Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Another day, another format

DVD Forum gives three-layer, 51GB HD DVD the thumbs up:
What's unclear at this stage is whether today's HD DVD drives and players will be able to read the new disc. However, with such a small number of HD DVD devices out there - relative to DVD players - only a limited number of early adopters are likely to be affected, and these are the kind of folk who are generally happy to upgrade in any case.

What's also unclear is whether anyone will still care by the time the whole mess is sorted out. Apple seems to be baking on being the company with the most workable infrastructure for actually selling video by the time the industry realises that a new kind of Polycarbonate disk isn't the answer. Rick McCallum can be found in this month's Star Wars Insider voicing pretty much the same opinion, though his suggestion of each studio having its own "web site" to deliver content sounds like a royal PITA. He's right though, HD-DVD and Blu-ray might well tire each other out fighting, while the real battle is somewhere else entirely.

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1 comment:

Pete Ashton said...

Given that your standard DVD is 7gig or so these disks are only seven times the capacity, which given the prevalence of DVD box sets isn't that much of a jump.

Maybe I'm surfing the curve too much but I can't see the point of DVDs and CDs as anything more than a delivery device and portable hard drives / flash drives are more useful (and reusable, therefore greener too).

But then I'm not in the DRM industry so my opinions probably don't count.