The King is Dead! Long live the king!
OK, maybe not so much with that, but the war is over ladies and gentlemen, and the world at large probably doesn’t care that much. Late last week Warner Bros. decided that it was dropping HD-DVD support from their studios. If we look at this highly scientifical pie-type chart, we can clearly see that with Warner’s departure from the HD-DVD scene, there appears to be little to stop the onslaught of the Blu-Ray. So perhaps the definitive battle in the high definition war was fought, then it appears the war was over just as soon as that. Paramount is about to drop support (registration required). Bam! And just like that the war is over.
The real question though is: Did any one care about the high-def battle? Many, many people have pointed to the Betamax and VHS battle in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s as an analogue for this struggle between formats. I’m not sure that I buy that argument. Home video-recording was a game changer in those days. It was allowing people to do something that they had never done before, watch movies in their homes and more importantly record things off of television. Even though it took a court case to ensure that consumers had the right to use this technology for whatever (legal) purposes they wanted, this was still an enormous leap forward in the viewing of televised media. Clearly the movie studios caught on and began to market movies, TV shows, and other things to the VHS market. This was the first jump into the living room that movie makers made.
So how is the high-def battle and format war any different? We have two competing consortiums marketing two competing technologies to the public how could it not be the same as the VHS and Betamax struggle of yore? For one thing high-def is too early and still too expensive. Most people are happy with their CRT TV’s that bring them American Idol and NFL football. They just want to see it happen they don’t care overmuch what it looks like. Next, we have the fact that nothing fundamental is changing about the distribution scheme. DVD was a replacement for VHS and it offered advantages such as size and increased quality. It was much like the jump from cassette tapes to CD’s. Most people don’t nostalgically search for cassette tapes as they do with vinyl records. VHS was just the first format, not the best. Though it was better than such “innovations” like Laserdisc and VCD. It still beat out these improvements because nothing could match it’s portability and ease of use at least until DVD became the creature it is today.
Regardless, my point remains the same. Take a DVD that was made in the last five years, put it into a standard DVD player and hook said DVD player up to an HD television. Unless you sit less than 6 feet away from the HD TV, you will almost certainly not notice the difference. It usually took someone point out the differences in HD movies and discs for me to notice. Broadcast television is another animal though. For whatever reason, most probably the amount of editing and post-production that movies go through to clean them up as compared with television shows, the difference between standard definition and high definition broadcast television is much more noticeable.
So we have a situation where new movies look pretty damned good on even HD TV’s and a situation where the HD players and discs are still pretty expensive and there is little wonder why the standing Meh of home video entertainment has yet to reach a head. Plus add to the fact that in the next five years a digital distribution model of some kind will likely obsolete optical discs and you have a group of movie studios who are eager to end the “HD war” and bring consumers a standard. Still as far as wars goes this one was pretty tame and it didn’t really effect the outcome as far as I was concerned. As much as I and many other techies despise Sony and the other members of Blu-Ray, I have to admit they did a pretty bang-up job with this new format.
I still have issues with Blu-Ray, mostly which have to do with the digital rights management scheme, which seems to be about the most restrictive thing that I have seen in a while. However, the Blu-Ray is here to stay and I for one welcome our new high definition masters.
