March 01, 2006
Hi Def DVD formats locked in battle
Integrators want one standard but find alternatives to push sales
Ace Computers’ new Viiv media server will be going out the door with one empty drive bay. Though the company designed the system to hold two optical drives, one standard DVD and one Blu-ray drive for new high-definition DVDs, an ongoing standards battle between Blu-ray and rival HD-DVD has left the Ace team empty-handed, for now.
John Samborski, vice president of the Arlington Heights, Ill., system builder, had hoped to have the first drives in January, but there were none available at the beginning of the year. The first drives in the United States are expected in the spring and summer.
But even if there were a plentiful supply of drives, Samborski says he would have trouble recommending them to customers. “There are no guarantees that what they buy will be the final standard,” he says. Thus Ace’s LHD Professional Media Server, which won a nod for innovation from CES earlier this year, expects to ship systems with just one optical drive until the two competing high-definition DVD standards duke it out. Meanwhile, Samborski laments, all that arguing over competing standards “continues to delay the format.”
Digital integrators and analysts don’t expect any immediate resolution. While companies from both camps and content providers that pledged to support those standards begin to roll out products, there has been no talk of compromising on one standard, further confusing potential customers and stalling the sale of additional products.
As a result, many digital integrators are advising their customers to wait to choose a format. They also are offering their clients alternative technologies and products that increase the DVD and digital video picture quality. Though the promise is great—the next-generation drives, among other features, will support high-definition movies that make the most of expensive plasma displays and home theater setups—there currently is no meaningful content available to play on them.
A host of companies, from big movie studios to Netflix, the online DVD rental site, have promised to support one or both of the formats this year. But the reality is there will only be a smattering of titles available this year. Sony, a key backer of Blu-ray, for example, promised 20 titles by spring.
While integrators and their customers wait, more trouble may be looming. The DVD Forum, an international standards group, already has given
Chinese companies the go-ahead to look into developing a third competing format.
“China is coming up with a similar high-definition DVD standard that is cheap compared to HD-DVD and Blu-ray,” says Deepa Iyer, a research analyst at Parks Associates. “The danger is if these two groups can’t resolve their differences, a third standard will come in.”
Finding a resolution is difficult, considering the differences in the format and the fact that manufacturers already have plans to release products in the first half of the year.
Blu-ray, backed by many of the Hollywood studios and consumer-electronics firms, promises 25 Gbytes of storage on the first single-layer discs and eventually plans for a 50-Gbyte dual-layer version in the future. Solution providers believe Hollywood studios are getting behind Blu-ray because of its tough digital rights management (DRM) format.
Sony, Philips, Panasonic, Pioneer, LG, Thomson, Apple and Dell are backers of the Blu-ray format. Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, Calif., previously was behind the standard as well, but the computer maker recently agreed to also back HD-DVD, some say bowing to pressure from longtime partner Microsoft.
Microsoft is indeed throwing its weight behind HD-DVD. The standard has one advantage that does not appear to be offered in Blu-ray: the ability to move HD-DVD content around a home network without running into difficulty with DRM.
Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft is supporting HD-DVD in its next operating system update, Vista, which will incorporate features of its current Windows Media Center OS. Intel, which just released its entertainment PC platform, Viiv, also is behind HD-DVD.
“HD-DVD allows you to move content and share it around the house,” Iyer says. “If you go with Blu-ray, you can’t do that.”
That’s a powerful argument for Microsoft and Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel, which both have a stake in entertainment PCs and media servers that will easily move content to various locations around the house through wired and wireless networks.
HD-DVD supports up to 15 Gbytes on a single-layer disc and 30 Gbytes with the double capacity. It also is backward-compatible with older DVDs and is said to be suitable for slim drives that also could fit into portable computers. Toshiba and NEC are two drivers of HD-DVD, in addition to Microsoft, Intel
and HP.
Like Ace’s Samborski, Rich Green, CEO of Rich Green Ink, is disappointed about the standards battle. “All that political positioning just delays product releases,” he says.
Green, whose Palo Alto-based digital integration firm installs high-end home theaters, says a delay in the proliferation of a high-end DVD standard could be threatened by more than a competing format from China. Downloading movies over the Internet could take off, provided broadband services continue to upgrade speeds. Green notes that internal scaling and digital video output can make traditional DVD look good on new, high-end screens.
So with a format war on the horizon, Green expects many customers to look more seriously at downloading, even if the picture quality is lower than high definition. “Look at what happened with digital music,” he says. “It had nothing to do with quality. It was about access.”
Green thinks the best thing digital integrators can do is come up with an overlay interface that makes a choice between the different DRM structures transparent. “It shouldn’t matter if it’s for Blu-ray, HD-DVD, QuickTime or Windows Media Player,” he says. “That is the opportunity.”
