NEWS: Goodnight, Sweet Prince: HD-DVD is dead

GEEK: Goodnight, Sweet Prince: HD-DVD is dead

At last: revenge.

Some might argue that Red still has some fight left in him, but it’s clear from recent announcements that the entertainment industry has chosen Blu-ray as their champion, leaving HD-DVD on limited life support.

The first blow came on January 4th, when Warner Brothers announced that beginning later this year they would release titles exclusively on the Blu-ray format.

Then two more in rapid succession: both Netflix and Blockbuster will dump HD-DVD for Blu-ray, though they plan to keep HD-DVD on the shelves for around a year before those titles disappear all together.

If that wasn’t enough, both Best Buy and Wal-Mart kicked HD-DVD to the curb barely a week ago. And today Universal issued a press release announcing their side in the Hi-Def Format War.

Oh, God, do you still think there’s a chance that HD-DVD might overcome? A small sliver of hope? Hope you have a hankie, because you’re wrong. HD-DVD’s most ardent supporter has also called it quits.

We barely knew him. May he rest in peace.

punk feels sorry for those who couldn’t wait to see who came out on top and bought an HD-DVD player. Really, he does. Hat-tip to Bennybum.

I still think HD-DVD was better for consumers, but at this point I'm just glad it's over. That said, I'm going to wait a couple years for players and content to hit a sensible price.

I look at the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray as potentially the most pointless format war ever. The winner is still the loser, since I've yet to see either format come into high demand with consumers. The prices are prohibitively expensive, and I don't think Blu-ray will stand long in the face of digital distribution, which is becoming an increasingly viable option for consumers.

I think you're wrong. People still want to own a physical copy of things, and you'd need some pretty big hard drives to hold a decent movie catalogue in Hi-Def. There's a lot of money to be made from this generation, and Sony's going to make it. It's strange to see them win one for a change, particularly as the key to victory was a console that's losing the battle in its own arena.

Bandwith and compression are not an issue with video on demand. This is why everyone is coming out with set-top boxes. Technology like media center, appletv and netflix watch now, will take the lead away from digital downloads. Log onto the service, pick what you want to watch when you want to watch it, no waiting for a d/l. Digital download is fine for music. Instant streaming is the way for video.

What sort of "machines" does one have to buy for flash play? Stick the card in your computer and stream to your tv or watch the movie through the hdmi out on your phone.

Also if there is anything you HAVE to buy a machine for it's blu-ray. Why go with a format that i need another player for when i can stick a flash card into every media device i own? The price is high now but prices drop as technology advances much the way it has with hd-dvd and blu-ray and dvd and floppies and every other form of media storage. I can easily see people buying movies on flash in the near future, maybe even usb sticks. and people can touch them!

I mourn the death of album sleeves. We lost something there.

It's amazing how many people said that about DVD players when they came out too.

The prices for the actual machine will start to drop now. I think a good reason that they are so high right now is because no manufacturer wanted to start producing a machine in mass that had the potential to be abolished in a year.

It's a common trend, when VHS came out and Beta was challenging it, top loading VCR's were still $1,000, when the debate was over VHS players dropped considerably in price.

When DVD's first came out, they were extremely costly, and i think you can pick one up now for like $29.00.

Sure, I'll go pick up a flash drive that's comparable to a Blu-Ray disc. Oh, wait.

I'll be happy with my wheezy old DVDs for a good while yet.

The difference between a dvd player and an internet streaming/downloading set top box is that Time Warner will give you a internet streaming/video on demand set/downloading set top box as part of their bundling service. Time Warner will not give you a dvd player.

Right. Prices stay the same. Always.

All we lost was a place to to easily separate stems and seeds.

Yeah, because that's totally the only cost issue in play.

That may have been all you lost. The rest of us lost a whole genre of (commercial) art - which had to be themed - with text. And, you know, it wasn't exclusively commercial; it was allowed to make you think, because some people would actually look at what was there.

Yeah, but compare it with this. Optical media is much, much cheaper to manufacture than solid state media, and it will continue to be for quite some time.

This issue has already been addressed.

meh. we're a long ways from that.

Our infrastructure is partially to blame. Most people don't pay attention to download/upload rates, accept maybe gamers. But the average hi-speed connections, rarely ever touch the speed they are sold at. I have a "hi speed" cable connection, and my download rate sucks and is often affected by activity of other users.

I download at about 4Mb per second, 8,192 megabytes = 1 gigabyte. A standard Blu Ray movie is about 20 Gigs. That's assuming the cable companies would operate on their own cable service, and not make people work through dial-up or DSL.

Time Warner, Comcast, Cox Communications and other digital cables aren't built to interact to that extent with their customers. The cable connections often lag because there are too many internet users, now add downloading movies through digital cable boxes, and i am pretty sure the download rate would be about an hour a movie.

Until these companies adopt fiber optics the fastest and most secure data transfer at the moment, we are far from having a device that downloads movies onto a flash device. On top of that, the cable companies would have to dump tons of money into their private infrastructure. They would require enormous storage servers, to store every single movie made, and make it readily available for download.

I like the idea, but a lot of change would have to happen in order for it to occur, not just a drop in price of Hardware to store the movie.

The cost of hardware is not what will drive the long-term success of a format (see HD-DVD). Media will.

Why are you focused on downloading? Expect internet search set top boxes, like this, to be pushed by providers.

First, video on demand/internet boxes will appear and then downloads will follow.

Again, service providers have no incentive to provide you with a DVD player of any kind, but quite a bit of incentive to provide you with a box that helps them bundle their services.

Video on demand is doable now, it will greatly impact DVD sales.

So far the only Cable company that i have read about even thinking of doing that is Comcast, and they're still only thinking about it, and if they did move forward with it, from what i have read, only 20% of their subscribers would have access to it, even at that, they are going to pay higher surcharges for it.

The technology is almost there, just a bunch of politics behind it

Last time I checked, the cost of hardware is exactly what has kept next-gen disc media from high levels of consumer adoption.

I thought Comcast has already tested DOCSIS 3.0 and was moving to deploy it in areas where Verizon has deployed FiOS.

The estimates I've read were DOCSIS 3.9 in 40% of homes by 2011. Who knows how many will have FiOS.

Both DOCSIS 1.0 and 2.0 support speeds up to 38Mbps, so DOCSIS 3.0 isn't really the problem. The bandwidth is there and it's cheap. The problem is that the equipment required to support and deliver such speeds is cost-prohibitive when you look at the overall ROI.

But then you factor in companies like Verizon and their FiOS product. Obviously, someone at Verizon said fuck it.

It's like if there was a war between companies that produce ejaculating vibrators.