Martin Gordon's Blog

Consumerist is reporting that current Blu-Ray players won't correctly play future discs. The article goes on to talk about how current players only support certain profiles of discs, and that discs with newer profiles won't have all their features enabled for older players.

It's crap like this that makes me think that even though Blu-Ray may have beat/may be about to beat HD-DVD, it's a long ways away from getting full mainstream consumer adoption. I'm pretty technical, and even I don't understand all the nuances associated with the different profiles. When consumers are faced with making a choice, they'd just as often not make the choice for fear that if they do choose, they will choose incorrectly. I think this will happen to Blu-Ray and is just another reason why the next-gen format war will be won by the Internet. So why let this profiles garbage even happen? Consumerist reports:

When asked why current players were released to the market when in such a primitive state, manufacturers blamed the release of HD DVD and said it forced them to come to market too soon. "We should have waited another year to introduce Blu-ray to the public, but the format war changed the situation."

Of course, blame it on the other guys for making a mess of your own format. Why even worry have these profiles as "features"? I haven't seen anything like this plague the HD-DVD camp.

Regardless, we now have this mess on our hands. At least the early adopters can help spread the word of how great Blu-Ray is despite these small technical issues, right? Wrong. It seems like Blu-ray will be alienating those early adopters, instead of embracing them: 'Regarding current Blu-ray player owners, Blu-ray developers told BetaNews, "They knew what they were getting into."'

The high-def format war is far from over. Even after beating HD-DVD, Blu-ray faces an even greater foe: the consumer.

Technorati Tags: Sony, Bluray, Playstation 3, HD-DVD, high definition, video

TechCrunch is reporting that Paramount, one of the last major studios on the HD-DVD side, will be announcing that it is switching to Blu-ray. This leaves Universal as the sole studio in the HD-DVD camp. I haven't been keeping up with the details of the format war, but I imagine the PS3 might have had something to do with it. Knowingly or not, people bringing home PlayStation 3's this holiday season were also bringing home Blu-ray players. With a much larger installed base of Blu-ray players, Sony had more leverage in negotiations with the last hold-out studios. I wonder how different things would be if the XBox 360 had HD-DVD built-in instead of as an optional add-on, given that it had a year (and effectively a two-year) head start.

I personally wouldn't go out and buy a PS3 just for Blu-ray support, and in fact was thinking about buying an XBox 360 because I like more of the games and because of the XBox Live (and Arcade) experience. That said, I wouldn't go out and buy any other Blu-ray player either. I doubt I would buy any Blu-ray movies since Netflix has been working wonders for me and on top of that, I would favor digital distribution over physical distribution at this point. I think many others do too, which makes me wonder if this was a war worth fighting over.

Technorati Tags: Sony, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, PlayStation 3, XBox 360, digital, high-definition, movie studios