is no proof and no rumors of any substance to back that up, but let's run with it. Paramount got paid to do HD-DVD, and that is well known. So how does it make it any different?

According to vgchartz.com, the PS3 has only sold slightly under 9 million units. Let's pretend that is correct, and also that you're made up number of 1/5 is also correct. That still puts people who know they have a Bluray player at about double your number of 1 million HD-DVD player buyers. But we haven't counted people who bought stand alone Bluray players.

You're last paragraph is where you lose me. So you are in the HD-DVD camp. That's fine. But then you go on to say you refuse to go Bluray until fair use is supported. Where is fair use supported in HD-DVD. Just because the DRM has been cracked, doesn't mean it's supported. So OK, you say you'll stick with DVD. Again, there is still DRM and breaking it is not supported. But how are you going to stick with DVDs when you are in the HD-DVD camp?

There are two givens here: prices will come down (just like DVDs did) and DRM will be cracked (just like it always is).

Wow! Biased much?

[Nursie]

"Blu-ray supports region encoding."

HD-DVD was getting it too.

"Don't tell me the studios don't love that annoying ability."

Oh they do and it pisses me off no end, no argument there.

"Don't tell me the studios don't love that annoying ability."

I believe they're also made of a far more scratch resistant material.

"And the much greater data density is also of great value from a copy protection and distribution POV. Hard drive storage of ripped movies becomes much more expensive"

Wait, wait, am I reading this right - more capacity is a BAD thing?

Internet downloads are even more prohibitive in terms of both bandwidth (not everyone has unlimited high bandwidth connections) and time (not everyone has the patience to wait 3-6 weeks to download a movie they want to see).

Newsflash for ya - the storage format isn't gonna matter a rats arse (to borrow your phrase) when it comes to net downloads, which will continue to be downsampled and compressed as necessary. It doesn't matter whether HD-DVD or BluRay becomes the defacto standard, it's utterly immaterial to downloads.

"More space should equal higher bitrates."

And with BluRay it does.

Now, the DRM is an issue I'll agree with you on, it sucks big time. But the rest of your post wasn't much help.