HD-DVD is a digital optical media format and is one of the specifications being proposed as the standard for high-definition DVD. HD-DVD is promoted by Toshiba, NEC and Sanyo, and backed by four major film studios: Warner Brothers Studios, Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures and New Line Cinema. The competing format, Blu-ray, comes from a group of companies led by Sony and including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, LG Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic), Mitsubishi Electric, Philips Electronics, Pioneer Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, TDK and Thomson Multimedia. Disney and its Buena Vista Home Entertainment Division announced they would release Blu-ray-compatible DVDs, complicating the picture because most of the Hollywood film studios had already declared for HD-DVD.
The good news is that both competing formats have far larger storage capacity than existing DVD. The Blu-ray disk holds about six times the capacity of existing DVDs, while Toshiba’s HD DVD can hold about four times as much as standard DVDs. Both formats provide far sharper pictures in addition to the vastly increased storage space — a fact that the studios intend to use to provide interactive capabilities that will allow viewers to buy merchandise, play games and call up bonus material even while the movie is being shown.
That said, a few observers have noted that the greatly increased storage space still pales beside the step from videocassette to DVD. For example, Gerard Catapano, the manager of electronics testing at Consumer Reports magazine, says neither technology offers owners of high-definition television sets the same improvement in image quality that DVD boasts in comparison with videocassettes. “That’s night and day,” he said in a recent article.
The interest shown by Hollywood studios in the HD-DVD format seems to come down to cost: HD-DVD media will be less expensive to manufacture than Blu-ray discs. The press has been full of comparisons to the past battles between the dueling VHS and Betamax videotape formats. The comparison is easy to make, as Sony was involved in both battles, but the situation isn’t the same this time. While billions of dollars in potential sales hang in the balance for the winner, the Hollywood studios aren’t calling the tune as they did in the earlier battle.
Paul Boutin ably described the new terrain in an article in Slate: “The good news is that if HD-DVD does turn out to be a low-capacity sham, Hollywood probably won’t be able to force it down our throats. DVDs aren’t just for movies anymore: Whichever disk wins out will almost certainly become the standard for new computers, game consoles, and other gadgets, just as CD and DVD drives did. It’s unlikely that computer users — or computer manufacturers — will settle for a medium that stores 30 gigs of data rather than 200 because it saves Warner Bros. a little money. No matter which side wins, this format war isn’t going to change how we live. The VCR upended the relationship between video producers and consumers, who could suddenly watch what they wanted, whenever they felt like it. All HD-DVD and Blu-ray do is pack more video onto an existing medium at a time when we’re discovering the joys of broadband connections, downloadable video, and hard drives big enough to hold a small movie library. If Sony, Toshiba, and the movie studios go to war, they might find that by the time it’s over, we won’t care about shiny silver disks at all.”
The HD-DVD and Blu-Ray camps have recently announced effort to effect a truce rather than prolong a debilitating war. This positive development appears to be more about cutting losses and getting the discs to market before online and wireless delivery systems gain a competitive edge. Per Paul Boutin’s comments above, the move smacks more of expediency than insight as a solution should have been reached long ago.
