Hi-Def disc format war begins today…. not. 

17 October 2006 tbs.pm/229

Samsung launches BluRay player in the UK (BBC Radio 4, Today, Business Report)

The first player from one of the two high-definition optical disc formats has been launched in the UK: it’s Samsung’s BluRay Disc (BRD) player and it’ll cost you £1,000. Next month, the first salvo from the competition arrives on these shores: Toshiba’s functionally very similar HD-DVD offering at half the price.

Of course, this new format war doesn’t actually start today, whatever the headlines in Metro might tell you. It started awhile ago on the other side of the world. But the fact that the war exists at all is a testament to the short-sightedness and greed of the manufacturers involved on both sides and forms yet another reminder of the veracity of Santayana’s oft-repeated quote from Reason in Common Sense that “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

In this case, what these people have not learned is that “letting the market decide” is a recipe for failure. A recent example is the failure of SACD and DVD-Audio. The fact that there were two hi-res audio disc formats instead of just one meant that neither of them did well, and today there is a tiny, tiny number of SACD releases from labels you’ve never heard of, while DVD-Audio is found often unmentioned on the DVD side of Dualdiscs. And we lost the opportunity to have high quality surround audio on disc. A more common and widely-used comparison is Betamax versus VHS, but this is not a particularly good example, as in fact Beta – technically the better of the two formats – was held back by legal challenges from Hollywood (short-sighted as all content-providers seem to be) allowing the inferior VHS format to slip past to market domination.

So far, sales of these new players around the world have been, to quote one commentator, “abysmal”. It’s hardly surprising. It is doubtful whether people actually think that a hi-def video disc is something they must have: DVD works very well, thank you very much: it’s cheap and so are the players, and there is a wide selection of titles – after all, it’s the world’s most successful consumer electronics product – and whatever you hear advocates of HD discs tell you, with a good video processor on the end of a good DVD player (you’ll need something better than a Tesco’s one in this instance) generating 1080p, you’re really hard-pushed to tell the difference (especially if your flat-panel display is crap, which it probably is).

Meanwhile, what people actually value in a disc are things like, “Did I like the movie?”, “Will I watch it more than once?”, “What extras are there?” and stuff like that: image and sound quality aren’t in peoples’ Top Ten features at all .

The first players and the first discs aren’t actually much good either. The original Toshiba players took ages to recognise a disc (though they have apparently fixed that) and when I played with a US version of the Samsung player it produced some very nasty sounds – namely digital noise at full level – from its output when you pressed Stop that thoroughly upset our home theatre system. They can’t make dual-layer BluRay discs yet, so every release so far has included virtually no extras at all – and for some reason BRD studios are insisting on using MPEG2 for video compression when the much more efficient MPEG4 is in the spec and all players have to include the capability.

In the format war between SACD and DVD-A, some manufacturers chose to “solve” the problem by releasing so-called “universal” players that could handle both. Initially, I thought this was a good idea – until I realised that what it was doing was to help the market not to make up its mind. In addition, once I worked for a consumer electronics manufacturer I realised that doing both meant that your player was sub-standard for at least one of the supported formats. Hmmm.

In this latest format war, it may not be possible for a manufacturer to make a “universal” player – not because it’s too difficult (“If an elderly but distinguished scientist tells you something is possible, they are probably right; if they tell you it’s impossible, they are very probably wrong”) but because the licensing terms of the two formats don’t allow you to make a player that does both. There may be ways around this, but in my view a universal player would once again extend the agony.

So here we have a product that people don’t actually want, in two different versions that do essentially the same thing but of course are not compatible with each other. Should you buy one? I would suggest not. Certainly not now. If you are in a boycotting mood, I’d say “Wait until there’s only one of them” – you never know, even at this late stage they might actually sit down and say, “Look, guys, we are losing money hand over fist with this thing, why don’t we settle our differences?”. Otherwise, simply sit on the fence as long as you can, watching your existing DVD library and rentals via a nice upscaling video processor. One or other format might win – there is a lot more going on here than merely playing movies in hi-def: these formats will appear in gaming systems and computers too, so it’s really impossible to say which at the moment.

What is perhaps more likely is that the two formats will dribble on with disappointing sales and instead something else will happen. That something else will probably be downloads of some kind.

In the world of professional audio we had a war between incompatible open-reel multitrack digital formats. Both failed – instead we got two equally-incompatible cassette-based formats (at least they were cheaper) – and ultimately we went on to hard disk-based systems, probably a great deal quicker than we would have done if studios had actually bought those big open-reel recorders.

Something like that could happen here, but this time the winner may be downloads, with available bandwidths going up and compression technology improving significantly. A while ago one would have said that means “the winner will be Microsoft”, but Redmond is today firmly in the HD-DVD camp and Microsoft is the distinct runner-up in the downloadable media stakes, as far behind Apple (a BluRay supporter) as Macintosh is behind Windows.

As someone once said, “Choice? People don’t want choice. They want what they want”.

A Transdiffusion Presentation

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Richard G Elen Contact More by me

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Liverpool, Friday 29 March 2024