There is nothing more dull than a format war, and the battle between Sony’s Blu-ray standard and the rival HD-DVD standard championed by Toshiba and Microsoft has been more tedious than most. Nobody wants to buy kit that loses a standards fight and becomes obsolete, so the take-up of both technologies has been slower than it might had consumers been offered a simple, single choice. The battle’s not over yet, but the announcement that Warner Brothers is to support Blu-ray, the rumours that Paramount may follow suit, and the stronger sales of Blu-ray in North America and the UK relative to HD-DVD sales are definitely making Sony like the winner at the moment.
However, I’m struggling to get excited about either format. I will admit I have been very impressed by demonstrations of both technologies. There is something extremely, viscerally exciting about the immediacy and vivid impact of these high definition formats. I first saw them in ideal conditions at trade shows, where you’re usually in a darkened, cinema-like tent with a 5.1 sound system that rattles your teeth. In these conditions, the impact can be jaw-dropping. Checking it out at a local electronics retailer, it’s still impressive, but less inspired. This morning I watched scenes from Black Hawk Down on a Blu-ray disc on a PS3, and it was very good, but I was left with a vague feeling of . . . hmmm.
As I survey my extensive DVD collection, I am not filled with enthusiasm at the thought of running out to by the whole lot again in Blu-ray format. The quality I can see on my excellent upscaling DVD player, on a high-quality LCD TV, is already very good, and the improvement in picture quality I’ll get if I switch up to Blu-ray is real, but not earth shattering. Blu-ray’s present good fortune makes me consider buying Sony’s PS3 games console, because there are already a bunch of Blu-ray films available for rental at my local Blockbuster, and I’m sentimental about Sony gaming, but that’s about it. I went to my local Blockbuster and stared hard at the selection of Blu-ray films. It’s a predictable lowest common denominator selection of action films and sci-fi epics, most of which I’ve seen before, some of which look fun. However, I don’t really need to spend £300 to get more popcorn movies in my life.
I’m left with a sense that the fundamental driver for the adoption of new formats is not addressed by Blu-ray. That driver is convenience. It’s no easier, quicker or faster to buy, rent or borrow a Blu-ray disc than the current DVD format, and the incremental picture quality improvement is a nice to have, but not really very compelling. On the other hand, my relationship to music has been completely transformed by breaking the connection between the physical container of music, the CD and its MP3 software content. My iPod, the iTunes store, eMusic, Napster, Sonos, and YouTube provide breathtaking convenience and have changed my music habits forever.
I’ve experimented with creating a similar ecology of film files, using a PC server connected to my television to watch DVDs that I’ve ripped for personal use, and a portable Archos video player to watch film and television on the go. It’s a painfully geeky business at the moment, but it’s worth it.. The convenience of being able to watch what you want to watch when and where you want to watch it is far more important to me than the video quality, and I’m quite sure that this will prove true for many other consumers.
Viewed in this light, the entire next-generation DVD project is a dead end. The film companies want us to buy the films we’ve already bought, again, at higher cost, in exchange for an improvement in quality that is nice to have but essentially pointless. We want to be able to watch the DVDs we’ve already bought on PCs and portable devices, and they don’t want us to, and are prepared to spend endless sums on lawyers to defend these redundant formats.
There are some signs the government is catching on. This week Lord Triesman, the Intellectual Property Minister, called for a change in the law that would make it legal to copy the CDs that you’ve bought for your own use – something which millions of people do, but which is technically illegal. It would be good if similar legal protection was made available to consumers who make back-up copies of DVDs they’ve purchased. As a parent of a toddler, it’s expensive and annoying to see DVDs, which are much more fragile than CDs, get trashed by heavy handling. It’s much more convenient to rip the DVD and watch it via a PC.
We’ll see how this all pans out, but I suspect that Blu-ray and HD-DVD will eventually be seen as the phoney war that it really is. The technology we’re all waiting for is the MP3, iPod and iTunes of the film and TV world. The music business has done everything it can to avoid facing the reality of life in a world of digital bits. The film and television studios will probably be even worse. I suspect we’ll be in for decades of conflict over intellectual copyright before convenience finally triumphs over the intransigence of the film industry.
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