The format war is over...Warner goes BluRay exclusive!

[Russ]

scotthm said:

Capt. Vulcan said:
WB execs say they didn't get a payoff. ...It really must have been a quick decision, because as of the moment before the news broke, the program for the HD-DVD presentation still listed WB as being one of the presenters at their show.

I believe the basic story can be found in this post at the Home Theater Forum.

Further down the thread it's implied by someone I consider reliable that WB got something on the order of $500M for their decision.

Yup, that's the story.

WB wanted to go HD DVD exclusive, but they're main priority was to end the format war. All three companies (Toshiba, WB and Fox) had an oral agreement, but Fox backed out at the eleventh hour after receiving a better offer by the BDA so WB had no choice but to go Blu-ray exclusive.

Who knows how much Fox was given by the BDA.

 

[USS KG5]

Irishman said:
How exactly did MS "win" the internet battle? Which battle might that have been?

Well you are right to ask for specifics of course, I was referring to the browser wars with Netscape, where they won hands down.

Of course in terms of web servers they are behind Apache I believe, and they have never convinced anyone that paying several hundred pounds for their web server software beats using Apache for free.

This is a bit off-topic though so I hope that provides the clarification you require.

 

[Irishman]

It could be argued that the open-source foundations (from which Mozilla, Firefox and Netscape sprang) ultimately won. Who runs IE by choice these days?

 

[Irishman]

And concerning Apache, which Operating platform bundles it for free with their OS?

 

[Deleted 2]

OpenBSD, although technically it's their own fork of Apache 1.3

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Russ said:
Yup, that's the story.

WB wanted to go HD DVD exclusive, but they're main priority was to end the format war. All three companies (Toshiba, WB and Fox) had an oral agreement, but Fox backed out at the eleventh hour after receiving a better offer by the BDA so WB had no choice but to go Blu-ray exclusive.

Who knows how much Fox was given by the BDA.

At this point, I really could give a damn who paid who and how much. All I care about is that the format war is over. The fact that it happens to be BluRay who won, is just icing on the cake.

 

[scotthm]

Irishman said:
Who runs IE by choice these days?

Most people who surf the Internet.

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[scotthm]

Babaganoosh said:
All I care about is that the format war is over. The fact that it happens to be BluRay who won, is just icing on the cake.

I guess that depends on whose cake you're eating.

I personally haven't taken the plunge into either hi-def disc format yet, but the 'winner' came down to which company (Sony or Toshiba) was willing to pay out the most bribe money, and not on any technical merits or consumer decisions.

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[Mr. Laser Beam]

scotthm said:

Babaganoosh said:
All I care about is that the format war is over. The fact that it happens to be BluRay who won, is just icing on the cake.

I guess that depends on whose cake you're eating.

Perhaps.

Again, though, at this stage I don't really care anymore. The format war is over. We have a winner. It doesn't really matter which one. Only the result matters.

 

[Daedalus12]

USS KG5 said:

I know about Nyquists theorem and it makes perfect sense along those lines, but there is the issue of what we cannot hear but are aware of, certianly there is a certain warmth and character to the sound of vinyl records which has always been absent from CD.

You can get the same warmth and character of vinyl on a CD. Taking some good digital recording equipment and record the sound directly off your vinyl player at 44.1/16. :thumbsup:

The only reason the warmth is there and absent on CDs is because of certain propagated "distortions" in the sound that would be absent in the digital process.

DVD-Audio and SACD do sound extremely good, and whether this can be put down more to the 96/24 encoding or the fact you get excellent recording quality and surround mixes is up to some debate.

There are certainly no humans who can hear 25KHz but there is something a bit different about the sound from those formats.

Take a 96/24 encoding and downsample it to 44.1/16 and do a double blind ABX test on the converted track versus the original. All I can say is good luck. I've never been able to pass the test myself.

scotthm said:

I personally haven't taken the plunge into either hi-def disc format yet, but the 'winner' came down to which company (Sony or Toshiba) was willing to pay out the most bribe money, and not on any technical merits or consumer decisions.

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Blu-Ray is superior to or just as good as HD-DVD in all technical areas and its software sales has won all 52 weekly Nielsen ratings in 2007 against HD-DVD's. The totals software sales ratio is 2 to 1 in favor of Blu-Ray YTD. Also despite having much cheaper stand alone players HD-DVD is also currently losing the battle there. Toshiba had this chart in their presentation at CES 2008 this morning showing Blu-Ray SALs being even with Toshiba SALs now.

Of course Toshiba never counts the large amount of playstation 3 in the market now which puts the number of Blu-Ray players well over the top.

If that is not consumer decision I don't know what is.

 

[scotthm]

Daedalus12 said:

scotthm said:
the 'winner' came down to which company (Sony or Toshiba) was willing to pay out the most bribe money, and not on any technical merits or consumer decisions.

Blu-Ray is superior to or just as good as HD-DVD in all technical areas and its software sales has won all 52 weekly Nielsen ratings in 2007 against HD-DVD's. The totals software sales ratio is 2 to 1 in favor of Blu-Ray YTD. Also despite having much cheaper stand alone players HD-DVD is also currently losing the battle there.

All very likely true, though I believe that the supposedly cheaper production costs of HD-DVD discs over Blu-Ray would have made it slightly more attractive to studios sitting on the fence.

If that is not consumer decision I don't know what is.

If DVD sales account for 97% of the home video market, and Blu-Ray sales account for 2%, and HD-DVD sales account for 1%, then we can rightly say that Blu-Ray is outselling HD-DVD by a 2-to-1 margin. However, the consumer choice is by far for DVD, not for either hi-def format. On the other hand, if Toshiba was willing to pay Warner and Fox huge sums of money to go HD-DVD exclusive, and Sony was willing to pay them both larger sums to release exclusively on Blu-Ray, we could logically conclude that the money changing hands between the format owners and the content providers probably had a larger impact on the decision than the trivial market share either format has.

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[USS KG5]

Irishman said:
It could be argued that the open-source foundations (from which Mozilla, Firefox and Netscape sprang) ultimately won. Who runs IE by choice these days?

Millions of people, over 63% of desktop users as of September last year by a very pro open-source survey?

I like Firefox, shitty memory holes notwithstanding, I'm using it right now - but do not pretend any kind of victory has been won over IE yet, the majority of desktop users still use IE and will continue to do so.

Also, Netscape is so dead even their consolation prize free browser is now dead, support discontinued in favour of Firefox. The business that made money out of selling a browser (they REALLY did) has died by MS's hand - that is some victory.

 

[Daedalus12]

scotthm said:
If DVD sales account for 97% of the home video market, and Blu-Ray sales account for 2%, and HD-DVD sales account for 1%, then we can rightly say that Blu-Ray is outselling HD-DVD by a 2-to-1 margin. However, the consumer choice is by far for DVD, not for either hi-def format. On the other hand, if Toshiba was willing to pay Warner and Fox huge sums of money to go HD-DVD exclusive, and Sony was willing to pay them both larger sums to release exclusively on Blu-Ray, we could logically conclude that the money changing hands between the format owners and the content providers probably had a larger impact on the decision than the trivial market share either format has.

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The consumer decision to go with DVD was made a long time ago. That has nothing to do with the current battle. Here is the bottom line. The Blu/HD ratios for Warner this year have been 60 to 40 in US, 70 to 30 in Europe and 90 to 10 in Japan. HD-DVD player sales have also been losing to more expensive Blu-Ray players this holiday season. No matter how much money has changed hands it's clear that on the consumer decision front Blu-Ray gets a much better score than HD-DVD. There is only an argument for Warner to continue to be neutral due to the overall low number of HD sales compared to DVDs but because DVD sales are dropping they decided to be smart and end the war. The easiest way is just to join the Blu-Ray camp since it already has over 50% exclusivity (HD-DVD only had about 25%?) even before the Warner decision. Whatever money exchanged hands imo is just a large negotiated bonus. A deal sweetener so to speak.

 

[scotthm]

Daedalus12 said:
There is only an argument for Warner to continue to be neutral due to the overall low number of HD sales compared to DVDs but because DVD sales are dropping they decided to be smart and end the war. The easiest way is just to join the Blu-Ray camp since it already has over 50% exclusivity (HD-DVD only had about 25%?) even before the Warner decision. Whatever money exchanged hands imo is just a large negotiated bonus. A deal sweetener so to speak.

The bottom line is Sony has so much riding on the success of Blu-Ray that they COULD NOT AFFORD TO LET IT FAIL. The fact is, Warner wanted the war to end, and both sides were offering them money to become exclusive. Once Warner realized that Sony, Disney, and Fox WOULD NEVER LEAVE BLU-RAY FOR HD-DVD then then understood that they and the other HD-DVD supporters would have to support Blu-Ray in order to have a one format future.

None of this had anything to do with the trivial amount of product sold to the public, though it might make some feel involved to think so.

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[Daedalus12]

scotthm said:
The bottom line is Sony has so much riding on the success of Blu-Ray that they COULD NOT AFFORD TO LET IT FAIL. The fact is, Warner wanted the war to end, and both sides were offering them money to become exclusive. Once Warner realized that Sony, Disney, and Fox WOULD NEVER LEAVE BLU-RAY FOR HD-DVD then then understood that they and the other HD-DVD supporters would have to support Blu-Ray in order to have a one format future.

None of this had anything to do with the trivial amount of product sold to the public, though it might make some feel involved to think so.

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Actually I don't think Sony even owns the most patents in Blu-Ray but that is another story. You pretty much repeated what I said except for the last part. Trivial or not I think if Blu-Ray had a poor (relatively speaking) sales figure (lets say 1 to 3 ratio) then there is no guarantee that Fox wouldn't have jumped ship. If Toshiba can pay 150 million to Paramount as reported in more reputable sources like the Wallstreet Journal then they could've also brought Fox on-board with another similar payout. The HD-DVD would've have the production cost advantage and sales advantage. If that happened then WB could've went easily to the other side on Jan 4 without any money.

Bottom line is that we can argue endlessly over semantics on what constitutes as "consumer decision" however the sort of consumer victory that you expect is impossible while the format war continues because too many people prefer to sit on the fence instead.

 

[Marc]

scotthm said:

Irishman said:
Who runs IE by choice these days?

Most people who surf the Internet.

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More so due to the fact Internet explorer was is bundled as part of the operating system (which until netscape blew thier own foot off) was the only way IE managed to get ahead.

But Blu-ray vs HD-DVD is another in the long line (I.E vs anything else), VHS vs Beta where the consumer hasn't actually come out on top because the better product hasn't triumphed - it's more a case of money talking.

 

[scotthm]

Marc said:
But Blu-ray vs HD-DVD is another in the long line... where the consumer hasn't actually come out on top because the better product hasn't triumphed - it's more a case of money talking.

It's arguable about whether Blu-Ray or HD-DVD is 'better', but you're right in that the consumers certainly didn't decide the issue.

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[rType]

I like Firefox, shitty memory holes notwithstanding

Firefox. It's a personal record.

 

[Candlelight]

HD-DVD has a better name than Blu-Ray. I hope if Blu-Ray win they're allowed to take the other's name.

And I hate Firefox. Causes my computer to do crazy shit. Never EVER had any problems with IE.

 

[USS KG5]

Daedalus12 said:
You can get the same warmth and character of vinyl on a CD. Taking some good digital recording equipment and record the sound directly off your vinyl player at 44.1/16. :thumbsup:

The only reason the warmth is there and absent on CDs is because of certain propagated "distortions" in the sound that would be absent in the digital process.

Agreed which does bring up certain questions about ones perceptions of music - if warmth is due to distortion, maybe we can all be happy in the download era?

Take a 96/24 encoding and downsample it to 44.1/16 and do a double blind ABX test on the converted track versus the original. All I can say is good luck. I've never been able to pass the test myself.

Indeed - with a double-blind test there are probably very few people who could pass.