“Paramount is poised to drop its support of HD-DVD following Warner Brothers’ recent backing of Sony’s Blu-ray technology, in a move that could sound the death knell of HD-DVD and bring the home entertainment format war to a definitive end,” Matthew Garrahan and Mariko Sanchanta report for The Financial Times.
MacDailyNews Take: And yet another defeat for Microsoft. MS couldn’t manage to shove DRM-laden WMA down the market’s throat, their tired and bloated WIndows platform is losing share to Apple’s superior Mac, and now they’ve failed at pushing the inferior HD DVD over Blu-ray, but, boy, do they have a Big Ass Table (with which to divert attention from their myriad failures; not yet shipping, of course)! Pizza Huts’ tabletop Ms. Pac Man machines cower in fear.
“Paramount and DreamWorks Animation, which makes the Shrek films, came out in support of HD-DVD last summer, joining General Electric’s Universal Studios as the main backers of the Toshiba format,” Garrahan and Sanchanta report. “However, Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD-DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner backing Blu-ray, according to people familiar with the situation.”
“It is unclear whether DreamWorks Animation has the same get-out clause in its contract with the HD-DVD camp. However, Paramount and DreamWorks have a close relationship, with Paramount distributing DreamWorks Animation films,” Garrahan and Sanchanta report. “The two companies also signed their HD-DVD contracts at the same time.”
“Meanwhile, Universal has declined to comment on its next- generation DVD plans following the Warner move,” Garrahan and Sanchanta report.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Too Hot!” and “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Blu-Ray it is. Bye HD-DVD!
All we need now is for Steve to announce the new AppleTV with Blu-Ray and online video rentals — the ultimate living room device.
none of this will really matter. The days of fixed format media are coming to a rapid close… Though it is fun to watch Microsoft losing influence left and right!
Die HD DVD! Die!
Just think of all the poor people that bought xbox with the promise of Hd-dvd. Oh the humanity, and nashing of teeth.
If the days of fixed format media are coming to a rapid close. The the Cable and Telcos better hurry up and get Cheep Fiber the the Home in a damn big hurry!!! To bad they took the Billions the US federal government gave them in Tax breaks to do so and just lined there pockets with it.
Die, HD DVD, DIE!
It’s about time! Finally, the better technology wins!
I was waiting to buy the soon-to-be-released Samsung hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD player… not now!
spudly… Yes, but here in the good old US of A where the gummint spends our tax money on more and more cleverly efficient ways of killing and making the rich richer, it’ll be decades before the infrastructure has been upgraded to handle the sheer mass of data flow required to view Full-HD content on all those Full-HD flat panel TVs that have been selling like hotcakes the past few years. There was an article i read someplace recently that 50% of US households have them now.
I don’t want to grow old waiting for movies to download.
So, it looks like shiny little disks will remain a reasonably efficient form of content delivery. They’ll be with us for some time to come.
*sing it friends!!*
Chairs are being thrown in Redmond today, today.
Warner said to Microsoft “No way, no way”
Bluray is here to stay, to stay!
But Apple announced a MacPro today, today.
It doesn’t have a BluRay, no way, no way….
I would love tho think that Supdly is correct and that we’ll all be downloading out HD content in the future, instead of shuffling plastic discs. However, whoever believes the HD optical media has no future is seriously and grossly overestimating bandwidth in all but minuscule fraction of the developed world. While there may be countries like South Korea, or some parts of the United States (for example) that have decent broadband that would allow for reasonable HD downloads, the remaining 95% of population is still 10 years away from that. During those ten years, a standard optical format will definitely help with faster adoption/migration to HD.
It is great that we’ll finally have this optical standard soon.
@poor m$
I am one (Bitten twice because the first drive died after a few months and MS screwed me over as a peripheral it only gets 90 day warranty) I also have a PS3 so I’m coverd on both fronts. Can’t wait till this is over and Bluray brings down the price of the disks they should be near the price of DVD not 1.5 to 3X the price.
Nail —> coffin.
MDN, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Microsoft continues to innovate and is on the rise. Big time. I don’t see Apple at CES. Who delivered the magnificent keynote at CES? That’s right, the brilliant Bill Gates. Apple is out of their league when it comes to consumer electronics—they simply don’t have the fortitude and guts to play with rest of the home entertainment companies.
HD-DVD is alive and well, thank you. Besides, Microsoft doesn’t need a bunch of little movie studios to sanction HD-DVD. 97% of computer users are fanatic Microsoft loyalists who will demand the superior quality and barely-there DRM HD-DVD offers. The studios will see the error of their ways. This will be a massive grass roots effort that will wipe Apple out once and for all. Buh-bye Apple.
Your potential. Our passion.™
partners in bed Universal & Microshit… What to do??? Maybe universal just comes out & says the obvious Microshit stinks big time. Or maybe not they’re both trying to get Apple…Yet another costly lesson for Microshit’s partners, sooner or later you’ll either be dumped by the world’s biggest & least innovated software company when it sees fit (Play for Sure, anyone?) or you’ll just have to dump it beause its so called innovative technology is actually nothing but poorly copied & badly executed applications from Apple or from someone else. Learn from it ‘parners’, oh & don’t get bribed as in this case (isn’t Paramount just cashed a $150millions check to exclusively support HD DVD?)
Blu-ray cannot die, theres thousands of people with PS3’s. Where blu-ray isn’t an option.
Sure theres many more xbox people, HD-DVD doesn’t come standard on xboxes.
jihad to paramount for making Transformers HD-DVD format
That’s when DMD (nee FMD) will suddenly walk onto the scene.
http://www.ddatainc.com/
MDN, are you suggesting that sales equals superiority. Please show me in what real ways Blu-ray is better. It’s not capacity because no study has maxed out any generation of Blu-ray or HD-DVDs and they wont they are lazy, they will just add more disc because consumers like it. It is definitely not picture, because they are relatively the same. Well then its not sound either, and we know this. Oh I see, it is because it is backed by Microsoft. So then now you are going to tell me the Nintendo Wii is superior to the Xbox 360. Just like when you used to post Wii news. This is a Mac site, but you don’t have to be fanboys.
Is HD-DVD Dead?
Fixed Format Media (Discs) are going NOWHERE! There are millions of rural houses that don’t have anything more than a telephone, much less internet or anything resembling a cable company in their area. Add in the soccer moms and their mini-vans with onboard video or any of a number of other scenarios and being able to take your movie along on a disc isn’t going to disappear.
Sure online downloads may gain some traction, but we are also nowhere near the cross country avg speeds needed to make internet delivery of HD content a reality not to mention the quality of that material. This isn’t even going intothe drm issue with online d/l’s the apy every time you watch something versus owning it, etc.. People tend to want to OWN the majority of what they pay to see.
Seems like Sony did a M$. They probably sold their PS3 at cost or a loss to seed the markets for both PS3 games and Blu-Ray DVD. Given that Blu-Ray stand-alone players are $500 each, its very likely that the PS3 manufacturing costs were very high.
I’m surprised this is being resolved so quickly. I though t it could drag on for years. However the thought of having to support 2 different HD formats was probably an annoyance to the studios.
I’m still be waiting for players to drop down to 200 bucks before I will consider buying one.
I have a Samsung Blu-Ray player. I would have waited longer to buy a HD player but my DVD player died and I pulled the trigger on the Samsung. So, for me, I am happy to see Blu-ray pulling into lead for format. Funny thing is, the only HD movie that I watched (Apocalipto) looked about the same as I remembered the regular DVD version. Film is film. How is high def supposed to improve the picture of soft, grainy movies shot on film with conventional cameras. HD television is magnificent, but can we expect the same from feature movies until their filming techniques change? I know the Blu-ray discs offer more space for extra features, but ultimately it comes down to the main feature. And from what I can see from my one experience is there is little or no difference to current DVD.
Blu-Ray superior my @ss. It’s got more room, but it’s also got more (and absolutely horrendous) DRM and is a far less mature format – oh and it still has regions unlike HD-DVD.
Paramount isn’t dropping HD-DVD though, luckily.
Things can still go in the only right direction for the consumer: cheap HD-DVD players and Blu-Ray dead in the water. We’re still talking tiny percentages of the movie market.
So let’s hope Blu-Ray (laser?)rots and burns. It certainly deserves it.
It doesn’t really matter what the HD-DVD camp thinks anymore. As far as the general public believes the war is now over and BluRay has won. Paramount should hammer the last nail in the HD-DVD coffin as fast as possible so we all can get on to the next thing.
I can’t speak for Spark’s settings and connections between his Blu-Ray player and HD TV, but I can confirm that he isn’t quite familiar with the difference between film and video.
Vast majority of current A-movies (big studio productions) are shot on 35mm film stock. The variations between various types of film stock are great. For some comparison purposes, though, it is assumed that standard frame on 35mm film equals to about 20 megapixels. As we all know, 1080p image is in the neighbourhood of 5 megapixels. Obviously, during edit, printing and copying of that film, image clarity is lost, but never to the point of going below 1080i or 720p.
There are more and more studios today that shoot part or all of their footage on HD. In those cases, the final quality will never degrade below what was originally captured.
Film has always provided better image quality, and even more so, better image contrast, than video (SD or HD). Today’s HD has provided the output quality that comes close enough to film so that significantly easier and faster work flow compared to film justifies the slight reduction in quality.
The bottom line: properly mastered movies in HD (blu-ray or HD-DVD), shown on properly connected, good quality HD screen, will always look significantly better than even best standard DVDs. If they don’t, something is not right in the chain between the player and the monitor.
Zune Tang is really a rare original
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Unfortunately his name will all too soon be completely inexplicable to most when nobody can remember any more what a “Zune” was once supposed to be…
Can’t be long now.
Blu-Ray is a way cooler name the HD-DVD, and should win the battle on that point alone!
macaholic: Blu-Ray is a way cooler name the HD-DVD, and should win the battle on that point alone!
Excellent point!
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