Blu-ray and HD-DVD talks restart again

[Inane_Dork]

...Kutagari's PS3 decision may put added presure on Toshiba to adopt the physical structure of blu-ray; but who knows, maybe not.

IMO, all timing pressures are on Sony. Toshiba, for all we know, has just been turning up the heat. Toshiba doesn't have two sell-the-farm projects resting on this decision.

 

[Carl B]

...Kutagari's PS3 decision may put added presure on Toshiba to adopt the physical structure of blu-ray; but who knows, maybe not.

IMO, all timing pressures are on Sony. Toshiba, for all we know, has just been turning up the heat. Toshiba doesn't have two sell-the-farm projects resting on this decision.

I see where you're coming from Inane, but my reasoning lies with the notion that Toshiba may want to get the 'free-ride' from PS3 inclusion. I agree though that if Toshiba has judged their interest in using PS3 as a vehicle into the homes as being minimal, then they have the benefit of time. Still, with Ken kind of talking his own thing, I have to wonder if those that want unification in Toshiba might be getting a little nervous.

PS - What's the other 'sell-the-farm' project? Movies?

 

[mckmas8808]

Yeah what does Toshiba have to push their format to the masses at a low price in one year guarenteed? They have no trojan horse, yet Sony does. If they are smart they will piggy back on the PS3 and live another day. They could make billions if they just unify for sure. Thats a 100% guarentee, but its a risk to not unify.

 

[Sean*O]

I definately disagree with the idea that if PS3 launches with BR (I'm almost certain it will), and some 'other' standard is adopted that it somehow hurts the PS3.

It may just hurt Sony as a company because of the added cost of shipping with Blu-Ray drives, and it might hurt the PS3 as a game machine because Sony have seemingly included a Blu-Ray drive at the expense of a Hard Disk Drive.

Other than that, the PS3 won't suffer at all from Sony's decisions to use it as a launching pad for Blu-Ray.

 

[Inane_Dork]

PS - What's the other 'sell-the-farm' project? Movies?

Blu-Ray and the PS3 are different projects from my point of view. Sony has a lot more riding on it than Toshiba I think. They're also much more pressed for time. Of course Toshiba wants to hurry, but they're not trying to mesh two big corporate strategies.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

It may just hurt Sony as a company because of the added cost of shipping with Blu-Ray drives, and it might hurt the PS3 as a game machine because Sony have seemingly included a Blu-Ray drive at the expense of a Hard Disk Drive.

Other than that, the PS3 won't suffer at all from Sony's decisions to use it as a launching pad for Blu-Ray.

Well, I believe that Sony already made the decision to eat/recoup some of the R&D expense of the BR by including into the PS3, regardless. If they don't include it in the PS3 and it just totally falls by the wayside, they've lost far more than they do if they include it in the PS3 and it doesn't get adopted.

As far as what they've given up because of that investment, I've also said previously that it was a huge mistake. Even if BR is eventually adopted its timing simply does not match that of the DVD so the same comparisons can't be made. They've added expensive optical media at the expense of the HDD, which is going to be a net loss for Sony. (But then again, that could be said of MANY of the additional "features" that they've added to the PS3 at the expense of the HDD.)

The way I'm currently predicting it (rubbing my crystal ball) BR will NOT win the format war. PS3 WILL ship with a BR drive. Whatever format IS adopted eventually will, somehow, be compatible with the BR drive through some sort of upgrade that Sony will make available at a relatively low cost to those who are interested (NOBODY... What? 1% of the market that actually cares?), and will probably be standard in future productions of the PS3.

In the meantime... Sony will have a proprietary format for the PS3 that might have SOME media available for it exclusively and in the meantime will still provide all the benefits of X360 by playing regular DVDs.

The only disadvantage for Sony at this point is COST and they are backed into a corner because they've already spent a boatload on BR R&D and have to attempt to recover it somehow. The fact that they are doing so at the expense of things that are IMPORTANT such as a HDD is a decision that I think is extremely foolish, but I think that's where they are headed.

 

[Chandler]

Noone has mentioned this but I think BluRay could be the biggest antipiracy tool for Sony. downloading a 4.5 gb xbox game is one thing, but downloading a 27gb game? I dont know man, I can't ever see the piracy scene kick off for 27gb games. They're good at distributing warez...but bandwidth is not cheap.

It would be very easy to encrypt a whole bunch of files and make them "filler" so that all games end up being 27gb, or even the newer BluRay 54gb discs. Maybe even specialize the PS3 blu ray drive somehow so that you cant read the PS3 games in PC blu ray players (ala X-Box).

 

[oi]

Well, I'm sure that's what people thought at first with DVDs too, heh. On my old (100 Mbit) connection it took me around 10 minutes to download a DVD, so I wouldn't underestimate the broadband development.

 

[PC-Engine]

Here is something i posted the last time jvd dismissed the PS2 as a DVD player and that the PS3 could have "anything" to do with Blu-Ray being a stronger contender for the next gen format:

When DVD was 3 years old it had sold 7 million stand alone players.

When the PS2 was 2 years old it had sold 10 million.

What i tried to show with those numbers is that the PS3 could be an even bigger factor, since the HD format will be 3 years old and the PS3 should be around 2 years at that time.

Right now there is actually 81 million stand alone players and 25 million PS2s in the USA. So even today plenty of PS2s are used for DVD playback.

And somewhere i dug up a report that indicated that around 50% used their PS2 dvd for playback..

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/news.php?aid=2135

Oh god, not this again...

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14430&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=380

Looking forward to Batman Begins on HD DVD this fall...

Yeah what does Toshiba have to push their format to the masses at a low price in one year guarenteed? They have no trojan horse, yet Sony does. If they are smart they will piggy back on the PS3 and live another day. They could make billions if they just unify for sure. Thats a 100% guarentee, but its a risk to not unify.

I don't know about you but I'm looking forward to LOTR on HD DVD in 2006.

 

[PARANOiA]

Noone has mentioned this but I think BluRay could be the biggest antipiracy tool for Sony. downloading a 4.5 gb xbox game is one thing, but downloading a 27gb game? I dont know man, I can't ever see the piracy scene kick off for 27gb games. They're good at distributing warez...but bandwidth is not cheap.

It would be very easy to encrypt a whole bunch of files and make them "filler" so that all games end up being 27gb, or even the newer BluRay 54gb discs. Maybe even specialize the PS3 blu ray drive somehow so that you cant read the PS3 games in PC blu ray players (ala X-Box).

Kind of.. if they can fill a 27gb disc with actual content, certainly... if they have "filler", it'll get cut by hackers... it's been done in the past a number of times.. notice how most Dreamcast games fit on a single 650/700mb CD, even though the discs are a gigabyte? The GTA games had the same things done too.. a double-layer DVD was cut to a little over 2gb i believe, since most of the disc was duplicated content.

And I can't see a game filling a 27gb disc with unique content other than FMV a la Final Fantasy.

 

[London Geezer]

Noone has mentioned this but I think BluRay could be the biggest antipiracy tool for Sony. downloading a 4.5 gb xbox game is one thing, but downloading a 27gb game? I dont know man, I can't ever see the piracy scene kick off for 27gb games. They're good at distributing warez...but bandwidth is not cheap.

It would be very easy to encrypt a whole bunch of files and make them "filler" so that all games end up being 27gb, or even the newer BluRay 54gb discs. Maybe even specialize the PS3 blu ray drive somehow so that you cant read the PS3 games in PC blu ray players (ala X-Box).

Kind of.. if they can fill a 27gb disc with actual content, certainly... if they have "filler", it'll get cut by hackers... it's been done in the past a number of times.. notice how most Dreamcast games fit on a single 650/700mb CD, even though the discs are a gigabyte? The GTA games had the same things done too.. a double-layer DVD was cut to a little over 2gb i believe, since most of the disc was duplicated content.

And I can't see a game filling a 27gb disc with unique content other than FMV a la Final Fantasy.

Music.... really uselessly impossibly huge worlds and lots and lots and lots and lots of textures with lots and lots and lots of different characters with lots and lots and lots of dialogue, even for characters you will never see...

 

[PC-Engine]

Noone has mentioned this but I think BluRay could be the biggest antipiracy tool for Sony. downloading a 4.5 gb xbox game is one thing, but downloading a 27gb game? I dont know man, I can't ever see the piracy scene kick off for 27gb games. They're good at distributing warez...but bandwidth is not cheap.

It would be very easy to encrypt a whole bunch of files and make them "filler" so that all games end up being 27gb, or even the newer BluRay 54gb discs. Maybe even specialize the PS3 blu ray drive somehow so that you cant read the PS3 games in PC blu ray players (ala X-Box).

Kind of.. if they can fill a 27gb disc with actual content, certainly... if they have "filler", it'll get cut by hackers... it's been done in the past a number of times.. notice how most Dreamcast games fit on a single 650/700mb CD, even though the discs are a gigabyte? The GTA games had the same things done too.. a double-layer DVD was cut to a little over 2gb i believe, since most of the disc was duplicated content.

And I can't see a game filling a 27gb disc with unique content other than FMV a la Final Fantasy.

Music.... really uselessly impossibly huge worlds and lots and lots and lots and lots of textures with lots and lots and lots of different characters with lots and lots and lots of dialogue, even for characters you will never see...

Which will cost lots and lots of money like Shenmue....

 

[London Geezer]

Which will cost lots and lots of money like Shenmue....

More.

 

[rabidrabbit]

Don't most of todays big games already cost lots of money like Shenmue?

 

[Fafalada]

Don't most of todays big games already cost lots of money like Shenmue?

Dunno what Shenmue cost, but it seems budgets for nexgen games have increased significantly (though these numbers seem to be highest at the start of each generation and get lower later on).
Some of the numbers I've seen bandled around suggest ~5x increase over similar time period in current gen.

 

[wco81]

Recent datapoint on HDTV adoption from Barron's article:

Dollar sales of digital TVs rose 78% last year, to $10.7 billion in the U.S., according to the Consumer Electronics Association, accounting for more than half of the dollar sales in television sets. Unit sales rose 63%, to 7.3 million. Some of those digital TVs had only standard-definition displays, but most were high-def. Most important to television programmers, the installed base is about 18 million HDTV sets in more than 12 million households. The CEA expects those numbers to pass 50 million next year, and 80 million in 2007.

 

[mckmas8808]

Dollar sales of digital TVs rose 78% last year, to $10.7 billion in the U.S., according to the Consumer Electronics Association, accounting for more than half of the dollar sales in television sets. Unit sales rose 63%, to 7.3 million. Some of those digital TVs had only standard-definition displays, but most were high-def. Most important to television programmers, the installed base is about 18 million HDTV sets in more than 12 million households. The CEA expects those numbers to pass 50 million next year, and 80 million in 2007.

Even more reason for next-gen console to push HD content on their games. PS1 generation games run on optical disk, PS2 generation games play over the internet, PS3 generation games play on HDTVs. WOW.

I hope Nintendo reads these reports and change their mind before its too late.

 

[Sis]

Even more reason for next-gen console to push HD content on their games. PS1 generation games run on optical disk, PS2 generation games play over the internet, PS3 generation games play on HDTVs. WOW.

I hope Nintendo reads these reports and change their mind before its too late.

I'm not trying to be contrarian because I respect what you are saying here, but I'm glad Nintendo is ignoring the HD market this time. Both Sony and MS have the HD market fully covered, so Nintendo should focus on delivering a solid standard def gaming console.

I guess I like the diversity of it.

.Sis

 

[mckmas8808]

HA! can't really argue with you there. At least Nintendo will always be different. Thats something that will always be a constant with them. And in a way I can respect that. I just hope that they respect the fact that if their console sales fall with the next generation just like they have done with every generation since they have been in existence.

 

[Ty]

I'm not trying to be contrarian because I respect what you are saying here, but I'm glad Nintendo is ignoring the HD market this time. Both Sony and MS have the HD market fully covered, so Nintendo should focus on delivering a solid standard def gaming console.

I guess I like the diversity of it.

.Sis

Why? In other words, what does SD get you over HD (all other factors being equal)? Are you expecting framerates to be different between say the Xbox360/PS3 vs. the Revolution? If they're not (let's say all 3 manage to hit 60fps) then SD is inferior, period, right?