Dear Movie Studios: Why?
We've had alot of discussion here at Homotron and Gay Gamer around Blu-Ray and HD DVD lately. It's no surprise that this is the hawt issue of the moment, given CES and the announcements that were made. It now seems inevitable that Sony's proprietary Blu-Ray format will win out the war on the physical distribution with most of Hollywood backing it.
The real question for me is why each studio chose either given format? Why did a studio chose HD DVD as their format over Blu-Ray, or vice versa? There has been alot of discussion involving codecs and features of the given formats, but I think when you look at the average, everyday consumer that is going to make up 75% of the purchasing base of this technology, they don't care about that. They care about three things: will it work? is it easy to use? and how much?
Obviously, both Blu-Ray and HD DVD work. Their usability is still not what I would call mainstream easy, but easy enough for most consumers. So that leaves us cost. And as we've seen thus far, HD DVD players have been the more affordable players. Well, by that math, HD DVD should have won out by now. But the haven't. So there must be something else driving this push to Blu-Ray. And if not the consumer side, it must be the coporate side.
Hit the jump to see the rest of this story:
CNET's Don Reisinger got a chance to speak with a few of the movie execs for studios that back Blu-Ray while he was out at CES this year. The main question on his mind is why? What was the reasoning behind choosing Blu-Ray? The most interesting point in the article came from an executive with Lionsgate Studio in response to that very question: They chose Blu-Ray for its Piracy Controls.
Of all the canned, corporate answers someone could give (We feel it's a stonger format, we see they have a larger install base, etc.), Piracy Controls was named the top reason. And then it made sense to me: Sony isn't trying to sell Blu-Ray to consumers at all; they're selling it to studios. For Sony, this isn't a battle of getting people to buy into Blu-Ray, it's a battle of trying to get rich, old stodges interested in their format. And the easiest way to sell something to rich, old people (as the 2004 US Presidential elections proved) is through fear.
The fear in this case is that young whipper-snappers will steal your movie or TV show and thus you will lose money. Plain and easy. So Sony used it's DRM as the key selling point to get people on board with Blu-Ray.
Now, of course, I'm extrapolating the response of one movie exec to assume that Sony used the same sales pitch with every studio, but I think that's a fairly safe bet. Studios want to protect their property, and that's completely within their right to do so. The problem is, however, that DRM will be cracked. It will be circumvented. Consumers don't like it at all, and hackers find it to be a fun challenge. Sooner rather than later, there will be a solid crack to Blu-Ray that will throw the idea of Piracy Controls out the window, and the studios will have been sold on a weak benefit rather than funtionality that makes things better for consumers.
I have nothing against Blu-Ray or HD DVD. I'm not at a home theater point where HD is relevant to me. And I'm not chiding Sony for selling their product. In contrast, I am looking squarely at the studios and asking why. By saying that Piracy Controls are their biggest concern, they've yet again affirmed the fact that they do not care to listen to their consumers. This isn't a Blu-Ray/HD DVD thing, this is a movie industry thing.
I've said it a million times, and I will continue to say it: As a business, you have to meet your customers where they are at to be succesful. If you try to make us come to you, you will lose. People will pirate or turn to digital media faster than you can count the money flying out of your coffers until you give us something we want the way we want it. It's that simple. Don't let yourself turn into the music industry: they've forced so many people into piracy that they are going to have one hell of a time getting people back into the legal purchasing fold. People are pirating because the music industry refused to give the customers what they wanted the way they wanted it.
Don't think that the file size of your media will protect you either. Why do you think the hard drive market has been going through a boom lately (one that I predict will continue for at least another two years)? A 20 gig file can be compressed and torrented easily, and more and more people are able to accomodate them on a regular basis.
Be warned, movie execs: chose whatever format you want, but chose it for the right reasons. Please don't force your customer base into piracy.
Jesse James
Posted to Miscellany on 10 January 2008
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: Blu-Ray, drm, HD-DVD, Movies, Studios, why?
If it ain't broke... cease production. Right?
There is another reason Sony is pushing Blu. MONEY. See, the DRM scheme on Blu-Ray is one that requires a key to work -- every movie has a key and every player has a key -- and movie producers have to pay The Blu-Ray Consortium (Sony and partners) to get the key. It's an infinitesimal portion of the budget for a major studio picture, but for an independent filmmaker, it can be more than the entire movie's budget. Oh, and the fee is a license which must be renewed yearly. Otherwise, the Blu-Ray Consortium can revoke the key in an update to your Blu-Ray player and render the movie unplayable. (That's probably the most appealing (to studios) part of Blu-Ray's anti-piracy scheme; if a disk is pirated, the Blu-Ray Consortium can revoke it's key, rendering the pirated movies unplayable.)
So, I have to wonder if the studios backed Blu because it kind of shoves the little guys out of the way of large-market distribution. Studios are probably nearly as scared now as they were when television first came along. New technology allows pretty much anyone with talent, skill, and drive to produce a movie that looks as good as Hollywood stuff (just look at 28 Days Later), but unless you team up with a deep-pockets studio, you're not likely to be able to afford mass reproduction of your movie. Sure, you can burn them off one at a time, but there's no guarantee that burned disks will have the same compatibility and durability as mass-produced, pressed disks. So, it puts independent producers at a disadvantage.
And as I heard on NPR tonight, Hollywood should not have a monopoly on what stories get told. If they do, OUR stories -- GLBTQ-SF -- will never get told.
I'll get off my soap box now.
Wow, great point!
People talk about Blu-Ray like it's Sony alone, but they're just the driving force and the creators of the technology that led to it. You want to see a unilateral effort, look at Toshiba. They're the only hardware company actively involved with HD DVD. There hasn't even been an HD DVD drive on the market they didn't manufacture, but lots of companies share the BD patents, and Sony hasn't even been the most proactive researcher of the technology: they're not the ones coming out with the four- and eight-layer BDs that only require some firmware updates to read. Hardcoat wasn't even their idea. If Blu-Ray had been a Sony solo project, the movies would be in caddies like DVD-RAMs and the format would be dead by now.
I've heard it said dozens of times that Sony, Fox, and Disney are married to Blu because of the BD+ anti-piracy, but I don't think that's the major reason for Fox. Go to any store and look at the backs of Blu-Ray boxes. Fox's are the only ones that tell you in which video codec and at what bitrate the movie is encoded, and pretty much all their movies come with DTS-HD MA soundtracks. I've noticed a much higher proportion of my Fox DVDs have DTS than of those from other studios. Basically, they're the geekiest studio. They actually care about the technology in their home releases, so Blu is the only choice. The Simpsons Movie is in MPEG-2 at 37 Mbps, which is higher than the total maximum read speed of HD DVD. HD DVD couldn't even play the Simpsons movie in real time *without sound.* It would need to be compressed into VC-1 first, which looks awful in various ways I won't get into right now. Blu-Ray is just plain better technology, which is why I prefer it, and I think why Fox prefers it. I hope now that Warner has taken a side (due to sales and a desire to create a winner so the market can grow, not DRM) they'll stop simply re-releasing their HD DVDs in a blue box and actually take advantage of the advantages.
I'll agree that -- technologically speaking -- Blu is superior to HD-DVD. And I'd like to believe that the studios are selecting Blu beause of that superiority. Unfortunately, I think it more likely that they're drawn by less altruistic reasons, among which are those I wrote of above. The technological problem Blu faces is that the user experience is hampered by all those checks, re-checks, verifications, and other steps that the BD+ DRM forces the machines to deploy.
It just bogs the system down.
But it appears we're stuck with it now...
@SFWatcher
Theoretically, I'm sure you have a point. If I had one of these first-generation dedicated BD players I've heard nothing good about instead of a PS3, I might feel very differently. But in practice, my HD DVD player (HD-A20) takes 47 seconds to open its tray from power off, plus ten more to load up the disc. That's almost a minute just to get to the Universal logo, and it'll be even longer in the all-too-likely event that it freezes or fails to initiate HDMI out (which I assume is an HDCP problem.) When it finally does load, I'm listening to Dolby Digital and looking at a grainy picture with poor color fidelity. That's a hampered user experience. The PS3 starts loading a BD from power off within 7 seconds of putting it in, even if I manually go through the menu to start it, and it's never frozen on a movie. In my experience, Blu-Ray conceals and abstracts its generous portion of evil much better than HD DVD does its meager portion of evil, so I just can't go with the notion of there being a practical, visible consequence to the BD+ humbuggery in normal playback.