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If people were clamoring for a new videodisc format — the way they were looking for salvation from the inconvenience and lousy quality of VHS tapes when the DVD appeared — there'd be more pressure on companies to get behind a single high-def format. But most of us are happy with DVD, and sales of the HDTVs necessary for seeing the improved picture the new formats provide are just beginning to hit critical mass. So it would seem that HD DVD and Blu-ray can take their time replacing DVD, staging all the skirmishes, sneak attacks, and pitched battles they want.
Or can they? If the new formats don't hook the average Joes and Janes fairly early on, they might face a steep uphill battle against services providing high-def movies on demand. So, why do the two camps feel they can afford the luxury of a very public format war?
The simple answer is that each side claims to have the better technology. And seeing the gobs of money DVD has made for the manufacturers, the studios, and just about everyone else associated with it, each side wants to position its format to grab whatever moolah it can. The stakes are quite huge, so HD DVD and Blu-ray are going to fight for all they can get.
FIRST STRIKE: HD DVD
It's all but inevitable that HD DVD will be out before Blu-ray, and that the first players will be Toshiba's $799 HD-XA1 and $499 HD-A1. But the format war is full of surprises, and the big one here is that neither player can handle the super-high-rez 1080p format. (On the other hand, nobody expects to see 1080p HD DVDs early on.)
Toshiba is doing a 40-city retail tour through the end of April to support the launch, offering player demos at stores like ABT, Best Buy, Fry's, P.C. Richard & Son, and Tweeter. Amazon.com and Best Buy are taking pre-orders for the players online, and they expect to start shipping those orders in April.
But the week before Toshiba was ready to start its tour, it set the tech blogs abuzz with a press release that said the first players would need a firmware upgrade to take full advantage of HD DVD's iHD interactivity. A Toshiba spokeswoman tried to defuse the situation by saying that the players could take advantage of all the interactivity currently on discs. She also said that the statement was only meant to convey that the players can be upgraded to include interactive features as they're developed, such as disc-based Internet shopping. But as we went to press, it still wasn't clear what types of interactivity the first players could support.
It also wasn't clear whether the players' HDMI outputs can handle the lossless compression used by the new Dolby and DTS audio formats. The players support these formats, but current HDMI interfaces don't, and it's uncertain how they can be upgraded when the new version of HDMI (1.30) appears.
There were also questions about how many HD DVDs would be available for the launch. Warner, Universal, and Paramount/DreamWorks said earlier in the year that they'd release the first titles on March 28. But Warner, which had committed to a launch of 24 movies, might actually have as few as four ready and not until mid-April. The studio also said it might initially sell discs only at the stores carrying HD DVD players. By late February, Paramount/DreamWorks and Universal were still discussing plans and pricing with their retailers. DVD rental chains such as Netflix have said they'll support both formats but haven't said if they'll have titles available at the launch.
It's also not clear how long Toshiba will be going it alone. Thomson has said it will introduce an RCA player — almost identical to the $499 Toshiba player — in April, while Sanyo and LG have committed only to shipping players later this year. Microsoft will start selling an optional HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 later this year.
THE NEXT WAVE: BLU-RAY
Expect to see Blu-ray players in May. Samsung's $1,000 BD-P1000 will probably be first, followed by the $1,800 Pioneer Elite BDP-HD1. Unlike the Toshiba players, both of these models are supposed to handle 1080p video. LG, Panasonic, Sharp, and Sony have promised 1080p Blu-ray players by summer.
Sony Pictures has said that its Blu-ray titles will sell for 15% to 20% more than DVDs, with new releases going for about $35 and older movies for about $30. Like Warner, Sony will probably make the first releases available only at stores that sell Blu-ray players. Sony plans to have 18 older movies ready for the launch, with recent ones available by summer. Four Blu-ray titles are supposed to be released every month until the end of the year, when the number will jump to 10 titles a month. The other studios in the Blu-ray camp — Disney, Lions Gate, 20th Century Fox, Paramount/DreamWorks, Universal, and Warner — were supposed to announce titles and dates in March. Prices for their releases will probably be similar to Sony's.
One large question mark looms over Blu-ray's front line: while Sony originally said it would have the PlayStation 3, which has a Blu-ray drive, out by spring, it recently announced that PS3 won't arrive in the U.S. until November. But the idea that Sony's latest console would be in 10 million homes within its first year and a half was key to securing the studios' support for Blu-ray.
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COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Just because players and discs are about to appear doesn't mean either side has everything all buttoned up. For instance, there's a lot of concern over what will happen if you make an analog, instead of a digital, connection to a Blu-ray or HD DVD player.
All high-def movies will have digital encryption to thwart piracy. As long as you use a digital HDMI connection to send the signal from the player to an HDTV or a high-def recorder, the copy protection will work. But if the signal has to be converted to analog to go through a component-video or RGB connection, the encryption gets stripped away. That prospect scares Hollywood, since pirates could use high-def analog signals to make perfect, easy-to-dupe copies.
To address this, the copy protection for both formats lets movie studios "cripple" the analog outputs on HD DVD and Blu-ray players, forcing them to convert signals from a maximum of 1,920 x 1,080 lines of resolution to 960 x 540 lines. While this will give you a picture better than what you get with DVD (720 x 480), it's just one quarter of HDTV's potential resolution. There were rumors that some players would either shut down the analog outputs entirely or automatically downconvert high-def analog signals to 480p (progressive-scan) resolution, but whether the analog output is down-rezzed is up to the individual studios.
This means that the 6 to 7 million early adopters whose HDTVs have only component-video or RGB inputs might not be able to watch full-rez high-def signals from HD DVD or Blu-ray players. Supporters of downconverting argue that many of those sets can't show resolutions higher than 1,280 x 720 lines anyway, but hardware manufacturers are understandably reluctant to tick off some of their best customers. It's still unclear which studios will opt for downconversion, but Warner and Disney are cozy with the idea.
If your HDTV has a first-generation DVI input, you might still have a problem. Since DVI didn't support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) back then, these early connectors can't handle Blu-ray or HD DVD copy protection. The result could be down-rezzing or, worse, a blank screen.
Then there's the tussle over Mandatory Managed Copy (MMC), which lets you make at least one copy of an HD DVD or Blu-ray disc to send to a server or a portable player. This is important to computer companies like Microsoft and Intel, who want people to be able to store high-def movies on Media Center PCs and then use networks to send them throughout the house. While both formats support MMC, it's still not clear under what conditions you'll be able to make copies, or if the copies will be free.
THE FALLOUT?
Format wars can send potential customers scrambling for cover, where they usually wait for the dust to settle before buying. (Didn't anybody learn anything from the whole DVD-Audio/SACD debacle?) But HDTV is the hottest thing going in home entertainment, and the lure of being able to watch favorite movies with high-rez images and pristine sound might be enough to get more than the usual early adopters to choose one format over the other. And Toshiba's aggressive pricing for its first players suggests that each side will use every weapon in its arsenal to lure shoppers to its camp.
Will PS3 strike the decisive blow for Blu-ray? Will the format war rage for years, or will one side concede before the year is out? Will a blitzkrieg from a new technology like high-def video on demand make videodiscs obsolete? All anybody knows right now is that — like Slim Pickens straddling that H-bomb in Dr. Strangelove — it's going to be a hell of a ride.
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