OT: HD DVD/BluRay wars

nolonemo wrote on 11/9/2007, 9:52 AM
From the AP today:

The head of Sony Corp., Howard Stringer, said Thursday that the Blu-ray disc format the company has developed as the successor to the DVD is in a "stalemate" with the competing HD DVD format, chiefly backed by Toshiba Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

At the same time, he played down the importance of the battle, saying it was mostly a matter of prestige whose format wins out in the end.

"It doesn't mean as much as all that," Stringer said.

Full article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21706778/

Comments

Terje wrote on 11/9/2007, 10:28 AM
Interesting comments from a Sony executive. I am not quite sure I agree with him. If you go by the numbers on http://www.eproductwars.com/dvd/ it does appear that the Blu-Ray format is doing a lot better than the HD DVD format, despite the fact that Toshiba has been, in reality, giving away HD DVD players lately.

The two most interesting happenings right now is the bump that HD DVD got from the release of Transformers, a bump that appears to be very short lived, and also not even close to what the HD DVD camp would have hoped for. From the latest numbers it appears that Spiderman 3 is more of a success than is Transformers, and this doesn't bode well for HD DVD.

Another trend that is interesting to look at is how the same movie is doing in the two different formats, 300 is an example. Last time I checked the sales figures of 300, the Blu-Ray edition was out-selling the HD DVD edition about 2-1.

It does seem like the family situation was improved slightly for HD DVD with dumping of the HD DVD players last weekend. The HD DVD version of Planet Earth got a bump recently and jumped very high on the HD DVD list, even better than Transformers it seems.

Currently Blu-Ray has 11 titles among the top 200 items at Amazon while HD DVD has 4.

The interesting moves will happen in December and January this year, and I think we will have a de-facto winner early next year. The first thing is the holiday season sales. How will the two formats do there, and what wil the camps do in the promotions department. There are rumors, but it is hard to know.

After Christmas it seems probable that Time Warner will evaluate their High Def situation, and at some stage they will probably come down on one side of the fence. At that time the war should be over.

As you know, Toshiba is the only company currently producing HD DVD players, and they are currently selling them for significantly below cost. An HD DVD player is as expensive to create as is a Blu-Ray player. How long will Toshiba be able to bleed like this? Unlike Sony this isn't a loss-leader for them, they do not have related products on which to make up the lost $$s (as opposed to Sony who makes money on games).

Finally, as a writable format HD DVD is a complete disaster, with the recently released burner being a serious failure.

I really don't see how Toshiba/Microsoft can win this.
JJKizak wrote on 11/9/2007, 11:00 AM
Perhaps with the burning of HD-DVD to standard DVD-R discs has something to do with what the big dude said.
JJK
apit34356 wrote on 11/9/2007, 11:57 AM
""It doesn't mean as much as all that," Stringer said." Well, this new alliance with Toshiba paying 800million in cash +2billion in one year,+ plus more for 51% of Sony cell IC plants, has just grown more complex, with BR or HD DVD becoming secondary for a few corp quarters. This happen because the cell and the cell memory controller for XDR memory has proven to be the future in memory subsystems and computing needs. Tho, a minor design partner in the cell project, Toshiba never commented as promised because they development an alliance with MS and Intel for HD DVD and future computing needs, But Intel and MS never really advanced memory technology as promise while IBM, Sony and Rambus developed XDR memory for PS3. Now, with the DOD and just about every supercomputer manufacturer crying for XDR speeds( easily up to 8 times DDr2/3), it has come obvious that current memory designs can not keep up with quads or higher design memory accesses, regardless of expanding "X" bus. Intel as signed a "lets talk" with Rambus, but Intel is nervous because IBM has already brought AMD chips into the design mix with cells, meaning AMD had a head start to XDR memory design and a proven on-chip IBM and SONY memory controller approved by the FEDs. Now, one must remember that Toshiba manufactures a lot of laptops and desktops, so being able to manufacturer and sell XDR controllers helps themselves and their old partners. Toshiba has "promised" Sony this manufacturing alliance will make for them $200billion the next 5-10 years, big numbers.

A while ago, a rumor about a china manufacturer building a cheap HD DVD player seem to have legs, but it turned out to be a false story. But then a Toshiba engineer leaked a couple of months ago that they had subcontracted to a china manufacturer for a building subplatforms for the HD DVD player to save some production cost and retooling cost for the new 51G drives, he hinted the new design head assembly could easily manage a "lens" assembly---- as in BR or other design needs. Toshiba selling parts for BR players in the future? Who knows.... in this musical chair game of future products,,,,,, and HD media appears to be a secondary interest on hold(compared to other "interest" by all parties)..... for Christmas 08 products.
Jeff9329 wrote on 11/9/2007, 12:17 PM
With the recent drop in HD-DVD player prices, it seems that Blu-Rays fate is sealed. We can still be sure that this will drag on for quite a while however.

About the eproductwars site, Im not sure about the quality of their info. I admit I did not spend a lot of time looking, but I could not find sources for their information or information on how the data is compiled.

I wonder if the 5 free HD-DVDs you get with a Toshiba player are factored into the "sales" figures?

Finally, as a writable format Blu-Ray is a complete disaster, with the recently released burner being a serious failure.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1980099,00.asp

I really don't see how Blu-Ray can win this.
Paul Mead wrote on 11/9/2007, 12:39 PM
I really don't see how Blu-Ray can win this.
I really don't see how Toshiba/Microsoft can win this.

And the beat goes on...
Coursedesign wrote on 11/9/2007, 1:07 PM
Finally, as a writable format Blu-Ray is a complete disaster, with the recently released burner being a serious failure.

Your link points to a review of a first generation burner, probably not sold anymore.

See Vic's post re the 2nd generation 4x burner on Amazon.

Still, the war makes it unpleasant to fork over more than $100 for a player, and then only to play content rented from Netflix. Buying disks today may mean selling them framed on eBay under "Antiques, Collectible".

Is it really true that HD-DVD players cost as much to manufacture as BD players? The technology is different.
Laurence wrote on 11/9/2007, 2:32 PM
At this point I have a foot firmly in both camps and can do what I want with either format. I don't really care which side wins or if both formats end up staying with us. One thing I will say though is that both formats are pretty amazing. A few years ago you could spend huge amounts of money on a film transfer that wouldn't look nearly as good as what you can now put on a thirty cent disc! The future looks bright indeed. :-)
apit34356 wrote on 11/9/2007, 3:25 PM
"Is it really true that HD-DVD players cost as much to manufacture as BD players? The technology is different." In the beginning, they were a lot different in general design, but both used blue lasers. But with redesign of the HD DVD to obtain 51G required a major change in the head assembly, which approached the BR design. Now, the critical different is in the BD lens assembly used for fine adjustments. The new 51G drive assembly with the new head is "supportive capable of managing the weight of an lens assembly". The new 51G electronics are 90% identical to BRs. The fact is, HD DVD "manufacturing design" has been playing catchup for a long time, tho the HD DVD crowd claims that its the reverse. Now, Toshiba has announced that they are going to put a sub-cell into most of their future designs for HD tvs and HD players.
Of course, I favor BR because 1080p60 will be here sooner than later and 4k editing stations are going to become common soon vs "green" cars. This is based on XDR becoming the standard memory in these products in the next few years. The market is here, with all the new cameras, for some serious displays with deep color space.
Terje wrote on 11/9/2007, 9:01 PM
With the recent drop in HD-DVD player prices, it seems that Blu-Rays fate is sealed.

You didn't really read what I wrote, did you. Despite the dramatic drop in HD DVD player prices, it has had no real impact on the sales of HD DVDs. In fact, it seems the only HD DVD that has received any real bump from this is the Planet Earth disk set, and I'd be surprised if that is long lived.

About the eproductwars site, Im not sure about the quality of their info.

Well, if you are looking into most things the way you were looking into this, I guess the Blu-Ray camp should go out celebrating right now, since your vision is clearly rather blurred (as is demonstrated later in your post as well). The title of the page is "... fought on Amazon.com". Where do you think they get their sales numbers? Oh, yes, they are sales number, sales as in paid for and shipped to the customer. Not shipped from the disk-pressing factory, which seems to be the numbers released from Paramount about the Transformer "sales". Fictional is a good word.

I wonder if the 5 free HD-DVDs you get with a Toshiba player are factored into the "sales" figures?

No, they do not, and neither does the five free Blu-Ray disks you get with every Blu-Ray player, nor does the Spiderman 3 disk shipped with every new Playstation these days. Interestingly Spiderman 3 still sold very well, even out-sold the much anticipated Tansformers HD DVD in 5 days. 130 000 Blu-Ray Spiderman 3 in a week where Sony is giving it away for free. Not bad at all.

For the record, official sales data for first week of Transformers is 115 000 (not 190 000 as Paramount said) and for the first five days of Spiderman 3 the official number is 130 000.

Finally, as a writable format Blu-Ray is a complete disaster

So you are quoting a review for a product that was outdated 18 months ago as an example of Blu-Ray burners doing badly. Well, if you are that informed I assume your favorite Movie format is the Circuit City DIVX format http://hometheater.about.com/library/weekly/aa062199.htm.

Seriously dude, there are a lot of Blu-Ray burners on the market today, from 1x to 4x, and they work very well. There is one HD DVD burner on the market today. It was just released. It is a total failure. I'd go so far as to say it is defect as designed.

So, please enlighten me, what did HD DVD have going for it again? Poor sales despite of Toshiba dumping (and I thought that was illegal) their player. No real burnable format yet, probably not for at least another 18 months, if ever. Quite poor media sales despite the fact that they are giving away players for less than it costs to make them.
blink3times wrote on 11/9/2007, 9:40 PM
"So, please enlighten me, what did HD DVD have going for it again? Poor sales despite of Toshiba dumping (and I thought that was illegal) their player. No real burnable format yet, probably not for at least another 18 months, if ever. Quite poor media sales despite the fact that they are giving away players for less than it costs to make them."

================================================================

Well... I wouldn't exactly call HD DVD sales "poor" and I wouldn't exactly call it "2:1" for blu ray as people seem to suggest.... BOTH terms are stretching things a little. If HD DVD sales were "poor" then there wouldn't exactly be a stalemate, now would there? :)

Point of fact... NEITHER camp is making anything in terms of headway. Granted, it's still too early to see what damage (if any) was caused by Best buy and Wallmart selling A2 players for $98 for a day (a conservative sales estimate for that day was something on the order of 90 thousand machines sold)

Blu ray has the sales edge, there is no doubt about that. But it's not a big edge in the grand scheme of things... in fact the edge is small enough for BDA's very own President to officially claim a stalemate.... and it's been this way for a while now.
apit34356 wrote on 11/9/2007, 11:30 PM
"a conservative sales estimate for that day was something on the order of 90 thousand machines sold" ???? real sale numbers would be interesting. For this promotion I heard that Toshiba had 30K units being redistributed thru all the US retailers, but UPS had received only about 6500 units being shipped out to big box retailers including normal shipping volumes. UPS is main transport to Best Buy, CircuitCity, Fry's, etc,..... and to big retailer warehouses, their shipping volume is a good measure of retail volume. I may have has missed it, but Toshiba is not publishing sales data on this event that I have heard. Walmart volumes suggest the Laptop was a major hit and the A2 was not a hot item from conversations I have had with a few Walmart managers, but these comments are not an official Walmart statement or position.

But even if Toshiba was dumping the market with older A2's design and it was not successfully in large volume sales, it still help a little in getting the general market to look at HD. IF big steps are not happening, baby steps will do! And as always, Go Blue!
Terje wrote on 11/9/2007, 11:38 PM
Is it really true that HD-DVD players cost as much to manufacture as BD players? The technology is different.

The main difference in the technology is in the way the disks are produced, not in the way the player is created. Both use blue lasers, which is the most expensive component of the player. The two players are, technically, not dramatically different even though the disk formats are quite different.
Terje wrote on 11/9/2007, 11:47 PM
Granted, it's still too early to see what damage (if any) was caused by Best buy and Wallmart selling A2 players for $98 for a day

Well, we can look at the numbers. As one would expect, in the first few days after the sale, there was an increase in the number of HD DVDs sold. Not too surprising. This seems to have topped out on Tuesday, and since then it has been down-hill.

I would have expected a little longer of a sales peak quite frankly, since you would expect people who have just bought a new player to buy three or four movies to go with the player. That doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe people are using the player as a nice up-converting DVD player. An odd choice if that is the case, since the A2 doesn't do 1080p out, not that that matters all that much.

Quite frankly, I think this war may be over next spring when I expect Warner will go Blu exclusively. We'll see.
craftech wrote on 11/10/2007, 5:09 AM
Doesn't anyone ever think about all this hype for exactly what is is? HYPE.

Considering the miniscule number of sales that make up Hi-Def worldwide greed is an unfortunate reality understood by all. How could there possibly be room for two formats? That would be un-business like or at least un-American.

So in order to make something that isn't selling well (Hi-Def discs) seem better than it actually is why not play games with statistics and instead of tooting their actual horn they toot out of the other end.

So how do you do that? That's easy:

1. Have two for one sales and count it as two sales. And also count the free ones that are given away with the various players as separate sales.

2. Count the total number of discs sold instead of the number of titles sold. That way major sales of titles like "300" and "Transformers" will make the unthinking assume the sales are of lots of different titles.

3. Create fictional technological differences between the two formats that don't amount to anything the human eye can discern because they will (for economic reasons) never be fully utilized to ever get to that point. Then let the fanboys duke it out.


Warner had the perfect idea until someone got to them. Instead of an SD/HD combo disc, produce a Blu-Ray/HD DVD combo disc.
But someone decided that was "bad for business" so the idea was scrapped. Good Lord! What would the consumer ever do without monopolies?

John
blink3times wrote on 11/10/2007, 5:59 AM
"For this promotion I heard that Toshiba had 30K units being redistributed thru all the US retailers, but UPS had received only about 6500 units being shipped out to big box retailers including normal shipping volumes."
===============================================================

http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6498141.html
MozartMan wrote on 11/10/2007, 9:25 AM
@blink3times

Well...
=================================================================

Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending November 4th:

WE: BD-71% HDD-29%

YTD: BD-64% HDD-36%

SI: BD-61% HDD-39%



http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=8608
JohnnyRoy wrote on 11/10/2007, 9:46 AM
> With the recent drop in HD-DVD player prices, it seems that Blu-Rays fate is sealed. We can still be sure that this will drag on for quite a while however.

The price of players has little to do with it. I bought a Toshiba A2 HD-DVD player for $200 and it's a boat anchor because all of the media my kids want from Disney is only on Blu-ray. Sony blockbuster movies like Spiderman 3 are only on Blu-ray. Compelling content is what will decide who prevails. Speaking personally, HD DVD just doesn't have the content my kids want.

> Finally, as a writable format Blu-Ray is a complete disaster, with the recently released burner being a serious failure.

As writable format HD DVD doesn't even EXIST! There are no burners, none, nada, not a one on the market to be purchased. Making 20/40 minute HD DVD's from regular DVD's is not an option for hour long content. I know, I've tried.

I will be buying a Blu-ray burner and player very soon because there is NO HD DVD option.

I don't care who wins and I really tried to make HD DVD work for me but it was a disaster. With limited content and no burners, I really don't see how HD DVD can win this.

~jr
4eyes wrote on 11/10/2007, 10:18 AM
My plans are to get a blu-ray burner for archiving/backups & video playback. Still expensive though.
Putting highdefintion on dvd's appears to me to have limitations, if you can keep the bit-rate down with a good compressed format it's alright.
I just wonder how long will a dvd that's spinning at 3X will last before failing when using them in an HD-DVD player. I returned my HD-DVD player, it was collecting dust.

I like the Blu-Ray disk because it doesn't have to spin that fast for high data-rate transfers.
I cannot get any of the consumer Blu-Ray players to playback mpeg2 @ 25MBS without studdering.
They will playback AVCHD/h264 video @ 18MBS from a dvd, but not mpeg2 @ 25MBS.
The only device that will do this from a menu-ed dvd is the PS3. I guess because the PS3 is more like a computer than a consumer playback Blu-Ray player. But even when doing this making menu-ed dvd's that will play mpeg2 on the PS3 I still have the time limitation as HD-DVD.
The only reason I even make a menu-ed dvd with mpeg2 video for the PS3 is the dvd will playback the files sequentially, one after another instead of stopping after each video. If using the h264 videos encoded from Vegas on the dvd I really can't see any difference in the quality, so I'm starting to believe that mpeg2 @ 25MBS on dvd really has to many limitations, blu-ray or hd-dvd.

I think that pushing the HD-DVD players at cheap prices wasn't smart.
They should sell the HDTV's at these prices. They are still to expensive for the average consumer.
They are giving the nails for free and making you buy the hammer.

Common sense tells me to try my mpeg2 @ 18MBS for consumer Blu-Ray Players, but avchd at that bit-rate should be better quality than mpeg2 @ 18MBS.
blink3times wrote on 11/10/2007, 12:47 PM
"Nielsen/VideoScan Numbers ending November 4th:"
=================================================

Nielson numbers don't include Wallmart sales for starters.

If HD DVD sales were "poor" then how could there possibly be a stalemate???
fwtep wrote on 11/10/2007, 2:49 PM
blink says: Nielson numbers don't include Wallmart sales for starters.

Do you have a source for this claim? Even it it was true, their numbers must be similar to the Nielsen numbers, otherwise Toshiba would be crowing about them. And don't think the distributors don't have a pretty good idea of how the sales are for stores that are not part of the Nielsen system-- after all, they know how much product they're shipping to them.

If HD DVD sales were "poor" then how could there possibly be a stalemate???

It's funny, when someone from Sony says "we're winning," you deny it, but when someone from Sony says "it's a stalemate" you take it as the gospel truth.
blink3times wrote on 11/10/2007, 5:03 PM
The proof is in a very looooong thread on the AVS forum... you can dig it up on your own if you look hard enough. I should also point out that Nielsen does not take into account anything outside the US border and HD DVD is doing better in Canada... well enough anyway so that BlockBuster Canada is carrying BOTH formats... not sure about the rest of the world however.

The term "stalemate" has been kicking around for more than a month now... it just so happens that the BD camp are the last to come forward and admit it in the above statement... so it has little to do with believing or not believing the BDA.
MozartMan wrote on 11/10/2007, 6:20 PM
blink says: I should also point out that Nielsen does not take into account anything outside the US border
======================================================

Here is article and picture from Norway

http://www.release.no/artikkel.asp?ID=4930


John_Cline wrote on 11/10/2007, 8:56 PM
96% and 4%... curiously, that's about the same market share distribution as Windows vs. Mac.
Coursedesign wrote on 11/10/2007, 10:21 PM
Used to be, I think Macs are somewhere between 6% and 7%, much thanks to the MacBook Pro.

PC Magazine rated this the fastest Windows notebook available. In their test it beat everything from Dell, Acer, etc.

As I put on my Nomex suit, I'll state that they only tested "store brands" as opposed to hugely expensive super ultra low volume monster machines.