Disclaimer: The proceeding article is editorial content. The views expressed are those of the author and do not neccessarily reflect the official position of the Advanced Media Network.
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has come and gone for 2007 in a fashion similar to that of years past. Some questions got answered while some new ones emerged. As gamers here on Advanced Media Network, we got to see Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gain some new multimedia features while we all held our breath in a collective sigh pining for a “version 2.0†Xbox 360 with a larger hard drive and HDMI, along with the promised cooler 65nm chipset. Sony showed off their PlayStation 3 games and functionality, alongside many new Blu-ray Disc titles. While nothing really “new†surfaced from either of these two presentations (barring the media functions of 360), a lot of questions about both of them were inadvertently answered elsewhere in the show.
Few format battles have been as divisive as the initial clashes between HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc, nor more expensive. At stake between these two formats for the consumer is hundreds of dollars worth of home theater equipment, software, and a lasting format for the future. Although HD-DVD held a significant early lead as well as perceived movie quality superiority, lower hardware costs, and a larger library of good titles, the tide has indeed turned into a tsunami of Blu in these last few months.
I should make clear that this is not a Blu-ray Disc fluff piece, as that isn’t my intention here. In fact, Blu-ray had one of the worst launches of any format I’ve ever seen. $999 playback hardware was the least of their worries. Samsung’s Blu-ray Disc player was quite well-known for being buggy and slow. The movies simply didn’t look as good as their HD-DVD counterparts, let alone the fact that the early Blu-ray catalog was sparse, at best. For a while there, it looked like HD-DVD would pull it off, leaving Blu-ray Disc stuck in neutral.
Even the logo wins the format war.
So what happened between then and now?
With everything going wrong for Blu-ray Disc, an extremely fortunate series of events occurred, ironically nullifying most of what HD-DVD had gained and accomplished. The issues with movie quality were essentially resolved when films began shipping on 50GB discs. Not only that, but Blu-ray films actually began to look better than their HD-DVD counterparts, on both the 25GB and 50GB discs, thanks to better codec technology. Samsung issued patches and fixes for their playback machine, speeding it up and fixing the problems. The library of titles released for Blu-ray Disc improved dramatically in the last part of the year. Samsung rolled out the first price cuts on their playback machine, increasing the amount of people who picked up a standalone player. The biggest positive force for Blu-ray Disc came in the form of Sony’s PlayStation 3.
$499 and $599 are very high prices to pay for a game console, obviously. Both Sony’s strategy and Microsoft’s strategy with their consoles are to take the experience beyond video games, as we’ve known for quite some time now. When compared to a standalone player, $499 and $599 are not exorbitant price points for an HD movie player at all. In fact, it’s the best value in the industry for a 1080p-capable player. Sony sold a lot of those initial PlayStation 3 consoles to gamers, but they also sold a lot of them to home theater fanatics. After all, it came (nearly) fully equipped for high-definition movies right out of the box, no matter which model you picked up.
However, PlayStation 3 alone isn’t what revived Blu-ray Disc. The strategy behind the release of the console and movies is what helped turn the tide, so to speak. Despite an on-paper array of support that dwarfed HD-DVD, Blu-ray had little to show for it until the PS3 launch. It seems that Blu-ray only had a “paper launch†in June. Sony and the other studios bided their time and waited until November 2006 to roll out the heavy blows. There may be no better example of this than Fox’s surprise X-Men 3 Blu-ray announcement where they slated the movie release days before PS3 came out. Blu-ray’s fortune shifted quickly thereafter. There are no official numbers as of this writing, but all of the preliminary data as well as store rankings shows that Blu-ray has at least caught up to HD-DVD sales, and perhaps even surpassed HD-DVD altogether in sales.
Perhaps even more impressive is the way that Blu-ray is keeping its momentum going well into 2007. At CES, more than 50 Blu-ray titles were announced, many being titles that had been previously released on HD-DVD. There are also new titles being released on Blu-ray that are big-name marquee titles like “Casino Royaleâ€, as well as smaller films like Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of our Fathersâ€, signifying that there will be a wide range of titles available this year to appeal to all audiences. Blu-ray’s exclusive studios are going to come into play heavily in 2007, as Disney, Fox, and Sony plan to release many blockbuster movies for the format, most of which are day and date with their DVD counterparts. Many more titles are expected to be announced throughout the year.
At the HD-DVD camp, things were a little less jubilant. Sure, they had some movies announced, but not anywhere near 50. The lone studio supporting HD-DVD exclusively, Universal, announced exactly zero releases for the format. None of that is to say that there are no movies coming out on HD-DVD this year, but things aren’t looking good for the format. At best, there’ll be releases that also come out on Blu-ray with a few exclusives. At worst, and as rumored, Universal will either support both formats or Blu-ray Disc exclusively, with either scenario giving HD-DVD virtually no chance at establishing itself as the standard as there are at least three major studios that will not release films on the format. With the recent development of HD-DVD being cracked altogether, it seems more likely than ever now that Universal will drop the exclusive support of HD-DVD.
So what does that mean for Xbox 360, with its HD-DVD add-on? With the possibly premature assumption on my part that support for HD-DVD is dwindling at a rapid pace, Microsoft may have sold eager Xbox 360 owners a $200 paperweight. Since the drive is USB and not a requirement of the system, Microsoft could issue a Blu-ray USB drive in theory, but whether they would in the face of consumer backlash over the HD-DVD drive remains to be seen. Despite being a key HD-DVD backer, Microsoft never seems that interested in really advancing the cause of the format. Microsoft and Apple both seem to have digital distribution plans for the future, and only support HD-DVD and Blu-ray respectively in a lukewarm manner at best.
Blu Lasers planning world domination.
Sony no doubt has digital distribution ambitions as well, but it has confined itself to the reality that the current online infrastructure isn’t set up to deal with the massive sizes of high-definition video, and that a new disc format is badly needed until it is. Including Blu-ray Disc in every PlayStation 3 was a gigantic gamble on Sony’s part. PS3 still must sincerely prove itself as a game machine, but it’s doing an incredible amount of work for advancing Blu-ray Disc as the medium of choice for high-definition content. If Blu-ray Disc is able to establish itself as the dominant or sole next-generation format this year, Sony has set itself up in a very good position with PlayStation 3, as it’s the only console that has that format built-in, and at a reasonable price point. As more hardware sells, more games will be made for it, which Sony desperately needs in order to catch up to the Xbox 360, if that’s still the game plan.
Jonathan Law is an AMN editorial columnist, and gamer since the age of two. An avid follower of all things video gaming, his regular feature, PlayStation Nation is a periodic column summarizing the events and news that affect Sony’s PlayStation franchise of game hardware as well as other subjects. A wide variety of topics as well as news from the industry means that Jonathan Law is at the forefront of all things PlayStation. The PlayStation Nation can be read on PSP Advanced and PS3 Advanced.
