Tuesday, August 23, 2005
High-Def DVD
There's a lot of fretting right now about a next-generation format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, and a lot of warm remembrance about the way the movie studios all banded together and agreed to a standard for DVD, and there was no format war and everything was wonderful.
This is not how it happened. If you try to do a search for "DivX" these days, all you'll pull up is the video codec, but before that codec existed, DIVX was something entirely different. There was tremendous fear in the early days of DVD that DIVX was going to gain traction, and split the market, or eventually win, due to the appeal it would have to the greedy movie studios. Especially because several studios (like Disney) signed on to release DIVX discs and not DVDs.
HD-DVD poses about as much threat to Blu-Ray as DIVX did to DVD. The number of device manufacturers and movie studios signed on to Blu-Ray far outnumber the number attached to HD-DVD. But this hardly matters, as in the next few years, there's a very good chance that these discs could be drastically reduced in importance, as online movie distribution eventually gets sorted out.
This is not how it happened. If you try to do a search for "DivX" these days, all you'll pull up is the video codec, but before that codec existed, DIVX was something entirely different. There was tremendous fear in the early days of DVD that DIVX was going to gain traction, and split the market, or eventually win, due to the appeal it would have to the greedy movie studios. Especially because several studios (like Disney) signed on to release DIVX discs and not DVDs.
HD-DVD poses about as much threat to Blu-Ray as DIVX did to DVD. The number of device manufacturers and movie studios signed on to Blu-Ray far outnumber the number attached to HD-DVD. But this hardly matters, as in the next few years, there's a very good chance that these discs could be drastically reduced in importance, as online movie distribution eventually gets sorted out.
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