Blue sky thinking for Blu-ray DVD
01 September 2006
A report published by Screen Digest suggests that the battle for supremacy between Blu-ray and HD DVD formats will come to an impass, whereby the two formats will live side-by-side, with combined format solutions being used to bridge the battleground.
Hedging his bets, Screen Digest’s chief analyst, Ben Keen believes that three other possibilities are also likely. These are that either HD DVD will be dominant in the market, or that Blu-ray will or that neither format is able to achieve mass adoption ‘resulting in a situation comparable to …next generation audio formats SACD and DVD audio’. None of the scenarios can be ruled out, he adds, and he believes that if the market is not careful, the publicity generated by this vying for position will dampen consumer appetite for the high definition disk category altogether. Compared to the success of the the DVD, the two formats fall behind in that they offer similar features. Graham Sharpless, the report’s author, says that Blu-ray offers up to 50Gbyte capacity, compared to HD DVD with 30Gbyte, but Blu-ray is more expensive and difficult to produce as HD DVD disks can be produced using modified DVD equipment.
HD DVD is supported by Toshiba and NEC and in Hollywood by Warner, Paramount and Universal studios. The format is also supported by Intel and Microsoft. Microsoft has built HD DVD support into its next-generation PC operating systems, Windows Vista. It has yet to be seen how significant this adoption may be in the format battle, as the personal computing market slows down.
Hewlett Packard on the other hand has a foot in both camps, with support for HD DVD and Blu-ray, which was developed by Philips and Sony. All the major Hollywood studios, with the exception of Universal, plans to release Blueray disk movies, with the first titles launched this July. The significance of the Sony development partner is that Blue-ray will be included in its PlayStation 3 games console scheduled for release in November this year, in time for Christmas, which may bring forward the marker of which direction the market, or consumer, will take. Microsoft has also announced plans to launch an add-on, optional HD DVD drive for its Xbox 360 games console, again scheduled for the Christmas selling period.
By 2010, Screen Digest believes that high definition formats will account for $11billion out of the projected $29billion revenue across the US, Japan and Europe, cited as the three key regions for video disks.
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