Michael Bay Comments on HD-DVD Again

Michael Bay has previously expressed his displeasure (before changing his mind) over Paramount's decision to go exclusive to HD-DVD (thanks to a $100 million payday from unknown source). He commented again on the issue on his official forums in a response to a poster blaming Bay for going to HD-DVD (even though he had no say on the matter).

What you don't understand is corporate politics. Microsoft wants both formats to fail so they can be heroes and make the world move to digital downloads. That is the dirty secret no one is talking about. That is why Microsoft is handing out $100 million dollar checks to studios just embrace the HD DVD and not the leading, and superior Blu Ray. They want confusion in the market until they perfect the digital downloads. Time will tell and you will see the truth.

Bay

Interesting theory. To a degree the theory is correct but Microsoft is just one player in the game and I don't think download services is the end game. Its way to early to declare a winner. In hardware sales, Blu-Ray is winning but only because the PS3 is included. Also, ironically because of Transformers, the HD-DVD has enjoyed sales that have proven it could be viable in the market, the same way 300 did that for Blu-Ray. Basically its way to early to call a winner in the format wars.

As for why there is a format war comes down to the usual reasons - money. Lots and lots of money. The studios and various tech companies have each chosen sides on the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray battle mostly because the winner will have a lead on the next format and the financial boom that could bring while the losers will experience a temporary loss in customer confidence and idle products while transitioning to the winning format.

A large part of the equation is patent ownership and related license fees. If you are one of the 17 patent owners for Blu-Ray (CyberLink; Dell; Hewlett-Packard; Hitachi; Koninklijke Philips Electronics; LG Electronics; Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic); Mitsubishi Electric; Pioneer; Samsung Electronics; Sanyo Electric; Sharp; Sony; TDK; Victor Company of Japan; and Warner Home Video) then that means you are not paying a license fee and anyone of those companies wants to use the technology must pay a fee and possibly percentage of their profits to those companies. All this means greater profits. Also why PS3 is Blu-Ray based. On the HD-DVD side, the patent owners are Toshiba and LG who in turn inked a deal with Microsoft to develop the technology. Which is why the XBox 360 supports HD-DVD.

As far as the downloading of movies, not so much. The United States is actually behind most of the westernized worlds in delivering of high speed Internet and getting further behind. The telecoms don't want to pay out to update the infrastructure (which would have to be fiber optics) preferring government pay for it. Not such a big deal accept the average file size of good old fashion DVD is around 6 gigabytes. The average Blu-Ray file size is around 27 gigs and HD-DVD its around 20 gigs. To download just one movie on the current infrastructure would take days. I don't see the average consumer willing to do that. It will probably be 5-10 years before downloading Blu-Ray/HD-DVD quality movies over the Internet has the possibility of becoming commonplace assuming that infrastructure gets built.

All the talk about formats, it all comes down to storage capacity which is what all the format talk is about. The max capacity of a CD is 700mb, DVD is 8.5GB, HD-DVD is 51GB and Blu-Ray is 50GB. As the tech gets tweaked more then likely the numbers will climb for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The greater the storage capacity, the more detail per pixel and sound quality can provide. That was a reason why DVD's can only do so much, the simple lack of storage capacity to cram in all the data needed to give that high definition picture. Keep in mind, the technology is very new. That means that there is a learning curve to maximize the storage capacity for the greatest performance, something I don't think either format has achieved yet. A handy comparison chart is here that to me helps illustrate that to vaunted differences between the two formats is highly dubious at best and the race in quality is dead even.

Nope the grand conspiracy is simply about profit margins and patent ownership. Those that win the format wars stands to gain the most for the healthy lead it gives them. In my opinion, the format war will end a draw with the formats merging so that any player can play any format. The only real deciding factor on who wins will ultimately be sales of the discs and prices of the hardware which Blu-Ray is falling behind on.