The HD DVD predicament

The HD DVD camp is probably feeling a bit like Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, facing as they did an astounding reversal of fortunes a day before the start of the CES convention in Las Vegas. Warner Brothers' announcement seemed timed for maximum effect, which seems to belie protestations that it was simply a business decision into which Sony had little input. There are any number of ways to incentivize a company to move in your direction besides shifting a wad of cash into bank accounts.

Whatever the case, it is going to be an uphill struggle now that most of Hollywood is exclusively in the Blu-ray camp. Further, the last defenders of the HD DVD corner, Paramount (plus Dreamworks) and Universal, seem poised to reverse their exclusivity arrangement with HD DVD in light of an industry that is now decidedly tilted in Blu-ray's favor.

HD DVD was clearly ahead in the features race, with the standard mandating such things like dual decoders to support Picture-in-Picture (PIP) and required network connectivity to support downloadable extras. This caused HD DVDs to actually use such features (PIP capability was in use almost from the start), something that Blu-ray has yet to do.

Less ballyhooed, but particularly important to me from the standpoint of HD discs serving as a bridge between the DVD present and an HD downloadable media future, was the formats mandatory support for video backups to storage media. This meant that HD DVDs were REQUIRED to support the backup of HD DVD media to some form of computer, opening the door to legal use of HD content in the burgeoning home media server market.  Blu-ray devices CAN support this kind of functionality, but like much of the Blu-ray standard, leaves it as an optional feature, which means studios very well might not allow this (honestly, do you really think they will?).

Costs were also an advantage for HD DVDs, given that they built on existing DVD technology. This meant yield rates for HD DVD media were much higher, which matters if you hope to mass produce millions of DVDs for sale in stores around the world. Further, due to technical similarities with traditional DVDs, mass production facilities didn't have to be ripped out and replaced with new Blu-ray hardware. This probably counts as a negative to HD DVD in the minds of hardware manufacturers, as they would prefer that companies need to buy new hardware from them (a likely factor in the overwhelming support by hardware OEMs for Blu-ray over HD DVD), but isn't a strong point for consumers or studios, which is why support was more evenly balanced among content companies in earlier days.

Blu-ray's big advantages were capacity (25GB per layer, versus 15GB for HD DVD) and the Java runtime, which is the equivalent to a "Hail Mary" pass from a format technology standpoint. Java is a toolbox that can do pretty much anything, but someone has to sit down and actually DO something with it. Up till now, Sony and its Blu-ray partners have done very little with that runtime.

Warner Brother president Kevin Tsujihara admits as much in recent statements:

Kevin Tsujihara, president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, acknowledged in an interview that the HD DVD format had some advantages.

"The interactivity is more advanced on the HD DVD side, but I'm confident that we're going to get there" with Blu-ray, he said.

Of course, "getting there" is going to require early adopters to run out and buy new Blu-ray players, because as noted, Blu-ray opted merely to create the POTENTIAL to offer features on par with HD DVD, as opposed to making strict guarantees that would ensure long term compatibility from day one. That's why the current generation of Blu-ray users will have to buy new hardware to accomodate new features once Blu-ray "gets there."

Studios are now in the position of "shoehorning" consumers and their own production facilities into a new format that accounts for a miniscule fraction of the total DVD market. That's fair enough, I guess, given that the format war wasn't serving to raise that miniscule share very much (though that may have something to do with the fact that the difference between Blu-ray and upconverted DVD is not noticable by many viewers). By its backers own admission, however, Blu-ray is still a massive work in progress.

That suits hardware manufacturers just fine as it it provides them the opportunity to sell playback devices multiple times to the same customers as new features obsolete older players. Consumers, however, might get a bit tired of the flux, which itself might do the format few favors. Then again, maybe they won't care, as the competition isn't so much HD DVD as traditional DVD. So long as the format plays movies (like I said, HD clarity might be less of a selling point than studios might think), in the end that might be all that really matters.

The only wrinkle would be if Blu-ray manufacturers did something really stupid...such as release new Blu-ray discs that can't be played in older Blu-ray players. Wait a sec...isn't that exactly what the Blu-ray group is claiming must happen if they are to reach feature parity with HD DVD?

Viva digital downloads!