2007 is the year of HD home entertainment. The drums may have started beating in 2006, with both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats rushing to gain a foothold with the early adopters, but those looking for take-home-and-keep high definition movies at a level more suited to the average consumer are going to start looking this year.
And it’s quite a battle out there – with HD-DVD gaining early ground in terms of getting discs and players on store shelves while Blu-Ray touts its technical superiority left, right and centre.
Rotten Tomatoes looked at HD-DVD last year, but with the impending release of the PlayStation 3 in this country, RT-UK thought it high time we explored Blu-Ray. Over four parts we’ll be giving you our experiences of Blu-Ray – we’ve played with both the PS3 and the first set-top player to hit shelves, the Samsung BD-P1000 – and putting its case for dominance before you.
Of course we’d be remiss not to start with a look at the format war being fought, and so the focus of this part of the guide is on the question that’s been driving tech-fiends crazy recently…
HD-DVD or Blu-Ray?
While the rest of the guide will focus on Blu-Ray specifically, we’d be lying if we said we’d made up our minds in the big battle of the formans. An HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360 has been happily buzzing away in the RT-UK offices since November of last year and we’ve been playing with our PlayStation 3 for about as long. So if we can’t choose what hope does anyone have?
The simple solution would be to look at the facts, and it doesn’t get much clearer than the sales charts. Sony has recently claimed that Blu-Ray is outselling HD-DVD 2:1 in the United States and that they’re fully expecting this to rise to 3:1 within the first six months of the year. They further claim that only one of last year’s top selling DVDs was available exclusively on HD-DVD (King Kong) while several were available exclusively on Blu-Ray. eProductWars has been keeping score for both formats, culling data from Amazon.com’s US sales figures, and that data has shown Blu-Ray overtake HD-DVD.
But the data is potentially deceptive. Firstly, Toshiba’s Olivier Van Wynendaele recently claimed that these sales figures took into account the free Blu-Ray discs being dispatched by Sony with the PlayStation 3 and that 200,000 HD-DVD players had been sold in the US against just 30,000 Blu-Ray players. More importantly, though, both formats are still suitable only for those willing to shell out large amounts of money (the cheapest players for both formats start in the region of £400; you have to add the cost of an Xbox 360 atop its £130 HD-DVD add-on to play fair) – HD formats represent just a 1% market share at the time of writing – and Google Trends is reporting that in the grand consumer scheme of things HD-DVD is still the more interesting name than Blu-Ray.
Technically, Blu-Ray is a superior format to HD-DVD, sporting up to 50 GB of data on a disc by comparison to HD-DVD’s 30 GB. While that’d make Blu-Ray the winner on the surface, it also makes it a more expensive format to produce, with Blu-Ray requiring production houses retool in order to start making the discs while they’re able to simply adapt their current DVD tools in order to replicate HD-DVDs.
PlayStation 3
It’s Blu-Ray’s trump card and the data shows that its US release, in November of last year, helped Blu-Ray overtake HD-DVD for the first time since the format started shifting discs. By bundling the technology amid a world-class games machine, Sony is hoping for a repeat of the breath-of-life the PS2 provided for the DVD format – essentially enabling consumers to have access to a player capable of supporting Blu-Ray whether they want it or not. By further bundling a Talladega Nights Blu-Ray disc rebate form with the US release of the console (it’ll be Casino Royale in the UK) consumers have been given their start with the format.
Studio Support
Of course, as movie fans, the real concern in the format wars is whether we’ll be able to get our favourite movies on the format we choose. NBC Universal and the Weinstein Company are supporting HD-DVD exclusively, meaning fans of Serenity, King Kong and Kevin Smith will be looking towards those little red boxes.
Meanwhile, Blu-Ray support comes from Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Buena Vista and Lionsgate exclusively. And this makes for an interesting list; it means that Casino Royale, Star Wars, the Pixar back-catalogue and the Saw franchise are all going to be in the Blu-Ray camp and since those are going to shift large numbers it’s a powerful indicator for the format.
Taking both sides in the battle are Warner Brothers (including New Line) and Paramount (including Dreamworks). In fact, Warner Brothers have recently announced intentions to create a hybrid disc that’ll enable both formats to coexist on the same piece of plastic.
Confused?
In short, the only answer is that there is no answer yet. The fight continues and the ultimate deciders of victory will be those on the high street taking home players and discs. Looking to adopt a format now? Pick one and stick with it, perhaps subtly telling your friends that they’ll lose your company if they don’t side with your choice; at this stage it’s ultimately down to guess work and regardless of Blu-Ray’s dominance in the sales figures, there’s nothing to suggest HD-DVD is dead in the water just yet.
Of course it’s entirely possible both formats will find a way to co-exist. In the Betamax/VHS wars of the 80’s, VHS became the consumer format while Betamax found new life in professional industries. Could we see a repeat with Blu-Ray? Like Blu-Ray Betamax was a better quality but more expensive format to produce…
For now, though, let’s explore Blu-Ray in more depth. In the next part of the guide we’ll look at the PlayStation 3 and compare it to the Samsung BD-P1000; a games console and a set-top player fighting it out for control of your HD-TV and sound system.
