BestBuy & CircuitCity frustrated over Next-gen DVD format war

[Smokey]

Top U.S. electronics retailers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas called the war "nightmarishly unfriendly" and "stupid."

Stores like Best Buy, Circuit City and closely held CompUSA may sell millions of devices, either HD DVD or its rival, Blu-ray, and some day one version could be obsolete, drawing the ire of their customers.

We are frustrated," said Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson on Friday on the sidelines of a panel discussion at CES, the industry's biggest U.S. trade show. "We are going to wind up with some number of consumers probably buying a format that dies, and we are probably going to wind up having to sell it to them. They are not going to be happy with us."

Starting this year, it is likely that electronics retailers are going to have to make space in their stores for sundry devices related to both formats, including DVD players, movies and other programming that play on them, and accessories.

"The problem is that what you want is huge penetration into homes as quickly as possible," said CompUSA Chief Executive Larry Mondry. "The Beta-VHS wars lasted 10 years. We are doing it again and we are just stupid as an industry.

"I don't care which way it goes, I just want it to go one (particular) way," he added.

Decisions on what to stock will have to be made by the retailers sooner rather than later. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Toshiba and Thomson each announced plans to sell in the next few months high-definition DVD player in the United States priced at around $500. Blu-ray backers such as Philips Electronics, Matsu****a and Samsung Corp. aim to sell devices this year, as will Sony.

"Customers clearly have an appetite for high-quality content. The shame is it is going to take longer than we need it to," to get it to them, said Circuit City Chief Executive Alan McCollough, during a panel discussion at CES.

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-01-08T205314Z_01_FOR875123_RTRIDST_0_TECH-ELECTRONICS-RETAIL-DC.XML

[Groundbeef]

Top U.S. electronics retailers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas called the war "nightmarishly unfriendly" and "stupid."

Stores like Best Buy, Circuit City and closely held CompUSA may sell millions of devices, either HD DVD or its rival, Blu-ray, and some day one version could be obsolete, drawing the ire of their customers.


"Customers clearly have an appetite for high-quality content. The shame is it is going to take longer than we need it to," to get it to them, said Circuit City Chief Executive Alan McCollough, during a panel discussion at CES.

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-01-08T205314Z_01_FOR875123_RTRIDST_0_TECH-ELECTRONICS-RETAIL-DC.XML

I agree. It is totally foolish with the 2 formats not being able to agree on some sort of standard. Rember the foolishness that CC got into with the DIVX ( I think that was the name) of the "disposable" DVD. I think they got burnt once and would rather not end up on the losing end of the equation again.

This whole thing is BS and will result in far fewer sales until the confusion settles down.

[Woochifer]

Actually, I think the whole format war furor might die down sooner than we think, because behind the scenes, hardware manufacturers have been scrambling to figure out ways to create universal players that can play both Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs. Broadcom has already announced a chipset that can decode both formats, which could very well accelerate this process. All of the VHS-Betamax comparisons are ridiculous because in that case, the cassette media and drive transports for those formats were entirely incompatible, whereas Blu-ray and HD-DVD both use the same sized discs as the other major optical disc formats and similar transport designs.

Broadcom's technology will allow PCs or DVD players using the chips to play video recorded with either standard, said Jonathan Goldberg, senior product line manager with Broadcom....

"Our chip set will play 100% of HD-DVD and 100% of Blu-Ray, and all the special features that come with that," Goldberg said.

http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/storage/story/0,10801,107441,00.html

But, I think that even without the format war as a factor, HD-DVD/Blu-ray have got a major uphill fight on their hands, most notably a market with considerably fewer customers that will benefit from those formats at the outset than DVD had, restrictive copy protection schemes that further reduce the number of potential customers for those formats, and future competition from HD on-demand and downloading services. HD-DVD/Blu-ray are tied to the growth in the HDTV, and creating a critical mass of users before HD on-demand and downloads come to fruition.

[Smokey]

Groundbeef and Wooch, you all make good sense.

Just as an observation, it be worth mentioning that content provider (movie studios) might be partly to blame for confusion over double format. If at the initial outset they had warned Sony and Toshiba that they will only support one unified format, then Sony and Toshiba might have hammered out a deal over double format. No content, no sales :)

[Groundbeef]

All of the VHS-Betamax comparisons are ridiculous because in that case, the cassette media and drive transports for those formats were entirely incompatible, whereas Blu-ray and HD-DVD both use the same sized discs as the other major optical disc formats and similar transport designs.

I am not sure that you are entirely correct on this point. Physically the Disc size is the same, but the technology to read the actual disk is very different. According to this article here :
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060104-5896.html

dated 1-4-06
This quote is most telling :
"However, there's still problems for would-be manufacturers. Blu-ray and HD DVD both use a 405nm wavelength blue-violet laser, but the similarities stop soon thereafter. Differing "track pitch" (the paths that data on the discs sit in) and minute differences in physical disc size means that the first hybrid players may nonetheless require two different optical drive casings. This could make the players considerably more expensive than their monogamous competitors, not only because of the expense of including two drives, but also because the units will carry royalties for both technologies. Marketers also worry about whether or not dual-drive units will sell."

So it isn't so much the disc size, but the fact that you would need 2 optical drives in the player & pay royalties for both technologies. Maybe you could sell one for $2000, but who is gonna pay it?

With reference to your other post, I agree. Until HDTV and all of its trappings are sold, this whole deal is a pissing match into the wind.

[Woochifer]

I am not sure that you are entirely correct on this point. Physically the Disc size is the same, but the technology to read the actual disk is very different. According to this article here :
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060104-5896.html

dated 1-4-06
This quote is most telling :
"However, there's still problems for would-be manufacturers. Blu-ray and HD DVD both use a 405nm wavelength blue-violet laser, but the similarities stop soon thereafter. Differing "track pitch" (the paths that data on the discs sit in) and minute differences in physical disc size means that the first hybrid players may nonetheless require two different optical drive casings. This could make the players considerably more expensive than their monogamous competitors, not only because of the expense of including two drives, but also because the units will carry royalties for both technologies. Marketers also worry about whether or not dual-drive units will sell."

So it isn't so much the disc size, but the fact that you would need 2 optical drives in the player & pay royalties for both technologies. Maybe you could sell one for $2000, but who is gonna pay it?

With reference to your other post, I agree. Until HDTV and all of its trappings are sold, this whole deal is a pissing match into the wind.

I believe that Samsung has already been at work on a drive mechanism that can handle both formats. With Broadcom (and presumably others to come) already producing a dual-format decoding chip, universal players are not a matter of if but when. I don't think the challenges with HD-DVD/Blu-ray will be technical, but more at the market end. My point about VHS-Betamax is that dual format VCRs were never even an option because the form factors and drive specs were completely different.

Who knows, maybe by the time a universal player is announced, Blu-ray will have already locked up the market, which would make HD-DVD a moot point. Blu-ray has all but one of the major studios (NBC-Universal) on board, and nearly all of the major hardware manufacturers on the PC side, along with the advantage of pent up demand for the upcoming PS3. Plus, my understanding is that Blu-ray's the only format that supports 1080p resolution, so they're the odds-on favorite if the market winds up supporting only one format. Even with a unified disc format or inexpensive universal players, the challenge will be ramping up fast enough to seed the market before HD downloading and on-demand come to full fruition. The DVD format had far fewer market impediments than Blu-ray/HD-DVD and still took about four years to reach enough households to start displacing VHS. In four years, who knows how people will get their HD content.

[noddin0ff]

You know, Blu-ray would be much better off by now if it had a cooler name. Few people really care what color the laser is much less know why its blue...I mean 'blu'. And dropping the 'e' doesn't really make me think 'innovation and cutting edge'. It makes me think Sony has lazy marketers. What's a matter with Sony and their names. 'Betamax'? What happened to 'Alpha'? The name 'betamax' just screams 'second best' even if it really wasn't. The Blu-ray logo is dorky. It doesn't imply backward compatibility like the HD-DVD logo does. What's their problem? If I could pay $1800 for a blu-ray machine, I'd want it to have a better name.

[djreef]

Does anyone know if BluRay players will be able to decode SACD, or even DVD audio, or will these formats get thrown under the bus? I'm thinking it'll prob have its own music format - to confuse things even more.

DJ

[Woochifer]

Does anyone know if BluRay players will be able to decode SACD, or even DVD audio, or will these formats get thrown under the bus? I'm thinking it'll prob have its own music format - to confuse things even more.

DJ

HD-DVD and Blu-ray will both require copy protected digital video connections for HD output, and the connection of choice at the outset will be HDMI. The current HDMI 1.1 standard allows for both video and audio signals to be carried on one cable, and this includes DD, DTS, AND DVD-Audio. With both a HDMI 1.1 video player and receiver, the receiver will be able to process the DVD-A signal digitally. And with HDMI 1.2, the standard will expand to include 1-bit digital audio, which includes SACD.

The issue with DVD-A and SACD is that the major labels have largely abandoned those formats with most non-classical genres in favor of DualDisc, which primarily uses barely-higher res two-channel tracks and/or bit-challenged Dolby Digital on the DVD side (only a few DualDiscs include DVD-A tracks on the DVD side). New releases in those formats now primarily come from independent labels.

HD-DVD and Blu-ray will both use higher resolution versions of DD and DTS that are backwards compatible with existing decoders. HDMI 1.3 will include the DD+ and DTS-HD audio streams in the standard, and this is the version that the HD-DVD and Blu-ray players will use. They also have the option of lossless resolution, which equal to DVD-A. Whether or not this will include multichannel music releases, who knows. The primary benefit is that we know that music and concert video DVDs will sound a lot better with the new formats.