Paramount to Drop HD DVD? 470
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."
Goddammit (Score:3, Funny)
already denied by paramount (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aQMGgh2LV_bU&refer=japan [bloomberg.com]
There's only a clausule that it is permitted for Paramount to drop hd-dvd if they think it's needed.
Re:already denied by paramount (Score:4, Interesting)
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:already denied by paramount (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't sound like a denial at all. That just sounds like they haven't announced any changes yet, so of course it's their "current plan". We already knew that it was their "current plan".
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Of course, denying the switch is the correct course of action, whether they're going to switch or not.
There's no sense in risking your sales by announcing shortly you won't be supporting the formatting you're selling. The rumour that they might should be enough to drive sales up a bit for the people who already have HD DVD players and don't want to switch to BluRay. Meanwhile you can be sure as hell, they're getting ready to go both formats and/or BluRay exclusive if the money works out.
I.e. the only
And Warner denied last month as well (Score:3, Insightful)
If there is a clause, what makes you think it's not needed? HD-DVD sales have tanked on Amazon, and there are also rumors of some retailers dropping HD-DVD altogether. If that happens, I would say Paramount would consider it nessecary to invoke the clause.
Paramount Denies (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Paramount Denies (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh geez. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Paramount Denies (Score:5, Interesting)
Moral of the story: Never believe anything you read or hear, especially when it's said in corporate circles.
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Dateline July 2007 - (Score:2, Funny)
Dateline Jan 2008 -
Paramount announces that Blu-Ray is where it's at. Paramount CEO gives himself a big raise and pat on the back for his intelligence and insight.
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'Get out clause" (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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Half price for a player that only works with a format most major movie studio's don't support? Actually, it means nothing at all. Half price for a device you can't get new films for is 100% too much money. The way things are going, no film studio will suppoort it soon, I was expecting Warner Brothers would be only the first of many, and here we are with Paramount following.
Where I l
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Forget second HD player. I and everyone I know are just waiting for the format war to be over before jumping to hi-def at all. I'm hoping Paramount does jump because one format will be chosen once and for all (for the next f
Is this really the end -yes -or no -or maybe? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some big players in the market there.
The Warners move gives Blu-ray about 70 per cent of Hollywood's output, although the format's grip on film content will increase further when Paramount comes aboard.
The words "grip on film content" makes me feel all cornered.
Not holding my breath (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not holding my breath (Score:4, Funny)
Jumbo Shrimp
Microsoft Works
Advanced BASIC
Bug-Free code
I like this game!
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If Sony Wins a Format War . . . (Score:4, Funny)
Re:If Sony Wins a Format War . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:If Sony Wins a Format War . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Winner is the Consumer (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Then the XBox 360 would have been late to market and expensive. I think MS had a lot more staked on the success of the XBox 360 than HD DVD.
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Finland is also one of the first
Blame Micrsoft? That is so 90s (Score:3, Insightful)
This is about Hollywood studios lining up with a product more friendly with what they want.
I went with HD-DVD initially because of price. That and the fact ALL movies start immediately without bunches of lead in crap - something that disney loves.
I will get
Re:Winner is the Consumer (Score:5, Informative)
MB => megabyte
Mb => megabit
MB/s => megabytes per second. Generally used to describe disk speed, memory speed (in the past, now in GB/s)
Mb/s or Mbs => magabits per second. USed to describe network speeds.
1 byte = 8 bits unless you are living in the 70s.
BTW, 1.5 Mbps is one of the standard speeds for ADSL and would net you about 177kB/s download rate. Going at full throttle, that gives you 14.5GB/day. On 7.5Mbps speed, or 5x faster, that would give you 72.5GB/day. Since HD movies now are probably around 25-30 GB/2hours or 15GB/h, to watch that real time, you'd need a 36Mbps broadband minimum or download speed of 4.3MB/s. Since HD content will be less compressed on the 50GB discs, you'll need about 70Mbps for that to download.
For regular DVDs, they tend to be about 3GB/h so you'd need a 7Mbps service minimum to be able to watch DVD quality movies real time.
Neither of the scenarios will be a reality for vast majority of the Internet users. If it costs you $1.5/GB to get the stuff in network charges, the HD content would cost you $50-$100. The DVD would be about $12. A mailed rental DVD costs you a lot less than that and even buying one may be cheaper.
So yes, you are correct. DL is *way* off in the digital future, just keep the darn units correct.
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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 o
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I call BS on this. If MS did this then the xbox would have been 100 dollars more, fanboys would have complained, and they still would have lost the format war. They might even have lost the console war.
First off, MS is not Sony. They dont own a movie studio and billion dollar movies. MS is always fighting off regulation and is somewhat controlled by the threat of lawsuit
Porn studios showed the way. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Porn studios showed the way. (Score:5, Insightful)
The myth that it was the porn studios who cased VHS to win over Betamax has been pretty thoroughly debunked... besides, even if it was so, this does not mean it must happen again 20 years later -
*People can get porn online easily these days.
*Porn might be one of the few genres that DON'T benefit from high-definition.
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With that out of the way, I do agree that porn seems to be completely migrating to the digital download world, which makes total sense. While they sell a LOT of porn, there is also a LOT of porn made, and most of the individual discs don't sell really well (despite the profit level being high just because
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Yes but real people don't have genitals the size of 42" screens and razor pimples the size of tennis balls...
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May I be the first to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
I always suspected Blu Ray would win (partly because I wanted it to win, partly because of the PS3), but it took far longer than I thought it would. For the most part when corporations compete for the consumers business, the consumers win because they get a better product. In the case of the Next-Gen DVD format, neither the corporations nor the consumers won (or maybe they both won but it was a phyrric (sp?) victory). The products a few years ago are barely any different than what they are now (albeit significantly cheaper), so all that resulted in this conflict was consumer confusion and lost sales from people waiting out on a "winner".
I must say though I'm glad that Blu Ray won given that the only end user noticeable difference is storage and price, and Blu Ray win's on storage space, and will eventually get equal in price.
Re:May I be the first to say... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would say that storage is not end user noticeable, as both formats have sufficient space for what they do - store hi def movies. That only leaves price, and maybe DRM (arguable I admit), at which Blu Ray loses both.
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I had been backing HD DVD, again due to it's lower device price. I'm still not buying high def until the price is around $99 for a cheap player. The rental stores still carry only a small amount of titles, and DVD looks good enough on my HDTV. My eye's aren't you
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1) Sony likes to fix market prices.
2) Blue Ray players are a royal pain to program for, where HD-DVD's devopment tools are quite robust and relatively easy to use. This is a loss for DVD collectors such as myself who often buy DVD's just for the bonus features.
3) Discs will be more expensive to print because BR is not an open standard and royalties will have to be paid to Sony.
4) DRM, blah blah. Good luck ever being able to rip those movies onto a media server.
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Mountain? (Score:2)
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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*
Fat Lady (Score:2)
It's not over till the fat lady sings. She has sung yet but I hear her warming up in the wings. I think we can call this one at this point. Sony wins. Sad, because I swore that I would never buy another sony product again.
Oh well I guess I can always get a third party br player. Good thing about this is now we can concentrate on cracking all the br encryption and not be distracted by HD-DVD's. Or is HD-dvd no longer a problem?
But what are the Porn Industries doing? (Score:2)
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Granted, I haven't ever been in such a store in my life, but given that High Definition would allow you to see things like blemishes, bruises, and scars from plastic surgery much more easily than before, my guess would be that they'd rather stick to DVD.
Blu-ray or internet? (Score:2)
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But it seems to me we should be getting our movies over the internet and distributing these little plastic discs is kind of silly.
It's an issue of bandwidth and storage limitations. Let's say that you want to watch a Blu-ray movie on a single-sided disc. Let's further say that the movie takes up the full 25GB (not unreasonable) for a 2-hour movie. To watch it streaming in real-time would require roughly 3.5MB/s, if my quick-n-dirty calculations are correct. That's at or above saturation for the majority of broadband subscribers in the US. You'd need a hell of a lot of buffering to make it work. That, or a massive rollout of to-
+1 Sony PS3, -1 Xbox 360 (Score:2)
Even though the decision (not to get it) was made by thinking about the noise the Xbox makes during a quiet scene, I would be definitely kicking myself reading these news if I got the damn device.
It also makes me want to buy a PS3 a bit more (just a bit more, but that bit is definitely there).
Mmmmm, shiny blue laser (Score:2)
http://lifehacker.com/software/diy/turn-a-flashlight-into-a-handheld-burning-laser-287252.php [lifehacker.com]
Maybe it's the name (Score:2, Interesting)
Blu-Ray::Obama ; HD-DVD::Hillary! (Score:3, Funny)
Voters, um, I mean buyers, seem to be moved by that message of hope! Obama, um, I mean Blu-Ray, seems to be surging unexpectedly ahead! Change is in the air! The big mony gang is frustrated -- they've been causing change for 25 or more years -- why aren't more people listening? Iowa was a shock; Blu-Ray is 10 points ahead in the latest NH polls; south Carolina won't save HD-DVD; they've gotta re-group and start pointing out Blu-Ray's flaws from now until Super Tuesday!
Only thing I can't figure out is where is Ron Paul in all this? I think he represents 3D holographic TV. It's the darling of the techno-cognoscenti, but nobody really expects it to see the light of day.
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All around, Microsoft doesn't care f
Here I am, (Score:2)
so the HD DVD ads are dead too!
do not want (Score:2)
I hate the idea of spending hard earned cash on DRM infested discs that will be obsolete in five years.
I already made the mistake of spending $1000+ on DVD's (now obsolete) and there is no way in hell i'm re-buying them all to line some sleazeball's pockets. For now i'll rely on bittorrent and and my apple cinema display.
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It figures because "Serenity" was HD DVD. (Score:5, Funny)
Heh (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I bought one of the HD-DVD players at Christmas time and was quite happy with it...for about a week, when WB cut the legs out from under the format. The only actual title I've bought so far was a WB title. Heck, I took their statements about continuing neutrality to be honesty.
I figured it'd turn out that way, but thought the worse-but-final-and-cheaper format might pull one out. I guessed wrong, but at least I got a good upscaling DVD player out of the deal, and I think I'll go ahead and grab some titles before they disappear.
And as far as Blu-Ray goes, I'll wait until there's a non-sucky entry-level player that doesn't cost more than double my 3rd-gen HD-DVD player. I mean, really, a stand-alone player that sucks ass and costs as much as an entry-level PS3, which also plays Blu-Ray and comes with 5 free movies? What kind of moron is going to buy into that right now? I guess the same kind of suckers who buy brand-new computer tech as soon as it comes out.
The way I look at it, these studios just set HD movies BACK a year, and in that time, people won't be buying as many DVDs either, since the studios will take the attitude, "Just buy the Blu-Ray titles, morons!" before long. So have fun losing that revenue stream, guys.
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This just in... (Score:3, Funny)
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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: DAT (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Seems like HD-DVD is dead (Score:5, Funny)
A more positive way to view it is that Microsoft lost!
Besides, as others have pointed out, lots of companies were behind Bluray, not just Sony.
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Not sure how this will effect the overall market, but in my case it pretty much ended my interest in HDM. I was never willing to pay a premium price for either format if it wasn't backwards compatible, so I'm going to
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looks like the chances of getting a next gen dvd player for linux are out the window.
Re:Seems like HD-DVD is dead (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Seems like HD-DVD is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seems like this is a war not worth winning (Score:5, Insightful)
Gates famously said this would be the last format far. I think that it will prove to be the last plus one. Most people are going to be uninterested in buying video in a locked format; unless blu-rays allow you to play your videos on a generic DVD player, rip your video into your computer, play your video on your PSP, iPod, iPhone, or whatever, not enough people will want them to generate economies of scale.
I suspect that 1080 will turn out to be a mere stepping stone to arbitarily large screen resolutions. DVD, VHS, etc. all targeted an otherwise very stable market of equipment: NTSC televisions and stereo (or even mono) audio. The old CE companies have tried to create a new ecology (HD TV + Surround sound) but the real ecology is much more complex and diverse (PCs, laptops, cellphones, iPods, and stuff we haven't even dreamed of yet) and it's not going to stay even vaguely stable for long enough for a deeply flawed and mistargeted technology to gain traction.
Re:Seems like this is a war not worth winning (Score:5, Funny)
You know better than to say "stuff we haven't dreamed of yet". The real winner will be the format that can run a lifelike virtual reality pornography simulation. Last I checked, Blu-Ray doesn't even come with a mechanical dildo (but imagine how quickly your wife would want it if it did).
In all seriousness... there are 5 human senses. Sight and hearing are taken care of. Really good movies can give you the chills or make you cry - so that *partially* handles the sense of touch. More work with that, and then an entertainment platform that can simulate smell are around the corner.
When you can smell Jenna Jameson's perfume as her virtual body climbs over you... that is when the Format War will be over.
:)
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Re:Seems like this is a war not worth winning (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Seems like HD-DVD is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Far better for HD-DVD than the 2:1 to 3:1 we were seeing during most of the summer, and a hell of a lot better than the 8:1 or more that some Blu fanboys were suggesting we'd see by Christmas six months ago.
No, what really seems to have caused the announcement of the switch isn't the ratios at all, but that the raw numbers, and certainly raw profit numbers were far worse than expected. Loads of people sitting out the battle because they didn't want to back the loser, and loads of loss-leading promotion being run on both sides to ensure it wasn't them.
Warner want one side, any side to win, so the fence-sitters might dive in. They just jumped the way they thought might make the most difference.
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Despite the fact that Tosh has been dumping players at somewhere around 1/2 of production price, the uptake of HD DVD has been pretty dismal. In fact, uptake of HDM in general has been dismal. This is the problem Warner was facing. They, and only they, had the power to put an end to a format war that kept the consumer on the fence. To do so they only had one move open to them. They made it.
There is no reason to think Warner was paid off in the way Paramoun
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I know this was a joke, but in many ways you aren't far from the truth:
- Holographic Storage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage [wikipedia.org]
- Tapestry Media: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry_Media [wikipedia.org]
- Enhanced Versatile Disc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Versatile_Disc [wikipedia.org]
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I can never keep up..
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Get educated.
Firstly, the difference between the two is completely irrelevant [hometheatermag.com] for movies (which is what we're talking about). I want 1080/24p, not the 1080/60p that the kids are giggling over.
Secondly, HD-DVD is the same 1080p as Blu-ray. Perhaps you mean specific players? There are 1080i and 1080p players for both formats.
Re:no more price war? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Wow! Biased much? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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2) So they're encrypted. Whoop-de-fuckin' doo. So are DVDs, I hope that you have just as much moral objection to them, and refuse to use them.