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hawke : We've started our daily posting of event news and info and we're sure to be providing more and more as we move forward. The show is HUGE, so we can't cover it all, but we've got a great game plan and the news should get progressively more expansive as the days move on.
Check out the Updated CES Pages
We'd love to read your feedback here - Enjoy!!!
Your coverage of HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray overlooks the most fundamental factor in format adoption -- installed consumer base -- by not even listing the marketers behind one or the other high-def videodisc. It's a lopsided scorecard, with Blu-Ray looking like an all-star team compared to the pick-up team on the other side.
Content holders don't predicate their format choices on whether replication plants can retrofit lines (HD-DVD) or require new technology (Blu-Ray).
Those are relative operational issues that are resolved after the fact; they are not determinants of which format makes the most sense to invest in and to market to the public.
Yet Audioholics' reporter endorses HD-DVD, it seems, on the churlish basis of manufacturing capabilities now in place.
I was in the CES press room the morning of Jan. 10 when a long-time CE journalist said to me, "Did you hear that HP and Dell endorsed Blu-Ray? Game, set, match."
Point being, those two brands dominate the PC market, and the CE brands behind Blu-Ray -- Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, Philips, Thomson, LG, et al -- totally dominate their segment. It's the suppliers of disc drives who are the market makers, not replicators, who are vendors to the marketers.
As for content holders, their main concerns are which drive suppliers are behind which format (a decision-making process in which major content holders -- i.e., Hollywood -- are usually involved), which format offers the most robust encryption (anti-copy specification) and which is most user-friendly (though fair-useniks may find those latter two factors conflicted).
All things considered, there's no question Blu-ray has the industry momentum. Replication plants gladly will install new lines to stamp Blu-Ray discs if that is where the tonnage is, and that's where it will be, judging from the heavyweight backers of Blu-Ray.
It's very possible, if not probable, that by the time high-def videodiscs are marketed en masse, there will be a compromise format, just as what happened prior to 1996 (DVD's launch in Japan), when there were two format proposals -- ultimately, the Sony-Philips camp essentially conceded to the Toshiba-Warner format proposal to settle on what we know today as DVD.
For that, you can thank former Warner Home Video president Warren Lieberfarb, who functioned as the de facto mediator and whose induction inscription into the Video Hall of Fame in December 1997 christened him "father of DVD." (That's back when the word "video" wasn't yet corrupted into being used as a synonym denoting only VHS tape, as is the curious case today with movie studio ads proclaiming "available on video and DVD." That's like saying an album is available "on audio and CD." DVD is a form of video, as is VHS.)
The eventual compromise reached in these evolving technologies typically is not about incorporating elements of the weaker camp's configuration as much as it is about allowing the secondary camp's sponsoring companies to participate in the patent pool that is the pot of gold for the format standard's consortium.
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