Delays for Blu-ray and HD-DVD
And The Hollywood Reporter says that the "when the first HD-DVD players, from Toshiba, begin arriving in stores this month, there won't be any software for at least another three weeks." That's because Warner Home Video has pushed back the release of its first few HD-DVD movies from March 28 to April 18. Thomas Arnold writes:
Stephen Nickerson, the studio's senior VP market management, attributed the delay to technical issues.
"Everything we do is new," he said. "We're using new copy protection, new compression, new codecs, and we want to make sure the product that goes out is flawless."
The remaining 17 titles in the first wave of Warner's HD-DVD launch -- the total also has been scaled back from the 24 announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January to 20 -- will be released in subsequent weeks, he said. These include "Batman Begins," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "The Matrix."
What's your guess about how long high-def DVDs will survive in the marketplace before they're supplanted by digital downloads and video-on-demand? One year? Two? Three at the outside?
posted by Scott Kirsner at
12:24 PM
1 Comments:
Depends on what you mean... if you're saying digital downloads will replace HD DVD movies bought by consumers I would agree with a couple three years at tops.
But, if you're saying just the HD DVD or Blu-Ray format will be gone in a few years (because of digital movie downloads to computers) then I would say I don't agree.
Why? Mainly, because of the reason I'm most excited about the new format... archiving data.
Where do you store all the downloaded content (i.e. movies, music, etc.)? Sure, you can store it on hard drives, but a back-up space saving DVD disk of that size is very nice.
I've heard some folks state they're going to skip the whole HD DVD stage of technology (at least for buying movies and the like). I'm not quite on their side yet, although not far behind. But as an archive resource it seems to have great potential - of course until the next big thing comes along and makes it obsolete.
By
Blake Calhoun, at 4:20 PM
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