My Tech Addiction

HD DVD vs Blu-ray

Into the ever compelling format war of HD DVD and Blu-ray, I throw my hat.

I just read a very interesting article about the production costs of both formats. My previous understanding was that the HD DVD format was cheaper to manufacture due to its inherent similarities to the DVD format. This allowed for simpler manufacturing versus Blu-ray which requires a very different process from DVD. This is due mainly to the data carrying layer of Blu-ray being closer to the surface of the disc, requiring different coatings than either HD DVD or DVD. According to this article, however, this is not the case. The article concludes that "...we can see that Blu-ray media replication does not cost significantly more than HD DVD. In fact, we found that Blu-ray is actually cheaper per GB in many situations!"

In my opinion this is the straw that broke the camel's back. To see what I mean, let me weigh the attributes of each format.

HD DVD:
-First to market
-More inexpensive players
-Major hardware support by Toshiba, Microsoft (XBOX 360 add-on), others
-Supported by Viacom (Paramount, Dreamworks), Universal and Time Warner (Warner Brothers, New Line) movie studios

Blu-ray
-More storage capacity (25GB vs 15GB for a single layer disc)
-Built into every PlayStation 3
-Major hardware support by Sony, Dell, HP, others
-Supported by Time Warner (Warner Brothers, New Line), Viacom (Paramount, Dreamworks), Disney (Buena Vista, Pixar), News Corp. (20th Century Fox), Sony (Sony Pictures, Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures, MGM) and Lions Gate Films movie studios

This time last year it looked like Sony was shooting themselves in the foot by delaying the PS3 and with it Blu-ray and consequently allowing HD DVD a head start. This head start and any player cost advantages have essentially been nullified by the availability and solid sales of the PS3. One could argue it is to early to call this an advantage, especially since it appears the HD DVD drive add-on for the XBOX 360 is also selling well. As shown above, however, Sony holds a distinct advantage in the content war. In the end their two trump cards may be the exclusivity they hold with their own studio and with Disney. Not only will Sony hold out to the last to relinquish its own studios films to HD DVD, a huge amount of DVD sales are for family movies (Disney's bread and butter).

Meanwhile HD DVD's main advantages, player and disc cost, have not been exploited well enough. As the article mentioned above notes; Blu-ray, in practice, costs the same to manufacture as HD DVD thus eliminating one of it's inherent advantages. The player cost issue is one I personally find amazing. Toshiba's best hand to play would be to introduce the cheapest possible player (under $200 is a key price point) to take advantage of whatever momentum they may have and try to steal the market before too much Blu-ray content is released. This would then force some if not all of the Blu-ray exclusive companies to also put out HD DVD content. By not doing that, Toshiba is essentially letting Sony win by default. In time, millions of PS3s will be sold (along with other players), a huge content disparity will be evident in favor of Blu-ray and in the end it will result in the end of HD DVD. Who wants to buy a player with less movies available for it? Only Universal is exclusively HD DVD.

Having one company, Sony, controlling too much of any market is not good (look at Microsoft). I have also read that the DRM on Blu-ray is much worse than on HD DVD. My above conclusion is very disappointing to me since I feel that due to its blunders Sony doesn't deserve to win this format war. But it looks that thanks to its combination of hardware and content holdings, it will anyway.

The DRM issue with HD content, especially HDCP, I hope to discuss further in a later post.