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Sony's Obsession with Proprietary Formats

Posted by Hemos on Mon Jun 05, 2006 10:10 AM
from the repeating-the-mistakes-of-yore dept.
Sony Hardware Entertainment Games
geoffrobinson writes "Jonathan Last, writing for a lay audience in the Philadelphia Inquirer, comments on Sony's push for the Blu-ray format: 'Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. One of life's more satisfying ironies, however, is that the same fate often befalls those who fixate on history... ...Obsessed with owning proprietary formats, Sony keeps picking fights. It keeps losing. And yet it keeps coming back for more, convinced that all it needs to do is push a bigger stack of chips to the center of the table.'"
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  • Far from being poorly supported, Blu-Ray has wide industry support (over 90 companies) and has the following companies on the Blu-Ray Disc Association [wikipedia.org] board of directors.

            * Apple Computer
            * Dell
            * Hewlett Packard
            * Hitachi
            * LG Electronics
            * Mitsubishi Electric
            * Panasonic (Matsushita Electric)
            * Pioneer Corporation
            * Royal Philips Electronics
            * Samsung Electronics
            * Sharp Corporation
            * Sony Corporation
            * TDK Corporation
            * Thomson
            * Twentieth Century Fox
            * Walt Disney Pictures
            * Warner Home Video Inc.

    Of the major media houses, only Universal Pictures has pledged support for HD-DVD.

    • Further to your list... (Score:5, Informative)

      by AnonymousJackass (849899) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:27AM (#15472572)
      CompUSA are now offering a variety of BluRay Products [compusa.com] for pre-order.
    • Most of those studios released UMD movies too.

      For a while.

    • Re:Those who ignore facts are doomed to look stupi (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 05 2006, @10:45AM (#15472758)
      I think that assuming the upcoming format battle is limited to Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is too simplistic. I would add to the mix: existing DVD and the anti-format: movies via the internet. Exisiting DVD still looks quite strong since the quality improvements gained from DVD to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD arn't nearly as compelling as the gains when moving from VHS to DVD. Movies via the internet is more paletable every day with data rates improving and the cost of storage decreasing.

      To me, it looks like a four horse race with DVD leading on the inside lane, Internet gaining ground on everyone else and HD-DVD and Blu-Ray weighed down by Big Media interested and lacking the speed to overtake DVD or outrun unfettered internet access.

    • You make it sound like Sony was the only company backing their technology in the past, and that was the reason they failed.

      As well as Sony and Sanyo, Betamax video recorders were also sold by Toshiba, Pioneer, Aiwa and NEC. The Zenith Electronics Corporation and WEGA Corporations contracted with Sony to produce VCRs for their product lines. Department Stores like Sears in the US and Quelle in Germany sold Beta format VCRs under their house brands as did the Radio Shack chain of electronic stores.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betamax [wikipedia.org]

      The HD DVD Promotion Group also has a rather long list of members, among them:

      • Broadcom Corporation
      • CANON INC.
      • FUJI PHOTO FILM CO., LTD.
      • Fujitsu Limited.
      • Hewlett-Packard Company
      • Hitachi Maxell, Ltd.
      • Imation Corp
      • Intel Corporation
      • Kenwood Corporation
      • Konica Minolta Opto, Inc.
      • Lenovo Japan
      • Microsoft Corporation
      • Mitsubishi Kagaku Media Co., Ltd. / Verbatim
      • NEC Electronics Corporation
      • Paramount Home Entertainment
      • RICOH COMPANY LTD.
      • SANYO Electric Co., Ltd.
      • TEAC CORPORATION
      • TOSHIBA CORPORATION
      • Ulead Systems, Inc.
      • Universal Pictures
      • Warner Home Video Inc.
      http://www.hddvdprg.com/about/member.html [hddvdprg.com]

      If Universal Pictures is the only media house supporting HD-DVD, it does seem a bit strange that Warner Home Video Inc. and Paramount Home Entertainment are also members of a group promoting HD-DVD...

  • How is it Any more (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nazmun (590998) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:17AM (#15472480) Homepage
    HOw is it any more proprietary then Toshiba's HD-DVD (or whomever the designing company is)? This isn't a rhetorical question, I just don't know how.

    Both techs seem to be upgrades with associated licensing fees for the tech. Do DVD's lack any licensing fee's to whomever originally designed it?
    • I don't think it's that Blu-ray is "more proprietary" so much as it marginalizes itself. HD-DVD is on the market now, and hit the shelves much cheaper than BR. What I'd really like to know is why I should rush out and buy their overpriced format instead of continuing to purchase $5 DVDs that I can watch on my XBOX. Of course, I'm still waiting to be convinced why I need to spend $500 for HDTV when I can get an analog for $150 and receive all of one less signal.
        • But OTA isn't analog, so your comment is confusing.

          OTA means "Over the Air". You can receive both ntsc (analog) and digital (atsc) OTA. NTSC isn't worth much, though a very weak analog signal may be at least watchable.

        • Uh, have you ever watched HDTV?

          No, I have a HDTV monitor from 2001, so none of the current HDTV crap will play on it. Frankly, I don't see the appeal, nor am I willing to spend $thousands on something I can't even record.

              • A lot of the cable/satellite HD isn't really HD (1080i) but lower resolution at as low as 4-6Mbps. Same bitrate as DVD, so don't be too surprised if it doesn't look much better. By HD they usually mean "a little better than DVD", but it's not a huge difference. Often it's worse that plain old DVD. It also varies from show to show, I've found the local cable HD sports broadcasts to be pretty good, but still not HD. I don't have a set yet, because I can't see the benefit either. I just looked around to

    • Re:How is it Any more (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MasaMuneCyrus (779918) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:45AM (#15472746)
      Because Toshiba's HD-DVD format was developed in unison with the international DVD forum [wikipedia.org], whose task it was to collaborate and create the next-gen DVDs. Sony, however, backstabbed the world, and created a second format war when it dismissed HD-DVDs and made their own specification.

      Moreover, Blu-ray has unimaginable support by movie companies, because of the very same reason everyone hates Sony and everyone hates the MPAA. The Blu-ray format has more DRM and other copy-protection than HD-DVD does.


      Simply put, BD-ROM is another propietary format developed by Sony, and it is screwing consumers in ways that this generation has never seen. The DVD forum was created to prevent another horrible VHS-Betamax war, and because of Sony's arrogance and greed, it was all for naught.

      • Re:How is it Any more (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Kenshin (43036) <kenshin@ l u n a r works.ca> on Monday June 05 2006, @10:53AM (#15472833) Homepage
        Because Toshiba's HD-DVD format was developed in unison with the international DVD forum [wikipedia.org], whose task it was to collaborate and create the next-gen DVDs. Sony, however, backstabbed the world, and created a second format war when it dismissed HD-DVDs and made their own specification.

        One could also say:

        Because Toshiba's HD-DVD format was developed in unison with the international DVD forum [wikipedia.org], whose task it was to collaborate and create the next-gen DVDs. Sony, however, saw that the new format wasn't advanced enough to meet standards 5 years from now, and created a second format war when it dismissed HD-DVDs and made their own specification with twice the storage capacity.

      • Re:How is it Any more (Score:5, Informative)

        by wyldeone (785673) on Monday June 05 2006, @01:51PM (#15474305) Homepage Journal
        Moreover, Blu-ray has unimaginable support by movie companies, because of the very same reason everyone hates Sony and everyone hates the MPAA. The Blu-ray format has more DRM and other copy-protection than HD-DVD does.

        Yeah, because even though HD-DVD and Blueray use the exact same [wikipedia.org] content protection system, blueray's drm is far more onerous.

    • Re:How is it Any more (Score:5, Informative)

      by DA-MAN (17442) on Monday June 05 2006, @12:57PM (#15473879) Homepage
      HOw is it any more proprietary then Toshiba's HD-DVD (or whomever the designing company is)? This isn't a rhetorical question, I just don't know how.

      1) The Blu-Ray license agreement requires that no one make a combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player. HD has no restriction.
      2) The Blu-Ray standard allows players to be disabled when they phone home via Ethernet, should the keys of a player ever become compromised.
      3) The Blu-Ray standard will not allow one to burn their own movies. Blu-Ray DVD players check for a hologram, which if it isn't present, will not play video. Say goodbye to making backup copies or putting home movies on HD.

  • It's only a "Sony proprietary blunder..." (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mehtajr (718558) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:18AM (#15472492)
    ...if it loses. If Blu-ray wins, it's Sony making an absolute killing by developing the standard for hi-def DVD content. The author ignores that, and that the situation he described with Betamax is apples and oranges with Blu-ray (i.e. Sony making deals with dozens of companies to get Blu-ray drives and discs out).

  • By name alone I have a feeling blu-ray will die (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MonkeyPaw (8286) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:18AM (#15472496) Homepage
    Someone like my mother will go buy a new television - HDTV. She'll upgrade her cable box to HDTV. When it comes time to buy a new DVD player which do you think she'll pick? HD-DVD or Blu-Ray?

    Of course she'll pick the HD-DVD because it sounds like it will work with her system.

    As for the other Sony products.. I like their hardware. The Clie I have ran circles around the Palm out at the time. I HATED memorystick.

  • does it really matter? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrSquirrel (976630) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:23AM (#15472533)
    It doesn't matter to me who wins in the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle. Why? Because regular DVD's look great! High definition looks better than non-HD, but not THAT much better (especially considering the costs). Sony says the ps3 will cost less than a blu-ray player... that's at $600! You can get an amazing DVD player for $150 with all the bells and whistles. When HD-DVD/Blu-Ray come to market and start to popularize, you can bet plain old DVD prices will drop. From a financial sense, DVD's trump HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD. ...not to mention that yargh, I'm a pirate matey, and I like to rip/burn DVD's -- something that'll be nerfed with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD.
    • My mom likes VHS, but her collection isn't growing as rapidly as it once did since they aren't making as many of the things anymore. Once either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray win standard status, a generation or so down the line, will they still be making new DVDs which will just get more and more pirateable as desktop tech progresses? In any case I think they're fighting over our children's money more than ours at this point.

    • Re:does it really matter? (Score:5, Informative)

      by timsesow (969190) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:43AM (#15472722)
      So, if you want to burn your own HD-DVDs, then you better go Blu-Ray, 'cause there aren't any HD-DVD burners coming out anytime soon. I have my first Panasonic Blu-Ray drive in my machine now, and it works great. Burns DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RAM, CD-/+/RW, and 25 and 50 GByte Blu-Ray disks (both -R and -RE). Plugged it into a CentOS 4.3 system (that LINUX for you Windows types) and it just worked. May be expensive ($900) right now, but that is the introductory price (read: recover engineering costs ASAP!). The real price problem right now is media, at just under $1US per gigabyte for rewritable (50GB BD-RE is $43 street, if you buy in quantity). The only HD-DVD media I can get is already recorded with a movie. Not really a computer product, just a TV product and that is sooooo 1980s!!

    • Well, I'm not a pirate. And the choice between HD-DVD and BR-DVD matters to me. Why? Capacity! I want it for a recording medium. With 15GB for HD-DVD and 25GB for BR-DVD, the latter would be the way to go if the pricing between them would be equivalent. Obviously, if BR-DVD stays at twice the price of HD-DVD, then it might not be worth it.

      Of course the big market the manufacturers are looking at is the HD video media market, selling new players and licensing the manufacture of all that media being pr

      • Re:Regular DVDs do not look "great" (Score:5, Insightful)

        by DragonWriter (970822) on Monday June 05 2006, @12:03PM (#15473429)

        ... and it frustrates me because they are screwing up something we really need.

        Sure, sure, higher resolution video entertainment is a pleasant luxury item, but it boggles the mind to see it described as "something we really need".

        I mean, solutions to problems of social injustice, environmental degradation, resource exhaustion, those are things we really need. Prettier ways to watch movies in our livingrooms are nice, and something I'll certainly be spending money on when their available and affordable, but hardly a necessity.

            • Many monitors can be driven at frequencies that the phosphor dots can't resolve.

              Your 19" monitor has a viewable screen diagonal less than 18". Let's say it's 18", and the traditional 4:3 aspect ratio. That means the display area is 10.8 by 14.4 inches. Or 274 by 365 mm. You need a .2286 dot pitch or finer to display 1600x1200 on that sized tube. Otherwise you will have pixels that are missing phosphors dots.

              There are many monitors advertised as being able to display 1600 x 1200 that just can't.
  • Their proprietary formats recently have probably met the first goal of proprietary formats: feeds revenue into the company. Unfortuantely, they just keep failing to be adopted as defacto standards (for good reasons).

    Look at their memory stick. While they didn't succeed it making it the de facto standard for portable media, I'm sure it's worked great for them. Their cameras, PSP, etc all use it and between their manufacturing and licensing I'm sure it helps them out some.

    The PSP's UMD bombed for movies, that's a given, but it was a worthwhile "attempt." Personally, I think it was the price that killed it, had they made it cheaper than it would have been worth it for travelling purposes (and only travelling).

    Sure, technologically UMB is not the best for gaming because of the power/loading time associated with discs but I'm sure the licensing helps them, but it was a good effort. Storing a lot of data for personal gaming probably doesn't have too many options. Besides, if company X wants to print a game for the PSP they get a piece of the production fee one way or another.

    I have a feeling Blu Ray is where it all hits the fan. Unlike it's other more recent proprietary formats which can supplement their own products, Blu Ray can only survive on its own in the wild. It must be adopted as the main video format or else there's just little point in it. Sure if it fails you can still sell Blu Ray burners for Desktops and such, and if PS3 goes Blu Ray then publishers will need to kick a few pennies to Sony.

    But in the end, it needs to beat out HDDVD to win and the only way that could happen is if they beat it to market or offered it as a cheaper alternative. I guess we'll see what happens here.
    • Look at their memory stick. While they didn't succeed it making it the de facto standard for portable media, I'm sure it's worked great for them. Their cameras, PSP, etc all use it and between their manufacturing and licensing I'm sure it helps them out some.

      The problem with the memory stick is that a lot of people went out of their way to avoid anything using a memory stick, simply because it tied you to expensive Sony products. And memory stick is one of the most confusing as hell "standards" out there

  • Technologically superior? (Score:5, Informative)

    by RSquaredW (969317) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:35AM (#15472647)
    It always seems to come up that Betamax was 'technologically superior' to VHS, and there's always some /.er who posts a refutation. Instead of being redundant, I'd argue that Minidisc was Sony's worst "technologically superior" failure. MD came about a few years before Zip, and had more storage capacity (177 MB versus 100 MB), a smaller form-factor, and the discs were cheaper. However, the software was terrible for audio (you had to record directly into the audio jack) and there was no way to use MD as portable storage until long after the iPod had arrived. There was a huge market for Zip as a middleware between floppy (1.44") and CD-R, and Sony could've aimed MD towards that market and done well (and provided a superior product to those damn Zip disks).

    Even when the first hard-disk mp3 players started coming out, Sony 'updated' with the NetMD software. That software must've been the inspiration for the rootkits of 2005, and was one of thoe most user-unfriendly products I've ever seen. Still no data-recording, even though competing players had that function, and an annoying three-copy rule on each mp3. Add this to a proprietary format and you get a terrible experience - no wonder MD never caught on. Even so, the hardware was good - the HiMD update allows .mp3 and provides hard drive functionality...but too little, too late. I would hope that Sony has learned the lesson of MD: superior technology without user-friendly software is worthless.

  • This isn't another betamax (Score:3, Informative)

    by Gat0r30y (957941) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:38AM (#15472680) Homepage Journal
    Sony has a virtually guaranteed market for blu-ray disks in the PS3 gaming market. Unless the PS3 is a total failure [slashdot.org] I doubt blu-ray could be a real loser. I don't blame Sony for trying to use that market to push HD-DVD out of the market.
  • The last Sony products I bought were Walkman Cassette players and a Trinitron TV. Back then those products were values for the money. Now I look at everything from digital camcorders to various music players and see no good value. I see locked in technology that would cost me more to own so I find something else to buy that does give me value and quality for my money. The article mentions Betamax, the memory stick and that stupid mini-disc, all examples of proprietary, expensive and locked down technologies from Sony. If Blu-Ray is the same it'll have the same fate as the other products Sony has tried to pawn off on us. It'll smell like a turd but they'll have pretty girls and advertisements telling us that's flower perfume we're smelling but it'll still be turd. Sony thinks that they have the video game players locked in because of the PS1 and PS2 and they reason that those folks will migrate to whatever nonsense Sony puts down in front of them. This was the reasoning with the mini-disc and the memory stick as well. Sony thought they had the personal music player market locked up. I mean after all, wasn't the walkman the most popular thing on the planet? Folks won't mind if we lock them into our Sony's expensive stuff. Only it didn't work that way, other music players came and other memory options came out and that market once owned by Sony was gone with the wind. The article writer Jonathan V. Last is right, Sony is a prisoner of their own internal logic and keeps making the same fatal mistakes.

  • Content will decide the victor... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rkhalloran (136467) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:50AM (#15472810) Homepage
    The studios listed for HD-DVD are *also* listed for BR ("CYA group"), but Sony's got more lined up for BR only. When little Joey wants his Disney fix in HD, and the parents find out it's only to be had on BR, guess what wins? Add the gaming boost from Playstation's market share and Sony may actually have something here.

  • Same as with audio (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drdanny_orig (585847) * on Monday June 05 2006, @11:20AM (#15473098)
    It's interesting that the history of SonicStage, the software Sony distributes with their consumer Walkman-type stuff (minidisc, "mp3" players, etc) is similar. The "preferred" format is ATRAC (.omg/.oma) a proprietary one that no other software supports. When MP3 was finally added, it was not truly MP3 -- rather it required you to process MP3 files through their software which SONY-ized it to a more propietary form of MP3. Today, when you plug a Bean player (Sony's previous generation iPod competitor) to a USB port, it's recognized as an external disc drive, but you cannot just drag-n-drop MP3 files (or even .omg files) to it and expect them to play: Sony insists on getting their hands into your audio data.


    Original versions of Sony's minidisc platform wouldn't allow you to digitally upload material you had recorded. You had to route the audio outout and use an analog process to get the stuff to your PC. When customers complained, they responded by providing the upload capability, but you only had one shot at it: the recording was then marked uncopyable!!! Finally, they currently support unlimited uploading, but I suspect it has other odious restrictions.


    If I didn't have so much invested in Sony hardware, I'd drop them like a rock.

  • I've got good news and bad news.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Meoward (665631) on Monday June 05 2006, @11:28AM (#15473153)

    To: Howard Stringer, CEO, Sony Corporation

    From: Djinns'R'Us, Wish Granting Department

    Re: Recent requests after bottle opening

    Dear Mr. Stringer,

    We are pleased to announce that we have fulfilled your latest request: to make Sony "the next Apple". Although we had to steal resources from projects in our Monkey's Paw Department, we have managed to complete this task up to your specifications.

    We hope you enjoy the restructuring. Sony now resembles Apple, circa 1996.

    Sincerely,

  • "Writing for a lay audience"???? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fm6 (162816) on Monday June 05 2006, @11:54AM (#15473350) Homepage Journal
    The submission makes it sound like Jonathan Last is some kind of technical expert. He's just a reporter on the technology beat. He does make some good points in the article, but he also makes some of the lame mistakes ("the DVD already had one competitor, DivX" and "household gadgets needed in a war-ravaged country: rice cookers and heating pads") typical of those self-taught "experts" who doesn't know technology as well as they think they do.

    • cliche retort (Score:5, Interesting)

      by xusr (947781) on Monday June 05 2006, @10:19AM (#15472501)

      I bought Sony's original MiniDisc recorders for field recordings. It's a workhorse and is still performing like a champ. When I retired my Walkman (you know, the cassette kind...) after 12 or so years of continuous use, it was not for mechanical reasons.

      Ok, so mod me down. I just had to respond to a knee-jerk comment with another.

      • I am sure that many of Sony's flagship products are very good.. however they started slapping their name on a bunch of products that were just regular consumer items and were of poor quality, diluting their brand.

      • Re:cliche retort (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mrchaotica (681592) * on Monday June 05 2006, @11:16AM (#15473069)
        You know the pattern in your examples? They're all old Sony products. It's the newer ones people seem to be complaining about.
          • When Betamax and MD were new people may have complained about proprietary media but not about quality. These days the quality and reliability of Sony electronics have gone downhill too. That is new.
      • Likewise, I still use my Sony D8 DAT Walkman and Sony R300 DAT Rack 11 years after purchase. With some modification, they are easily able to circumvert SCMS restrictions - which never really mattered since I bought them to tape/process Grateful Dead shows. Having said that, Sony should stick to making great versions of existing consumer products and quit trying to create/force everyone into their proprietary formats. They, quite simply, never have and never will win these battles.

          • Re:cliche retort (Score:4, Informative)

            by shotfeel (235240) on Monday June 05 2006, @03:08PM (#15474930)
            I can't hold that against Sony. Calling it an IEEE1394 port isn't going to help anyone. Keep in mind, Sony was one of the first (the first?) to use 1394 on consumer video products (video recorders to TVs). Their brand name for their implementation of the standard was/is iLink. Apple had there own registered monicker for their implementations, called Firewire. It was only after Apple decided it would be a good idea to put the "Firewire" name in a kind of "Creative Commons" type of use to promote the standard by other industry players that it became the name for 1394.

            From there, is Sony better off changing it and confusing customers, or not changing it and confusing customers?

    • Re:Why I avoid (Score:4, Interesting)

      by erroneus (253617) on Monday June 05 2006, @11:05AM (#15472966) Homepage
      Many Japanese people agree with you... and so do I.

      Sony used to be 'the' thing to get but for the past... I don't know, 8-10 years maybe, they've really seemed to have their heads up their asses. They are NOT Apple though they seem to think they are. What I mean by this is that in Apple's case, whatever they make is gold every time they slap their Apple logo onto anything. This is not so with Sony. There are too many competitors and Sony is not a culture all its own as Apple is at the moment.

      My bad experiences with Sony started when I was selecting a laptop. I wanted to run a Japanese OS and expected that since Sony was a Japanese company, that I wouldn't have any trouble getting support. Boy was I EVER wrong on that. I should have gotten an IBM! It ha(d) WAY better Japanese language support than any other at the time. Pretty amazing considering it was an American company.

      And from that point forward, my bad experiences with their stuff just kept piling up. I've been 'done' with Sony since about 5 years ago. Now I just wait for them to die.
      • And from that point forward, my bad experiences with their stuff just kept piling up. I've been 'done' with Sony since about 5 years ago. Now I just wait for them to die.

        You're going to wait a long time. I have a Sony radio on my shelf, it was built in 1962. Sony is not going anywhere.

        Unless you are some kind of console fanboy, why on earth would you want them to die rather than simply improve?

      • Frame for frame, sony had a better product. But they lost because VHS came out with tapes that could hold more. Doesn't matter for rentals, but when you stick your tape in, and want to record the superbowl, or a movie that with commercials has been stretched out to 3 hours, it made a difference.
      • Sony lost out, only because of price, not quality.

        My dad has always been a fan of new technology. When we got a satellite dish (no cable in rural areas) we also decided to get a VCR so we could tape movies and such (we had a fairly advanced system with a high-gain C-Band LNB that worked with an "amazingly small" 8 foot dish!). After seeing a noticeable difference in picture quality we decided to get a Sony Betamax VCR despite the slightly higher cost.

        It didn't take too long to become frustrated with the s
    • When I was a journalist, MD was great for recording interviews because of the far longer recording time than the usual micro-cassettes. I knew a couple of people who had problems making copies of their own recordings because of Sony's stupid copy management system (SCMA, or something like that? I can't remember), but my MD unit was a Sharp and never gave me any problems at all.

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