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Armistice Day

Today is Armistice Day, the day set aside to commemorate the end of The War to End All Wars. While there are certainly wars ravaging all across the world, for some reason I’m caught up in the middle of the most trivial of all wars, the high-def format war. It’s not really a war at all, it’s more like two-year-olds arguing over the same toy. “Mine,” they say with that whiny voice while huffing with an air of disgust and fury.

Not a war at all. For surely there would be no war if it weren’t for the media’s inherent ability to sensationalize everything. Without the “format war” there would have been a year of “slow news days” or the poor “journalists” would have to fabricate some other random controversy to generate web clicks.

Here in the States we’ve changed Armistice Day into “Veterans Day” - and in the British Commonwealths to “Remembrance Day” - after World War II (The Great War). Apparently the entire western world was naive for the first half of the 20th Century thinking one war was going to be the last ever. It would be just as naive to think this high-def war would be the last format war as well. Certainly we would hope the mega-corporations would have enough sense to avoid another one, but egos always get the better of the two sides and it’s inevitable. This is how shooting wars start after all, two sides can’t agree on something so they start killing each other. Yes, it’s obviously the most ridiculous concept ever devised by humans, but it sure is good for the economy! (I say this in jest obviously.)

I may just be the only person watching this war who is jaded (I sure hope not), but I’m over the whole affair. It appears some in the industry are also growing weary. Sony’s Howard Stringer appeared to be tiring of the canard. Reflecting back to before he was CEO he declared that he wishes he would have stuck to the negotiations and unified the two formats. He blamed egos for the quagmire we’re in (isn’t it always one ego trying to prove something to the world?).

You may have noticed I haven’t posted last week. It was not because I was enjoying my amaretto sours while I wasted away at home, or because I am sick of the “format war.” It was because I was away on vacation. I was in Las Vegas where I had neither fun nor relaxation. I am back now and I will be writing more articles for your education or enjoyment. I will be enjoying an amaretto sour, however.

The question of value

Last night I took my wife out to a nice steak house and wine bar for dinner, as I do sometimes. It was a pleasant experience in the casual, but elegant, restaurant dining on a filet mignon with a glass of Pinot Noir from Sonoma, CA. Of course, if it wasn’t nice I would have been disappointed and I would have really missed that $160. But where am I going with this?

You know in the film 300 when Leonidas says to his men, “Tonight we dine in hell!” I always ask the question from the perspective of one of his soldiers: “We’re going to Sizzler?”

It is this gulf between a quality steak at $32 and a mediocre steak at $19 that I began to muse over. There must be many people who think a $19 steak from Sizzler is fantastic, or at the very least it’s adequate. There are others, like myself, who would never consider the over-cooked piece of left-over meat as worth $19. In this regard I relate to the food critic, Anton Ego, from the Pixar film Ratatouille when he exclaims, “I don’t like food, I love it. If I don’t love it, I don’t swallow.” In the same way, most people find their standard-definition DVD collection as more than adequate, thus they do not see the need to spend a good deal of money to upgrade (for surely everyone has DVD equipment they’re replacing) to Blu-ray and/or HD DVD.

It’s probably a good bet that the majority of the population have not had the pleasure of dining in an up-scale steak house. When you haven’t tried the best, you really have no benchmark to compare mediocre to. In fact, mediocre is all you know, but to you it is not mediocre, it is good. When something is good, why would you want to replace it? What benefit is there to pay thrice the price for the “same” steak you could get at Sizzler? Ah, but it is not the same! And, no, it doesn’t taste better just because you pay more.

We’re still in an era of standard-definition. Only about 55-million households in the U.S. have an HDTV, but over 130-million have DVD players. The sum of all HD DVD and Blu-ray players is still a fraction of the total HDTV install base, let alone the DVD market. This is the reason why Blu-ray and HD DVD will always remain a niche product.

Over two thirds of HDTV owners believe DVD is “high-definition.” This is probably because DVD did a bang-up job promoting the format’s higher-resolution than VHS a decade ago. Most HDTV owners also think anything they watch on their HD set is high-def. How they can think the picture they have at home is the same as the one they saw in the store is mind-boggling, but it’s still a problem the backers of both next-gen formats have to face. Before the market is going to buy into Blu-ray, they’re going to have to buy into high-def. Before they’re going to buy HD DVD, they’re going to have to know the benefits of high-def.

The promoters of both formats do know this, and that’s why you see so many ads for them on Discovery HD-Theater. It’s also why Panasonic and Disney embarked on their Magical Blu-ray Tour, and Panasonic is also setting off on their own bus tour promoting high-def and educating the public on high-def, plasma and Blu-ray Disc. Toshiba is also set to start airing HD DVD ads on Sunday Night Football on NBC (an NBC Universal company).

While I posit that both formats will remain niche, I also contend that the market will dictate a winner and will eventually support one format nearly exclusively, and that this will be a good thing. High-def is a growing market, and nearly every TV sold today is a high-def set. DirecTV and Dish Network are adding hundreds of high-def channels to their network. Adoption will grow and as the consumer is educated, they will be interested in high-def movies. Of course with the two formats, ennui will reign in some of these hopeful shoppers. However, some people will buy a player and be happy getting a limited selection in high-def while enjoying the rest on DVD. If the market favors one format, it will inevitably favor one format in the long run. There is historic precedent for this as the Betamax war lasted over a decade but did eventually end with one format as the standard. I feel the sooner this happens the better. One format will help the high-def market grow much faster as all the companies can focus all their attention on educating the market on high-def instead of trying to explain why they should chose whichever format they support.

If there isn’t a winner soon, video-on-demand just might win. I know a few people already who do not rent movies and aren’t interested in buying either next-gen format opting to use the free video-on-demand they get from Time Warner Cable. Their options are limited, of course, but they figure they only watch a few things a week and they can wait for new releases to hit the free channels. It’s possible Time Warner or Comcast could make their service unlimited and load up every title they can get the rights to and it would be like Netflix’s “Watch Now” feature, only in high-def. This is the most likely VOD type service as the biggest criticism of streaming content is the bandwidth issue. Of course if the cable providers can do it already, it’s not just a pipe dream.

I’m holding out hope that one of the next-gen optical formats will finally win this ridiculous war because a lot of people like collecting movies, and you don’t get the same satisfaction with a hard drive. Of course it’s hard to say if any format could match the pure joy of a nice Syrah.

Because of the jump in RSS subscribers, I thought I would take a moment to point out some of the best articles on WesleyTech.com that you may have missed. If you have not yet subscribed, feel free to do so using the Full RSS Feed.

BackupBluray rip utility released
BackupBluray Guide
Copy HD DVD freeware
Copy Blu-ray free
DVD Fab Decrypter is now DVD Fab HD Decrypter
Blu-ray vs HD DVD replication costs revealed
Blu-ray vs HD DVD replication costs part 2
Is Star Wars coming to Blu-ray?
$1 DVD Rentals at your grocery store

I normally save the best stories on the top articles page, but some really good ones can slip through the cracks, so feel free to use the search page if you are looking for a particular topic. If you have any suggestions for the top articles page or you would like to contact us at any time, feel free to comment on the articles or use the contact form. Thanks for reading WesleyTech!

Thanks to Shawn over at http://shawn-knight.net for providing the photo that I have used in my new header image. I was tired of the same old blue image and I believe this new fiery picture fits well with the theme of “DVD burning” and optical storage.

A few people have asked me why I am not updating the website daily any more. This is due to a few reasons. 1) It is very time consuming to write an article every day 2) I felt that the quality of the daily articles was not as good as they could be and 3) I am also working on other projects such as http://DVDRentalForums.com. Due to these reasons as well as some others, I will not be updating WesleyTech.com daily any more. HOWEVER, I will be trying to focus on posting articles that are very interesting and of higher quality content, so please continue to visit the site on a regular basis.

As always, thanks for reading and if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please let me know!

DVD Rental Forum community
Hello everyone, I’ve been pretty busy the last week over at http://DVDRentalForums.com, my new forums dedicated to DVD Rental service discussions. Due to this, there have not been many updates over here at WesleyTech. I hope to start posting more again here at WesleyTech starting tomorrow and I’ve got some really good articles in the works.

If you have any suggestions for future articles or any questions that might spur a tutorial or a guide I would love to hear them! Otherwise, stay tuned for some good stuff coming up soon and thank you for reading!

Hello everyone, I was struck with a very bad illness on Sunday, which is why the site has not been updated the past couple of days. I hope to resume posting new articles in the near future. I am still resting and trying to get better, so until then you might want to check out the following optical storage websites.

http://CDRLabs.com
http://CDFreaks.com

Today I added a WesleyTech favicon , an integrated Google search function and started to tune up the categories. The previous search function (integrated WordPress search) just did not provide the right formatting or results needed to efficiently search on the site, so I hope the new Google search helps everyone search around with greater ease. If you have previously bookmarked or added my site to your favorites, you might want to delete and readd so that the favicon is saved with your entry. I hope to continue improving the site soon by adding article tags, updating the header background image and a few more surprise features. If there’s a specific feature that you want to see on WesleyTech, please let me know.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to my site using RSS, now is a great time to do it!

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