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Microsoft Fueling HD Wars For Own Benefit?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Dec 05, 2007 10:23 AM
from the well-they-ain't-running-a-charity-over-there dept.
from the well-they-ain't-running-a-charity-over-there dept.
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."
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Firehose:Microsoft fueling HD wars for own benefit? by Anonymous Coward
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Alternative explanations (Score:5, Insightful)
...Or maybe it's because Microsoft has been a strong backer of the format since the very beginning, and doesn't want it to end up like all of Sony's other consumer device formats. (Betamax, MiniDisc, Memory Stick, SACD, UMD...)
...Or maybe it's because HD-DVD is the format that its cash cow video game console system supports, whereas they have nothing to do with Blu-ray.
Of course, I could just be grasping at straws.
At any rate, I do think he is right in that neither format will be the choice for obtaining and playing hi-def content, online distribution ultimately will win.
Re:Alternative explanations (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Alternative explanations (Score:4, Insightful)
Online distribution is only feasible if you have an Internet-enabled device connected to your HDTV. Sure, media center PCs are getting more common (and more affordable), and the numbers [vgchartz.com] on HD-ready game consoles are steadily rising, but the vast majority of HDTV owners do not possess either (a fact that will likely remain, as the magnitude of the HDTV sales figures [parksassociates.com] indicates).
Maybe in 10 years the tide will have turned and most people will be using online distribution. However, there's serious money to be made in the meantime, and that requires physical media.
Re:Alternative explanations (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? So right now in the lo-def world we cant get this stuff to work and Joe Sixpack isnt goign anywhere near it and when he does the quality is shit (netflicks) but next year or two we'll have the extra bandwidth and marketshare and the equipment and joe sixpack's trust and a pricing scheme that works and and
Right.
Discs are going to be the delivery mechanism for the forseeable future. MS is backing HDDVD. Sony is with Bluray. This is just a slashdot trolling hit and run page. Enjoy the ad impressions.
Not to mention if anyone pushes online distribution it'll be soaking in DRM. Enough to make bluray and hddvd look like Richard Stallman. This crowd will go apeshit and will never use it.
Because heaven knows.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Both Sony and MS throw money into supporting the horse that their respective wagon is tied to. That's how it is.
And I agree that in the long term on line distribution will win, but before it can the internet as we know it needs some substantial upgrading. Not to support the concept (it already does), but to support what happens when the masses start using it.
Re:Because heaven knows.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bingo! MS isn't trying to destroy physical media anymore than Verizon is trying to destroy the POTS. While both know that the future doesn't lay in these technologies both also know that for now they're pulling down a reasonable profit with them because of mass usage.
By the time the internet is seriously up to the task of delivering HD styled content to the masses both HD DVD and Blu Ray will have gone the way of the laser disc. The lifespan of these new formats will not be longer than that of the traditional DVD. We've been DVD for what now? 10 or 12 years? Do people here honestly think that technologies like FIOS are going to be nation wide (let alone world wide) in the next decade? I think people are fooling themselves into the ultra futuristic world of downloadable content being just around the corner. We have communities within 20 miles of a somewhat major city (if you can call Pittsburgh a major city) that still don't have DSL or Cable internet. This doesn't even bring the frail backbone of the internet into question.
Online content as a mass market is still a long ways off and it's ability to replace physical media won't be a reality in the next 10 years.
Re:Because heaven knows.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. However, it is very clear why Sony is willing to dump a ton of money into Blu-Ray. It's pretty much their format. They'll make a killing if it becomes dominant, and they'll loose a ton if it looses.
Microsoft, on the other hand, isn't as heavily invested. For example, their console supports HD-DVD only as an add-on. If HD-DVD becomes dominant, they get some licensing fees on each unit sold, which is no doubt nice, but not that big a deal.
I think Microsoft wants to kill Blu-ray, but they don't care if HD-DVD succeeds or not. They don't want to be at the mercy of Sony for two reasons:
1. If Blu-Ray becomes dominant, they'll be forced to licence it for their next console, (and possibly a XBOX360 add-on). What if Sony denies them? What if the fees put them at too much of a disadvantage.
2. Microsoft envisions some soft of computerized media center in each home. They need some control of the format to do this.
Re:Because heaven knows.... (Score:5, Informative)
What Microsoft does NOT like about Blu Ray is that it requires a java VM.
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.
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.
proof? (Score:4, Insightful)
They wrote the HD content software. (Score:5, Interesting)
What's a few $100M here and there when you have the potential to collect so many licenses from consumer boxes?
Plus, the Blu-Ray content software is written in Java. What better reason for MS to hate it?
Strategically consistent (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Strategically consistent (Score:4, Insightful)
FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe since they're offering their set top game box in HD DVD it's a business interest?
What's the problem here and why is this news?
They have real interest in seeing HD get the upper hand. Yes. Would they like to see downloadable content as a better business prospective? Yes. Who doesn't. MS has invested billions into their 360 product, throwing in a bit more money to give it the edge in home movies isn't unthinkable and certainly isn't unheard of.
I seriously do not understand why people are in such a twist over this. Oh, that's right, it's because it's big bad Microsoft and we all need to focus our attention for our daily two minutes of hate.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't care for the why. (Score:3, Insightful)
The HD-DVD format whilst not perfect is much more consumer friendly in that it's cheaper, it's region free and it's backwards compatible to an extent.
In comparison Bluray suffers from being region locked, having much more unfriendly, more problematic DRM and doesn't support backwards compat. in DVD players.
A lot of people don't want HD-DVD to win because Microsoft are backing it, but I think Microsoft is the lesser of two evils in this case, the biggest bonus for me is the region free part, whilst this is probably largely useless for North American consumers who get films earlier and cheaper anyway for those of us in Europe this is immensly important, rather than paying £23.99 for a film we can import it for about £15 and often get it 6 months earlier. With Bluray you're stuck with your £23.99 cost and the 6 month delay between North American and European releases.
Sadly it may be too late, HD-DVD isn't holding up that well right now it would seem, for me personally if HD-DVD won I would buy an HD-DVD player because of the cheap import HD-DVDs I can buy but if Bluray won I'd go for online purchases of HD content for no other reason than I refuse to pay over £15 for a movie.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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:I call bullshit on this one... (Score:5, Interesting)
True, Downloadable video is nice, as is stuff like Video on demand. I can picture telling my kids that "In my day, if you wanted to watch a show? You just had to wait until it was on." However, I don't think that downloadable movies will ever overtake actually having the disk in hand. If I want to watch Army Of Darkness, I don't want to wait 20 minutes for it to stream, then hope that my connection stays steady enough to prevent it from freezing. Just pop in the disk, no problem. The more steps you take from wanting to watch a movie, and pressing play, the worse off it is, in my opinion.
Re:I call bullshit on this one... (Score:5, Interesting)
Throw in the added benefit of taking some of the wind out of the PS3 and it seems like a very cheap way for Microsoft to purchase marketshare in several different markets (Console, DVD Downloads, Home Electronics).
Re:I call bullshit on this one... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's already the case with Tivos and Tivo-like devices.
You just wait until it's "been released" and then decide
when you're going to get around to watching it after that.
The more storage space you have in your PVR, the more it
starts to look like your own personal VOD system. You
just need to give it a little time to accumulate stuff.
Streaming is always open to problems. Whereas whole files are
a lot more reliable to deal with. It doesn't really matter if
they were downloaded from a torrent or recorded off of some
TV broadcast channel.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So yes, it will take a decade for downloaded videos to kill DVDs and high definition alternatives
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wait a minute (Score:4, Insightful)