Blu-ray, HD both doomed as pr0n industry twiddles thumbs
WHEN IT COMES to the HD-DVD versus Blu-ray battle, the winner is neither, they will both lose. Blu-ray will lose much quicker than HD, but neither will achieve the critical mass necessary to take off before the net overwhelms them.
The majority of this victory is due to one thing, Sony's arrogance. It doesn't learn from history, and is burdened with the huge millstone of unchecked ego. You can see signs of it everywhere, but the most obvious is at the Adult Entertainment Expo that goes along with CES. Sony underestimated porn.
There are several key players in HD porn. Some of them had an opinion, others did not, some were under various NDAs, others talked under promise of anonymity. They all fell into three camps. About half were taking their watches out and waiting, and all but one of the others were pro-HD-DVD. The one single holdout was both an HD and Blu proponent.
A year ago, everyone was leaning toward Blu because it has superior capacity. Many, including high def pioneer Digital Playground, (not a worksafe title page, so go to
www.digitalplayground.com at your own risk) and others were heavily leaning toward the Blu camp. Some even went as far as to master movies in this format.
Then the cold hard reality intruded and Sony dropped the bomb. No, not the recalled Dell batteries, the fact that it would not allow any porn on Blu-ray at all. None. Never. When asked, several people claimed this was because of pressure from Disney, but there was no way of directly confirming this. Most called Sony puritanical [censored] with [censored] as big as a horses [censored] in a [censored]. Those were the nice ones.
Could it get worse? Most companies officially hate porn but love the money it brings in, so they give it tons of support behind the scenes. Not Sony. It is swinging the other way and going after anyone who replicates porn on Blu equipment. If you do, your licence gets pulled, basically putting you out of that business.
This makes me believe that Vivid, the one company that is still promising a Blu-ray title won't get very far with it. It may just not be aware of the wall they are about to hit, or it may have a backdoor. One person in the booth said that it was a done deal and the disks were coming out. There was no spokesperson available for official comments however, but there were banners with the Blu-Ray logo on them in the booth. I guess we will see when Debbie Does Dallas Again comes out.
One big problem with this is not pornography, but your rights. If Sony says no to content it doesn't like, and ends up winning the market, what if someone has content that Sony finds unsavoury for reasons relating to finance or other things? Got a documentary that is critical of Sony's chairman? It presumably can block it or revoke the keys. This is a hugely dangerous slippery slope we are on.
The next major hurdle is cost, something that was brought up from the earliest days of the format war. There are several facets to this, from mastering to licensing, to DRM. The most obvious is replication.
I am told it costs about $3 million to set up a Blu-ray replication line and about $100,000 to do the same with HD-DVD. If you are projected to sell a million copies, guess which one is economically viable? This is a major hurdle and adds a non-trivial amount to the cost of the disks.
One other thing to keep rattling around in the back of your head is that HD is backwards compatible while Blu is not. You can burn an HD movie on a DVD-9 if you can fit it on, and use the exact same mastering components you use on a normal DVD, With Blu, you are stuck.
Why is this important? A glass master disk costs about $25,000 to make for a single layer Blu-ray title and a lot more if you use multiple layers. Most people say DRM infections are mandated under Blu-ray, but others disagree. In any case, if you build the master and the DRM infection does not work, you basically eat the cost.
Since the tools to make this all work are immature and badly done, this happens a lot more than many would like. Through no fault of their own, simply because of monopoly bent fiat, companies may end up throwing out a few of these glass masters. Even if there is only one, this can be quite expensive per unit, something the little guys have to pay out of their pocket.
The funniest part? AACS is already breakable trivially, so Sony's insistence on having DRM must be about more than mere content protection, it does not do that any more. DRM infections add expense, time and effort, basically crowding the little guys out.
HD-DVD on the other hand does not require AACS, so there goes that expense if you choose. To make matters better, a master is much cheaper than an equivalent Blu disk.
On top of this, there is backwards compatibility to factor in. HD has it, Blu does not, and HD has one neat trick on top of this, you can burn HD-DVD formatted data on to a DVD-9 if it fits the size restrictions. With a little lower quality, you can get a 9GB movie instead of a 15GB one, and you save tons of money. DVD mastering parts cost next to nothing now.
The last bit about mastering took me by surprise, the cost of replication. The HD-DVD consortium announced three layer HDs last week, taking it up to a total of 50GB or so per disk. Blu is at 25GB per layer, 50 total over two layers. Three layers cost more, right?
Yes and no, the cost for doing multi-layer is all in the mastering. A glass master for a multilayer part, any multilayer part is much more expensive than a single. Once you have the master, the replication is very cheap. Tom Funk of High Def Home Entertainment told me that once you have the masters, replication is quite inexpensive, layers add pennies to each disc.
Will it be cheaper to make a two layer HD than a one layer Blu? Possibly. When you start comparing one vs the other, adding replication, licensing, and other various sundries, it gets quite messy to calculate.
Other than capacity, DRM infections and cost, the formats are identical. Joone of Digital Playground told me that to him, the formats are pretty much identical other than capacity. He would use the same VC1 compression for both. As far as I know, he is the only person at the show to have done both sides.
Then comes the social factors. HD players are much cheaper and more plentiful right now, with Microsoft putting the boot in over pricing with the Xbox 360 drive. Sony's PS3 is failing in the market, and instead of lifting its Blu technology with it, it is dragging it down. Very hard to shed a tear for that company though, go free market.
Most of the people at the show are actively against Blu-ray, or are at least not bothering until Sony does a complete turn around. In the mean time, they are actively promoting HD, but still do not have hopes for immediate high returns.
A comment by Joone, echoed by many others, is that HD now is all about planting the seeds. When consumers see HD porn available now, when they go out to buy in a year, they will have the idea that HD has porn and Blu does not rattling around in their heads.
What we are seeing is two historical battles played out once again, Beta versus VHS and magnetic versus Laser Disc. Beta was blown out of the water largely because Sony was puritanical and said no to porn. The market wanted porn, and Beta died a rather sad death in the US even though it was technically superior. Blu is technically superior to HD but has no porn, it is an exercise left up to the reader to work out the result.
Both HD and Blu also have the same problem that the Laserdisc had, they're expensive and there are almost as good options available elsewhere. With the fight on, camps building walled gardens at every opportunity they get, the only loser is the consumer. While they fight, people wait on the sidelines. Would you buy a format if half your movies were not available? Would you buy a format if there was a good chance it would die soon? Place your $1,000 on the line and watch them duke it out for 18 month long rounds.
While there are a good number of people actively replicating HD discs, many others including Kick *ss and Pure Play Media are fence sitting. To them, it makes little sense to jump in and eat the early adopter expenses for very little payback, the number of players out there is miniscule. So they wait, and will probably be waiting a long time.
One little tidbit of trivia, it seems that the old adage of porn not really wanting HD is far truer than you might think. There are some absolutely gorgeous women in porn, and some that are, well, umm, not quite as gorgeous. When you up the resolution a lot, you end up being able to see every detail of a person's anatomy, Things that you should never see unless you are a doctor.
A lot of people expressed the sentiment of purposely lowering resolution or quality, basically blurring things out for the sake sanity. Many said "do you really want to see that?" or similar things. The short answer is no. The longer answer was a discussion about the technical merits of using motion tracking and Photoshop brushes to remove zits. Quality might not be the same panacea here that it is in football.
That brings us to the 10,000 pound gorilla lurking aound the corner, not Tera Patrick's security moose, but the internet. It delivers lower quality images, for now, at a vastly lower production cost, and it will kill both formats.
The studios and electronics companies are waging war over HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and we all pay the price. Other than the LG combo drive, there is nothing that will do both. On the combo drives, you pay for twice the heads, twice the licensing, and quite possibly twice the DRM infection tax.
Instead of the studios playing nice for the benefit of the people paying them money, they are fighting, bitching and tearing you down. In a wonder of capitalism, it's you that has to pay for the privilege. Even odder is that people don't seem to care, let's call it a wonder of the educational system, or possibly the marvel of advertising.
The internet is open, most players are free, and the setup costs are far less than making physical product. It is also lower quality, but for now, I will consider that one a plus. While the big boys bicker and slow growth, the internet keeps getting faster, more capable and more ubiquitous.
In the end, Blu-ray will wither and HD-DVD will overtake it in just about every non-technical way, which is what matters. The hobbling and ill will generated by the early power grabs and walled gardens are going to doom both in favour of the internet.
If you look at history, all the precedents are there, Beta, Laserdisk and most recently the PSP. Proprietary and closed simply does not work, history shows the people care more about the things they want than the box it came in. Both formats are doomed, HD-DVD is just a little less doomed than Blu-ray.
naughty, you must have been about my age during the VHS/BETA wars...
. In the July 2003 issue of PCF on page10 in the Coming Soon thing at the bottom they have blue laser, probably same as blue ray, DVDs of 30gb, but never seen anything about it anywhere else.
