“Microsoft is deliberately feeding into the HD disc format wars to ensure that its own downloads succeed where physical copies fail, says movie director Michael Bay in a response to a question posed through his official forums. The producer contends that Microsoft is writing “$100 million dollar checks” to movie studios to ensure HD DVD exclusives that hurt the overall market regardless of the format’s actual merit or its popularity, preventing any one format from gaining a clear upper hand. Bay’s own Transformers is available on disc only in the less popular HD DVD format despite his stated preference for Blu-ray. To the director, this is primarily a stalling tactic while Microsoft refines its own online-only technology,” Electronista reports.
“‘What you don’t understand is corporate politics,’ he says in the response,” Electronista reports. “‘Microsoft [officials] want both formats to fail so they can be heroes and make the world move to digital downloads.'”
More in the full article, including link to Bay’s post in which he describes Blu-ray as the “leading, superior” format, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “RadDoc” for the heads up.]
The thing that most journos are overlooking in the so called format wars is that a number of mainstream player manufacturers are now selling dual format players that are equally comfortable with both BluRay and HDDVD. The addition of a second laser head and most of the rest is in the firmware. Then both formats can win and M$ is back to dreaming about their twisted view of utopia.
All of your MAC lemmings’ wild conspiracy theories about the “evil Microsoft” are hilarious. The simple reality is no company has a better finger on the pulse of consumer desires than Microsoft. More importantly Microsoft clearly values consumers and puts them first in all aspects of their well designed, high quality products. That’s how they rightfully got to be so huge in the marketplace.
Apple could learn a thing of two from Microsoft in this regard. Hey Apple, how about instead of bullying consumers into proprietary formats and relying on hideous DRM schemes to lock customers in you make something people actually want?
Keep it up MAC lunatics. Next you’re going to whine about Microsoft’s monopolistic business practices, right? Give it a break already.
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This may not impact Apple all that much. After all, Apple already has a download service. Both formats ought to be a dinosaur before they even reach the street. As flash mem gets cheaper, larger and faster, why would you want spinning media at all?
While I worry about the antics of the EU commissioners, I wish they would get onto the issue of proprietary codecs being foisted on the public. This is not the same thing as DRM, but proprietary codecs are a way to tie content to one particular platform. Note that the codecs that Apple uses are not proprietary, so Apple ought to be immune to these lock in charges.
Typical MS. They can’t just offer a good product and let it be successful on its own merits, they have to do some underhand market manipulation.
DIAF MS.
Sorry, to say it but, I’ve been saying for months that the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray war itself is killing the media market for all formats. I don’t think that Microsoft will win in a digital download of content market though because they screwed their own partner/customers with the MS DRM for music and they want exclusive locks that the industry and consumers don’t what. I think the movie studios will stay at arm length from Microsoft. The format for HD download content will be mpeg4 with .H264 encoding the only question will be the DRM scheme that the studios will use. My guess is they will opt for either the DReaM or the Marlin open source DRM solutions.
It would be simple using a standard format .H264/MP4 file encoding with either DReaM or Marlin DRM already on the files the studios could distribute the files to retailers who sell the content an provide the authorization information to a studio controlled DRM Server for customer authorization. Doesn’t matter who sells what the studio controls DRM authorization the resellers sell/rent the content.
(This is the model of that the Music labels should have taken long before the genie was out of the bottle. Instead they listened to Microsoft, ‘oh we have DRM and we’ll license it and all MP3 Players will use it, and the online stores will use it. It will be a perfect DRM’d music world. Well they got burned, Apple say the mess that the MP3 Player market was in and said we can do better and they did. Then they looked at the online music stores and built a better music retail online store. It’s not their fault that Microsoft’s DRM sucked and was expensive to license, so they created their own DRM to comply with the labels requirements for DRM.)
MS is inadvertently helping Apple here, since Apple is much farther along with downloads than they are. Microsoft has nothing that can compete with the iTunes store, and little hope of coming up with anything. They can’t count on IT support to sell movies!
Downloading or streaming movies is just not practical. The internet couldn’t handle it. If I was streaming or downloading the dvd’s (forget HD) my connection would crap out and I’d probably get banned for using too much bandwidth.
@GranitW – Or you can simply say that BR is cheaper/GB than the other.
@Petey – The thing I actually keep asking, myself and everybody else, is why oh why do we keep giving MS business?
I do not believe there is any real qualitative difference between BR and the other, I just want the one that actually costs less/GB, and that’s BR. I also want the one that MS doesn’t want – again that’s BR. Yup, BR wins in my book. When you add it all up HDDVD just doesn’t make any real sense.
It’s easy to remember when sending a five megabyte image was shaky. HD downloads are coming sooner than we think.
“a number of mainstream player manufacturers are now selling dual format players that are equally comfortable with both BluRay and HDDVD”
Sadly, they are still around 800-1000$.
“Transformers being one super awesome movie”
at which point you lost ALL credibility….
“It’s easy to remember when sending a five megabyte image was shaky. HD downloads are coming sooner than we think.”
5 meg? crap i am old. to me it wasn’t that long ago that an entire meg was an awful lot. i mean that was more than a whole floppy!
…yes, i remember floppies before one meg. and yes, they once where actually floppy.
…i am going to go sit in my rocker and yell at the kids to get off the lawn now….
As a leading industry insider, Mr.Bay is likely correct although MS is like the Star Wars Deathstar – it will continue to disrupt the universe and cause chaos for its own benefit- they have vast resources to do so. I simply hope that Apple offers Blu Ray as a BTO option for the 24″ iMac & 15/17in MBP’s. Streams may very well be the near future – operative word “future”, I’d like my 1080p NOW. Mac’s are already expensive and I would pay a premium for this option. I know it is available from 3rd party vendors as an external drive but I would love a built in option to complete these wonderful systems as all of the major competitors are offering it. Please let this be part of the next update Cupertino.
“it [MS] will continue to disrupt the universe and cause chaos for its own benefit- they have vast resources to do so.”
And one more time, I hope the world is learning its lesson about allowing any one mfg. to have nearly 100% market share. If anyone ever breaks MS’s share I hope we don’t do all of things that we’ve done this time, again. While my hope is that Apple gets as close to 50% market share as they possibly can, I would never do anything to allow them have more (not that I can do much, obviously). The painful irony is that, in spite of MS’s seemingly endless resources they actually spend huge amounts of those resources just trying to corner every computer related market that they can. If the resources MS now has were instead spread across several direct competitors, competing at the developmental level, I honestly believe that desktop computing would be someplace measurably different than where it is now – and probably a much better place. After 20+ years of personal computing I think time (developmentally) is actually moving slowly backwards, and as long as one company holds all of the cards it’s going to continue to accelerate – in reverse.
M$ should focus on getting their own products right.
That’s what Apple are doing. They couldn’t care less about competing mp3 players or pcs. They are doing what they want to doing and being successful in the process.
When Apple release some thing it is usually well thought out and reliable. That leads to success in the marketplace. Sometimes the products evolve and Apple learn by listening to their customers.
I think that is why Apple haven’t bothered with HD drives yet. It’s not on their roadmap until later.
If Microsoft HD-DVD format wins, kiss Mac OS X goodbye
It’s as simple as that.
Sony doesn’t make a operating system, so they are not inclined to make certain “OS level” DRM schemes.
But Microsoft on the other hand does and certainly would use HD-DVD to force Apple.
Apple will have to make a choice to adopt the Microsoft Way in their OS or go without being able to play HD-DVD movies on consumer computers.
If consumers can’t buy Mac’s that play HD-DVD’s, then they will buy PC’s.
Microsoft with selfish motives? Say it isn’t so. One must also realize that Microsoft is the only computer-related company that aspires to become a utility company. They want to keep draining money from their customers be it from subscription music or grossly overpriced Vista and Office 2008, amongst others. Business as usual.
Could it be that Microsoft is actually doing the right thing for once? At least they agree with Apple – Steve Jobs doesn’t seem too big a fan of disks any more.
Both formats are tied up with nasty gotchas like disks that won’t play in HD if your HD set has component inputs, and an actual self-destruct code that shuts down every device you have if one decides that an unauthorized HDMI device has been installed.
@pete – are you delusional?
Blu-ray & HD DVD use the same DRM – except Blu-ray has an additional layer of DRM on top of that.
Both DRM schemes have been cracked.
Combine that with the fact that I can take the XBox 360 HD DVD drive, plug it into my Mac (it’s just an external USB device, after all), drop in an HD DVD, and I get an “HD DVD” icon on my Leopard desktop.
“If consumers can’t buy Mac’s that play HD-DVD’s, then they will buy PC’s.”
Or, they will just buy an HD-DVD player for 50 bucks at WalMart once the price comes down, and save themselves hundreds of dollars and the pile of headaches that come from dealing with a general-purpose computer (especially a Windows-powered one).
I really don’t think optical-disc HD movie playback on computers has much future market relevance. I can’t even recall the last time I put a DVD in my MacBook. The Internet and flash media are making optical stuff obsolete.
Is agreeing with Michael Bay a sign of the Apocalypse?
HD-DVD or Blu-ray, what the hell difference does it make? Both are intermediate technologies designed to stretch the life of movie disks a little farther until digital downloads make them all candidates for the history museum.
To see the future of movie disks in all forms, simply look at music CDs. Who buys them anymore? They have been replaced by digital versions that people buy from iTunes and store on their hard drives.
The only reason downloads have not killed DVDs yet is that download speeds are still too slow. The death blow for movie disks will occur when it takes less time to download a HD movie to watch on a big screen TV then it takes to get in your car and go to Blockbuster to rent or buy the movie. I’d say that is a 30-45 minute download for most people.
Finally, as to worries about a MS conspiracy–pleeeeeeese! With Ballmer in charge the only thing MS has mastered is throwing money down ratholes. MS is successful because they convinced businesses that MS was the way to go. Consumers are a little more fickle and tend to adopt good stuff faster. That’s why Apple is gaining and that’s why no one buys american cars or TVs anymore.
The day will come when Microsoft is fondly remembered with other companies that lost their market like RCA, Pan American Airways, and Pullman. And boy do I long for that day.
Put on your tin-foil hats; Michael Bay has exposed a conspiracy.
HD-DVD is the format Microsoft has backed so I would not read too much into exclusive deals. A lot of films have been released exclusively on Blue Ray thanks to SONY but that does not seem to bother Michael Bay. Perhaps he is still upset about his Transformers being HD-DVD only; I doubt the film would be any better on Blue Ray.
Debunking the Microsoft/HD DVD conspiracy theories