Warner Bros goes Blu-Ray Exclusive

[quest55720]

Sorry I don't understand why one HD disc, be it HD DVD or BR means that movie prices will be at an extreme premium.

WITH the war, non-sales prices of movies were around $29. With just BR, are you expecting the prices to increase? I don't see how having HD DVD and BR out there affects movie disc prices as studios that were supporting both (e.g. Warner) had the same price for the HD DVD and their BR version anyhow. That is, it's not as if a BR-only studio waged a price war against an HD DVD-studio.

The disc has nothing to do with studio pricing as I see it - it's all about content against other studios/movies.

I was hoping they would have to give on the royalties. That would mean lower movie prices and studios get to keep a premium on the movies. I would of not been happy if warner went HD-dvd exclusive right now. I wanted 1 more year of competion then let warner decide. I was hoping the MSRP would settle down to 24.99 or 5 dollars more than the SD version. I love HDM but there is only so much I will pay for movies. I just don't see the studios giving on price because of fear of eroding prices like what happened with DVD. To be honest I think the studios would not mind of the winner in the end failed to downloadable movies. I think that is the studios dream force people into PPV were there is no inventory to worry about.

MSRPs won't go up but prices will indirectly because of bogos being phased out.

 

[DJ12]

I don't think you've been reading Warner's reasons for going Blu-Ray exclusive.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Yeah, the reasons do make a lot of sense. Why would someone buy the DVD release of, say, Transformers, if he plans to get it in HD eventually? But he'll delay the purchase because he doesn't want to end up with a collection in the wrong format either.

So it really is a win for almost everyone if the war can finally end.

 

[DJ12]

I wonder if there is a way Paramount will be able to get out of the contract with HD-DVD?

If, as we suspect, HD-DVD player/disc sales die because of this, surely releasing HD-DVD movies is not going to be cost effective.

 

[inefficient]

Michael Bay chiming in again:

Well another studio down. Maybe I was right? Blu ray is just better. HD will die a slow death. It's what I predicted a year ago. Now with Warner's down for the count with Blu Ray. That makes it easier for Wal-Mart to push Blu Ray. And whatever Wal-Mart pushes - wins. Hd better start giving out those $120 million dollars checks to stay alive. Maybe they can give me some so I can give it to my Make-A-Wish charity, just to shut me up. Have faith people Transformers will come out in Blu-ray one day!

Bay

http://www.shootfortheedit.com/forum/showthread.php?p=9716#post9716

 

[Morte66]

I disagree. The consumer benefitted greatly from the war, I think. In terms of price (look how quickly they came down) and in terms of features. If it weren't for HD DVD I'm sure most Bluray titles would still be MPEG-2 and I'm not sure if VC-1 and AVC would even be considered for Bluray standards. Not to mention profile 1.1 and 2.0 Bluray features.

I'll agree with that.

Look at the way most DVDs are encoded, it's not quite trained monkey work but it's pretty damn close. A tape is delivered, an operator shoves it in an old machine and pushes the button. If there's any need for sophisticated standards conversion (e.g. hybrid video/telecine NTSC to PAL) it doesn't happen, the machine just field blends. The encode is single pass, constant quantiser, and never uses the full capacity of the disc. They might watch the encode to make sure something's there, but don't expect serious quality review.

I have a pretty strong suspicion that Sony expected Blu-Ray mastering to work on the same basis. They used godawful five year old transfers made for MPEG2 HDTV (hello Fifth Element). They used MPEG2. It seems to have come as a complete surprise that the enthusiast and early adopter market wanted actual high quality, not just a HD logo. They got slammed for quality, and shown up by HDDVD/VC-1 for a while (Microsoft really went for it on the tools side), and it took them months to get a passable AVC encoder together and enforce some QA.

I have a bad feeling that without HDDVD to keep things honest, BD will slip back to the mastering standards seen in SD DVD. In other words, it'll look like SkyHD broadcasts without the station logo.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I'll agree with that.

Look at the way most DVDs are encoded, it's not quite trained monkey work but it's pretty damn close. A tape is delivered, an operator shoves it in an old machine and pushes the button. If there's any need for sophisticated standards conversion (e.g. hybrid video/telecine NTSC to PAL) it doesn't happen, the machine just field blends. The encode is single pass, constant quantiser, and never uses the full capacity of the disc. They might watch the encode to make sure something's there, but don't expect serious quality review.

I have a pretty strong suspicion that Sony expected Blu-Ray mastering to work on the same basis. They used godawful five year old transfers made for MPEG2 HDTV (hello Fifth Element). They used MPEG2. It seems to have come as a complete surprise that the enthusiast and early adopter market wanted actual high quality, not just a HD logo. They got slammed for quality, and shown up by HDDVD/VC-1 for a while (Microsoft really went for it on the tools side), and it took them months to get a passable AVC encoder together and enforce some QA.

Hardly surprising given that next-gen formats are simply being viewed as a way for studios to sell us the same old stuff over again. What, you thought they were doing all this hi-def malarky in order to simply give us a better product?

Of course they want to do the least (hence the poor transfers), and sell it to us for the most (hence the high prices on the same movies they've been selling for the last 20 years). Remember, it's not the media you pay for, it's the IP, and the media companies want to push up the price of that IP, not make it as cheap as the last 10 years of price war has made the DVD.

Getting a next gen format going is pressing the reset button on their profits cycle, and that's what the format war has been preventing, and why Warners finally chose a side. As soon as they have a next gen standard, they can kill off the DVD and start trying to get us to buy our movie collections all over again.

 

[_phil_]

The argument about Mpeg 2 being bad for HD is far to be setteld yet.
In fact , i've read from top professionals that mpeg2 is more fit for HD than for sd, and HD is where it can excell if done properly (no automatic machine )

 

[Mintmaster]

This sucks. I just bought a HD-DVD player as a gift for my parents' big screen. Oh well. It's only ~$100, and they needed another DVD player anyway. It also would have been interesting to see disc sales unadultered by this news, as player sales were pretty in the last couple months.

The war is definately over. HD-DVD's whole existence was based on being a lower cost, more competitive solution for HD when all else is equal. Suddenly all else is not equal, as they can't compete with only ~20% of the movies using their format, even if the players were $50. They just lost what, almost half the movie base?

Anyway, gotta agree with Asher. Toshiba definately helped consumers in making HD movies better.

I wonder if Toshiba will consider virtually pulling the plug? Loss-leading would be silly at this point, and that investment with Paramount is now much less valuable, so maybe they'll ask nicely to void the contract (and Paramount probably wouldn't mind either).

 

[DeathKnight]

Interesting discussion on why Warner did not accept 500 million dollars.

http://formatwarcentral.com/index.p...tsujihara-says-no-payoff-for-move-to-blu-ray/

Since the payoffs aren't true, then yeah the format war is over. The consumer has chosen.

You honestly can't be that naive, right? Warner isn't going to publicly admit they received any kind of monetary compensation of any form. Even HTF's owner Ronald Epstein has unofficially confirmed large compensation (both camps were playing the money game but Sony won out). You can see his posts in thread linked below:

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htf...ws-warner-brothers-now-blu-ray-exclusive.html

 

[Mintmaster]

The argument about Mpeg 2 being bad for HD is far to be setteld yet.
In fact , i've read from top professionals that mpeg2 is more fit for HD than for sd, and HD is where it can excell if done properly (no automatic machine )

Not sure who told you this. There's nothing MPEG2 can do that the other codec's can't.

Being "fit for HD" is nonsense. Maybe for a given size ratio (compared to uncompressed) the error with HD is less than with SD, but that's true for all codecs. MPEG2 is not competing with itself but rather VC-1 and AVC.

MPEG2 is good for cheap realtime compression/decompression and that's about it.

 

[Morte66]

The argument about Mpeg 2 being bad for HD is far to be setteld yet.

A lot of people repeated this on the web during the earlier days of HD discs, but every real test I've seen and done encoding from raw footage gives it the lie. MPEG2 can look OK (if a bit noisy) on easy content at 40mbps, but it doesn't handle difficulty spikes like VC-1/h264 within HDDVD/BD encoder profiles.

The best I can say for MPEG2 is that it plasters over some of the faults of 8 bit colour depth. The self-noise hides the blocking you get in Discrete Cosine Transform encoders, and it somewhat hides the banding you get on smooth gradients in non-dithered 8 bit material. But sticking a noise generator in the VC-1/h264 decoder would do the same thing.

 

[Sxotty]

meh

Maybe HD DVD players will get really cheap and a person could get one just for upconverting DVDs now

 

[ShaidarHaran]

Glad I bought a PS3

 

[Dave Baumann]

Maybe HD DVD players will get really cheap and a person could get one just for upconverting DVDs now

The problem with that it HD DVD hardware's cost is so completely tied up in just the HD DVD decode that it allows for no other features. As a DVD player the cheap HD DVD players are nowhere near as feature rich as current DVD players at the same or even less cost. You are far better off getting an HD DVD plyer with HDMI output as you'll also get features such as DiVX playback etc.

 

[jb]

Well I agree this does suck on the timing as I bought a low cost HD-DVD player for xmas as well (they dont tend to watch a lot of movies). Oh well guess I will buy them a "low cost" Blu-ray player next xmas...

 

[pascal]

Good Warner decided one side. Bad the time of decision.

Anyway, Lets Keep Moving because there are so many things to be done.
A HiDef world awaits us

 

[patsu]

Panasonic has the first standard form-factor slim drive ready for CES, MacBook and other note PCs will adopt it.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=262

Hopefully 4x burners for desktop PC get some price cuts too!

Cool. But given their track record, I think Apple may focus on digital download only. We should see major effort pouring into AppleTV. Blu-ray drives may receive little or no attention. Let's see in MacWorld.

 

[Ty]

I was hoping they would have to give on the royalties. That would mean lower movie prices and studios get to keep a premium on the movies. I would of not been happy if warner went HD-dvd exclusive right now. I wanted 1 more year of competion then let warner decide. I was hoping the MSRP would settle down to 24.99 or 5 dollars more than the SD version. I love HDM but there is only so much I will pay for movies. I just don't see the studios giving on price because of fear of eroding prices like what happened with DVD. To be honest I think the studios would not mind of the winner in the end failed to downloadable movies. I think that is the studios dream force people into PPV were there is no inventory to worry about.

MSRPs won't go up but prices will indirectly because of bogos being phased out.

BOGOs would have been phased out if BR died too. Also I'm not so sure reduced manufacturing costs necessarily translate to reduced shelf prices. Consider the fact that HD DVD is supposed to be much cheaper to make since retooling the lines isn't necessary. Yet HD DVD and BR movies still cost the same.

So what happened? Are HD DVD studios ripping us off or are BR studios cutting us a deal? What about studios like Warner who supported both and yet offer the HD DVD and BR versions at the same price?

Don't get me wrong, I think cheaper for the studios reduces pressure but I'm just not so sure it automatically means lower prices for the consumer.

 

[quest55720]

BOGOs would have been phased out if BR died too. Also I'm not so sure reduced manufacturing costs necessarily translate to reduced shelf prices. Consider the fact that HD DVD is supposed to be much cheaper to make since retooling the lines isn't necessary. Yet HD DVD and BR movies still cost the same.

So what happened? Are HD DVD studios ripping us off or are BR studios cutting us a deal? What about studios like Warner who supported both and yet offer the HD DVD and BR versions at the same price?

Don't get me wrong, I think cheaper for the studios reduces pressure but I'm just not so sure it automatically means lower prices for the consumer.

I never said bogos would stay if hd-dvd would of won. That is why I did not want a winner yet I wanted pressure on both sides. I hope you are right about the BDA but I can only go by what I see. I see the PS3 still as the cheapest blu player and no outdated 1.0 players don't count. I see a ton of CEs making blu players but none of them breaking the 399 dollar price barrier. I wish I could afford 800 dollars for players but I can not. I am afraid I will have to wait this out till mid 2009 when we might see solid 2.0 blu players at 199.

Since this is over I hope toshiba just tosses in the towel. Lets everyone out of the contracts and starts working on a blu player. The faster they give up the sooner I can buy hd-dvds on the cheap. The faster toshiba gets making a blu player the sooner I can see the prices getting to a reasonable level.