OPINION: Fueling the fire
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By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 9/14/2007
SEPT. 14 | HOPES (OR FEARS) that Warner Home Video would drop its support for Blu-ray in return for a pile of cash from the HD DVD camp, thus returning the high-def format war to its original three-to-three studio balance, were dashed this week—at least for now.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
But “for now” may not be very long.
“The consumer is still kind of divided, and we still believe that we should offer the content in both formats,” WHV president Ron Sanders told VB sister publication TWICE.
But he was careful to hedge his bets.
“We will watch the marketplace closely and see how it plays out,” he said. “But for now, we are supporting both.”
Such hedging of bets is becoming a fashion of sorts among the studios.
Paramount’s new “commitment” to HD DVD is scheduled to last only through the end of next year, after which the studio is free to change its mind.
Warner’s sister studio, New Line Cinema, found a unique way to hedge its format bets, going day-and-date with Blu-ray and DVD in the fourth quarter but delaying the HD DVD release of Hairspray until sometime next year.
Unlike HD DVD, Blu-ray provides for region coding at the option of the content owner, allowing studios to release titles here but not in Europe, where theatrical windows still sometimes lag the U.S. by weeks or months.
Standard DVD also provides for that, of course, but the system has long since been hacked and isn’t terribly effective—to say the least.
The two hardware camps, meanwhile, are hustling to cover the bets of any studio that might be thinking of laying off some of the risk of its current format policy.
“We’re talking to both sides, and it’s crazy right now,” Sanders acknowledged.
SOME STUDIOS, of course, remain stalwart in their chosen format. But as a group, they seem less able than ever to affect the course of the format war.
Whatever Paramount’s real motives for dropping Blu-ray, the move is as likely to add fuel to the format war as to help bring it to an end.
It brings HD DVD closer to new-release parity heading into the fourth quarter and makes it easier for Toshiba to continue pouring money and resources into the format.
Regardless of the merits of either technology, the solution to the war inevitably will involve one camp or the other deciding no longer to pour resources into the battle. So anything that postpones that reckoning, for better or worse, can only extend the war.
“It’s really hard to handicap,” Sanders admitted in his interview with TWICE. “I can’t tell which side, if any, will win. Right now it’s like a Mexican standoff. If the consumer continues to support both formats, the industry will as well. It will be really pivotal what Toshiba does this fourth quarter in hardware. If they sell-through everything they ship, and it’s a big number at the price points that are coming out, then I think [HD DVD] will be around for a long time. If they don’t, then it could go Blu-ray’s way.”
I’m not completely unsympathetic to Warner’s position. I’ve argued before that format exclusivity forces consumers to make a technology choice just to watch the movies they want to see and leaves money on the table for the studios.
Under the current circumstances, a dual-format policy is clearly the most consumer-friendly.
But we seem to have come a long way from the days when content was king.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda. Get more of Sweeting's analysis here.
