Blu-Ray won, you, not so much.
Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 5:58PM 
Reader Jeffery just posted such an awesome comment on OK Blu-Ray, you won. Now where are the movies? that I had to follow up.
Let's just say that you own an HDTV and nothing else, and you really, really want to watch Blade Runner tonight.
Blade Runner on Blu-ray is $25.95. A no-frills Sony Blurry player is $389.99 (prices at posting time). Total investment: $415.94. Of course, that Blu-ray player may not be up to spec in a few revs, so the common wisdom is that you should get a Playstation 3 ($399.99 and up) for Blu-ray playback, to avoid getting obsoleted. That brings your total to $425.94.
Or you could buy Blade Runner on HD DVD for $21.99 and an HD DVD player for $149.99 or less. Total investment:$171.98.
Ah, "winning." It's quite clear that Sony won. Do you feel that you did?
Reader Comments (15)
I don't think the dust has settled on the HD Disc war just yet. Unless you're an avid gamer, then shelling your hard earned cash out on a PS3 would be plain silly. Also, HD-DVD may be currently cheap, but there's next to no new content in the pipeline (nor will there ever be).
Give it a year or two. Blu-Ray will come down in price and will embrace the non-gamer and non-gadget-obsessed market with open arms. Till then I'm happy watching my copy of The Final Cut on normal DVD. It still looks pretty!!
I bought my HD DVD in December for $180 I got 5 free movies with it, another 5 for rebates. Amazon just gave me $50 for "wasting" my money
I picked up the Planet Earth series for $29.00 on HD vs $99 on Blu, and so far Ive been getting super cheap great films in 1080p
I feel like I won the format war. :)
Even though everyone knows that BR is technically superior, the BR association must realize that everyone who "really counts" (Motion picture houses, Steve Jobs, that kind of everyone) doesn't want another solid state media.
Part of me wonders what even the penultimate top brass at any of these association companies really want.
Will they make more money via BR players and disks than they will with downloads? They could care less about which is the better format for consumers, they care whether or not they are getting the best return for their investors.
I'm glad that Blu-Ray won. It's at least a standard that we can work towards that will have some modicum of future proofing.
Sure, they're expensive, but then again my first DVD player was $399 and DVD's used to cost 25-30 bucks. Before that we had VHS players costing $399 with $25-30 movies. This is no different.
I feel like I won ... sort of.
Today some HD-DVD users get cheap players and movies. That won't last. The format is dead.
In the long run we all get a higher capacity data storage format, and one that happens to play video. This is good news.
Now, the thing is that everyone loses a little bit.
Imagine the state of the market if instead of this stupid format war all the players had been focused on engineering BluRay? We might actually have those 50 and 100GB data discs... and prices would be further along their curve. (i.e. cheaper)
BluRay could have been better, now it seems like everyone is waiting for the "next" storage/video playback format. That will hurt in the market.
I really wonder if we'll ever get to see the $0.25 25GB writable disc? (i.e. single layer BluRay comparably priced to todays single layer DVD-R.) Not to mention $2 50GB discs and $4 100GB discs.
That was what I wanted to get my greedy mitts on from the beginning.
OK, so it's the week after NAB now. Has no one here heard of RED Ray? It's one of RED's new products in 2009. Uses normal DVDs that we've used for a decade. They are just using a new way of encoding it, and being able to play "4K"! It also donrezzes too, so you could burn your 4K or 2K movie on a normal DVD and play it either on a 4K projector OR any HDTV with the RED Ray drive. Sounds to me like it could beat out Blu Ray sooner rather than later. http://www.red.com/nab/redray
SONY had tried for over 40 years to get the market to use their proprietary formats, and they never succeeded until the BluRAY payoff scandal.
Now, BluRAY discs will never be as cheap as the open alternative.. opening a cheaper way to do the same thing... HD on demand.
The free market system moves on.
Stu,
We had a similar discussion on our own blog page, if you're interested to take a quick look at my rant? www.news.eesb.tv
Cheers,
Dom
P.S. keep up the good writing and tips dude
50 bucks for an HD DVD player for your Xbox 360. I'm thinking about stocking up on some HD DVD titles and nabbing a 50 dollar player.
I think maybe there could have been room for HD-DVD if the DV community had embraced it as a disc archive medium. The way I saw it, HD-DVD equalled 15 GB, a DV tape was 13 GB.
One disc could archive a 50 minute DV cassette with 2 GB left over for secondary audio, production notes, stills, metadata, you name it.
Of course if we wait a few more years the price of a 16 GB CF card will be so cheap it won't matter.
In the meantime I look at my shelf which bristles with hard drives and tapes and wonder.
I think the premise of this post is fundamentally flawed.
Maybe the best way to explain it is the same way you did: economically.
You would be essentially wasting $149.99 on an HD DVD Player that would never be able to play anything released post-March 2008.
I should note here that the reason HD DVD players are so cheap now is because retailers don't want to get stuck holding stock on an EOL product... The 3rd Gen HD DVD players that Toshiba http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/08/08/thirdgen_hd_dvd/" REL="nofollow">released about 8 months ago started at retail for between $300 and $500.
I'm not in love with Blu-Ray boxes either, the fact that profile 2.0 isn't required for hardware vendors is incredibly lame and the prices are high, for now.
Working at a DVD design and authoring facility I can tell you that Blu Ray replication prices are plummeting. The cost for a run of 1000 is approaching $2 per disc, down from $5 per disc less than a year ago... Costs on larger runs are exponentially cheaper. Expect to start seeing more bargain Blu-Ray titles very soon (granted, these aren't Blade Runner).
I understand the sentiment, but the logic is flawed. If you want to see it now, get it on demand. I agree with other posters here: physical media is on the out, and I'm actually surprised it's taken this long!
darby, you are correct about it being useless for movies post March 2008. However. There are a lot of great movies available that were made PRE March 08.
Blu-ray: $29.99-$40 for a movie? I think I'm still happy with my standard def. DVDs until the price comes down. Otherwise, I'm just going to stick with my "up-rezzing" DVD player. Looks good enough for me, considering the price difference.
Well call me a rebel, but I'm not one who cheers the end of the format war. Seems like the upper industry echelons just wanted to put a painless end to it. I don't feel like spending money to convert to pricey player /pricey media when my entire library will play on a $29 Wall Mart special. Heck super affordable dvd players aren't even special any more. And yes S.Jobs has me in his grasp. So you companies out there, throw me bone here! Gimme a reason to want to see every pimple on an actors face other than just for the sake of it.... please. They're not that impressive, really!
“Wages of Fear,” “Convoy,” Smokey and the Bandit” and “Duel”
Remember these great flicks? What are they? Road movies, of course, but more importantly, they are trucking films. Here is a genre nearly forgotten that Navistar, which builds legendary International trucks, hopes to single-handedly revive.
The company that just launched a revolution in long haul trucking by building the mold-shattering LoneStar Class 8 tractor is now launching another first - a student film competition that will ask aspiring auteurs and cineastes to celebrate the lives and labors of long-distance truck drivers in a short film format.
You could be the next Spielberg, Sam Peckinpah or even Henri-Georges Clouzot.
On May 1, 2008, Navistar is sending out a call for entries to approximately 50 universities and film schools around the country asking ambitious filmmakers to hit the road and produce short films or videos that honor the American trucker. These mavericks will then submit their final product in a competition to win film school tuition or top-notch camera equipment.
Academy award nominated producer/director Brett Morgan (Chicago 10, The Kids Stays in the Pictures) will chair a jury of filmmakers who will judge all submissions. First, second and third prize winners will premiere their films at The Great American Trucking show in Dallas, Texas, on August 22, 2008, and will be featured as streaming content on InternationalTrucks.com. The films will also be included as bonus material on a DVD with “Stand Alone,” Brett Morgen’s upcoming Navistar-funded documentary about truckers.
It’s time for filmmakers to release the jake-brake, hammer down, and make cinema that really matters, films about real life on the road. Put it this way: if America’s drivers decided to stop working, the entire country would shut down. We depend on truckers to deliver everything we own and consume. Truckers are that important. They are true American heroes.
Merle Haggard sang it this way: “The whiteline is a lifeline for the nation… It takes a special breed to be a truck drivin' man, And a steady hand to pull that load behind.”
Since everyone is reading this post, not the original one Stu's linking to, I'm going to post my comment here as well.
"Why would anyone want to celebrate that we now have the same number of HD disc choices as the Soviets had in toilet paper?"
Actually I never minded VHS and DVD - I was more than happy to walk into a store, look at the wall, see a movie I liked - grab it, walk to the counter, pay for it, go home and watch it.
With HD-DVRay I had to look at the packaging, decipher what 'bigger/better/byeond high-def' actually meant format wise, figure out if it would play on my player etc.
So in itself I don't feel just having one format is bad, it's just too bad that it's the expensive sony one that won.