DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

So it’s a couple of days after Warner’s shock decision, and I think people have not yet fully digested (pun unintended) what has happened yet, and what this will mean.

The latest rumours are suggesting that Paramount will now ditch HD DVD as well and go back to Blu-ray, and after the last round up rumours turned out to be true in regards to Warner, you can’t rule anything out at this stage. If Paramount does ditch HD DVD, then I think HD DVD will not survive the month.

While I’ve already touched on the subject in my earlier blogpost about the Warner decision, but for this post, I want to concentrate on the future of HD, with the assumption that HD DVD had gone the way of the Dodo. What will we, as consumers, have to look forward to in the Blu-ray dominated market? Of course, these are just educated guesses, starting the assumption that HD DVD will fold, so please bear with me.

First of all, I think Toshiba will start making Blu-ray players, maybe dual-format players to cater to some movies which may still be HD DVD exclusive. They may not be happy with the outcome, but they are not going to destroy their promising consumer electronics division just to hold a grudge. Microsoft has shielded themselves from the format war by being quite distant to it. Yes, the would prefer HD DVD have won, but they’ve left enough room to wiggle just in case HD DVD didn’t win. A Blu-ray add-on drive is a possibility, a dual-format drive as an upgrade to the existing HD DVD add-on drive might also happen.

Sony has taken a huge risk in tying the success of the PS3 with Blu-ray. If either failed, both fails, but if either wins, both wins. It’s an “all or nothing” strategy that appears to have succeeded, although not without losing significant ground in the console war, to the Xbox 360. When you have so much to lose, you end up with the will to win at all cost – something that Toshiba and Microsoft lacked.

A reminder again that this is all just an assumption and some guessing, not facts, and so we come to the assumed conclusion that Blu-ray wins the day. The market will be flooded in 2008 with Profile 1.1 players, dubbed “Bonus View”. If you want to access all the bonus features of a Blu-ray disc, you will have to throw out your Profile 1.0 player (about a million sold in the US so far) and upgrade to the new 1.1 player. Us consumers are fairly predictable – if there’s an upgrade that gives us what appears to be more features, we will often do so, because nobody wants to be left behind. Then in 2009, “BD-Live” (Internet connectivity) will be introduced in discs and then a whole new range of Profile 2.0 “BD-Live” players will be on the market. Time to upgrade again. You can of course avoid all of this by buying the PS3, as recommended by my Blu-ray and HD DVD Buyer’s Guide, as it can be theoretically upgraded in software to BD-Live and beyond (more than 3 different profiles? Now that’s a scary thought). By the time “BD-Live” players are everywhere, you won’t see too many “Bonus View” players for sale at all (except perhaps on eBay), so if you don’t want to be left behind, you have to upgrade again. This cycle might continue on if the market (that is, us consumers) accept it, since every upgrade means extending the time it takes for hardware prices to bottom out, as it did quite quickly with DVDs.

On the region and copy protection front, BD+ will ensure hacking is limited to no more than specific discs and specific players. It will be highly inefficient for anybody to try and hack BD+ for all Blu-ray titles that uses it, meaning that for the first time, there is actually a copy protection mechanism that works (something that DVD does not have, although not for want of trying by the studios). This will eliminate the rent-and-copy crowd that is quite a large group when it comes to DVDs, which eats into disc sale profits and has been the ire of the studios for quite a while now. Discs will get managed copy, which means you can make (mostly inferior quality) DRM’d copies of discs for use in your iPod or PSP, or maybe even a DVD version. This is actually a good thing for consumers, except the cost of these different versions of the film will have been included in the cost of the disc and passed onto consumers (hopefully, there will be “standard” and “copy-enabled” versions of the same movie being released at the same time, with different pricing).

And with BD+ in place, the typical way of getting region-free playback on PCs will no longer be valid, and so with strict hardware control and application of the new digital copy protection laws that most countries now have, region-free players will be a thing of the past if not due to technical difficulties, then due to legal difficulties. For the first time, studios now have a solid region control system (again, something that DVDs do not have) which allows them to delay releases in regions and create pricing differentials depending on local economic conditions. The US will get movies quickly and cheaply because that’s where the competition is, while the rest of the world will get movies when the rental, cable TV showing period is over, and at a price that seems awfully high compared to the US.

So Blu-ray looks set to fix some of the “mistakes” that DVDs made, namely low hardware prices far too quickly, lack of proper region control and ineffective copy protection. It’s the optical format studios have been dreaming about since before DVD, not because of improved quality or any of the things we consumers look for, but for the added security of being able to control how and when people will be able to use your content. Of course, consumers will have to allow them to get away with it, and that’s not a certainty, especially with the hostility that has been shown towards audio DRM. There is still a chance that we can make Blu-ray a more consumer friendly format, but only if we put in the effort to make the studios know how we feel about region coding or DRM or any of these anti-consumer gimmicks, instead of accepting “BD-Live” as just another upgrade we had to have.