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K-Mart chooses HD DVD

The retailers are entering the format war now. A few months back Target announced Blu-ray players would be exclusively sold in their stores this holiday season and today Home Media Magazine is reporting that K-Mart is siding with HD DVD.

K-Mart is owned by Sears, who is publishing a “Black Friday” ad showing a Toshiba HD-A3 at $169. This may indict Toshiba in an effort to court Sears as a whole.

Jody Sally, spokesperson for Toshiba, said it was the lower price point that gave K-Mart the incentive to carry the format exclusively. However, the Sony Playstation 3 is also sold at K-Mart and supports Blu-ray.

I know it’s difficult for retailers to sell either format because they have to educate their salespeople on both formats. You can’t up-sell a customer to a choice between two ambiguously different formats. You confuse the customer. I’m anticipating other retailers to side one way or the other in the coming months.

It was Blockbuster that first announced they would support Blu-ray Disc exclusively in their stores. Then Target announced Blu-ray players only in their stores. Hastings later announced they would expand Blu-ray in their rentals both in store and on-line. The HTSA buying group consisting of over 60 retailers also announced exclusive support for Blu-ray. Now that K-Mart is in the ring things should get interesting.

Warner re-evaluating dual-format support

The interwebs are all abuzz today over anticipation of what could be the end of the format war as we know it - Home Media Magazine reports that Warner Bros. VP Dan Silverberg has said change may be in the works.

“One thing that may be changing is our strategy,” he said. “When both formats launched and hardware prices were high, we made a decision to support both formats and let the consumer decide. But now that hardware pricing is affordable for both Blu-ray and HD DVD, it appears consumers no longer want to decide — so the notion of staying in two formats for the duration is something we are re-evaluating now that we are in the fourth quarter.”

The HD DVD supporters are claiming his statement about affordable hardware leans WB to the red camp. However he mentions both formats are affordable now. Another rumor spreading around in favor of HD DVD is that Warner didn’t renew their membership in the Blu-ray Disc Alliance. There is nothing but message board chatter about that so it’s highly-suspect in the face of Warner being a patent holder on BD technology.

On the other side of the trenches, the Blu-ray guys are pointing to another quote from the same Home Media article where Silverberg says, “We can definitely talk Blu-ray - we are committed to the format” while talking about how well the BD version of 300 has been selling. However, considering he was at a Blu-ray event he’s bound to say that. Even Paramount was talking about the advanced features of Blu-ray the week before they dropped BD support. Paramount even replicated Blades of Glory for Blu-ray due released that week and sent them to reviewers before pulling that back and only releasing HD DVD to retailers.

If anything is certain it is the immaturity and loyalty exhibited by the supports of both sides and the futile peacemaking efforts of the “purples” (as dual-format supporters are known). This retarded “war” is all a farce which should have been avoided in 2005 when both sides walked away from the bargaining table leaving this mind-numbing business to people like me.

New Blu-ray training website for retailers

It seems like every day there is a new Blu-ray website. The official Blu-ray Disc website was recently redesigned and today I’ve discovered
www.bluraytraining.com.

This website is aimed at sales associates to educate them on the facts of Blu-ray Disc and what is required for good, better, best scenarios for high-def setups. The videos have a lot of good information in them for more than just Blu-ray though, so it’s a good tool for anyone. Some topics are the difference between standard-def and high-def as well as the FCC digital change-over.

So while you’re at work, instead of checking up on your fantasy football team you can learn a little more about the next-gen technologies.

Toshiba HD-A2 blow-out at Wal-Mart for $198

At least one Wal-Mart has been found to have an end-cap full of the discontinued Toshiba HD-A2 on sale for $198. If a Wal-Mart near you has the same, let me know because so far I’ve had nobody give me a confirmation of this anywhere except for this one location.

There is a picture that confirms they exist, and you can see that right here:



There are several rumors about this. One is that every Wal-Mart will receive 18 units at this price. This means around 54,000 of these players sold through Wal-Mart. Another is that this is Wal-Mart fulfilling a commitment to Toshiba made earlier this year but they’re switching to Blu-ray next month. This came from someone claiming to be a Wal-Mart employee. Another is that Wal-Mart bought up the remaining stock to blow these out as large retailers sometimes do. The HD-A2 is discontinued so this one is probable. And there is the claims of “photochop.” This is always the case.

Anyway, this might be significant for HD DVD but I also heard Wal-Mart is working closely with Sony to push the 40GB PS3 this holiday season, so if anything we know the next three months will see the most heated battles in this so-called “war.”

Update: There have been several pictures taken at various Wal-Marts and a representative of Wal-Mart has confirmed it as well. As it turns out, Circuit City beats Wal-Mart’s price by $0.01.

Blu-ray wins first three quarters, fourth to be close

As the third quarter numbers have finally been tallied, Home Media Research has published the sales of both competing high-definition formats and the results are not surprising. Blu-ray Disc has come out on top with close to twice the sales of software as HD DVD. This is right there with the weekly published numbers, however this does give us a look at solid sales figures.

From the period between 1 January and 30 September, Blu-ray has sold 2.6 million units while the HD DVD team rakes in 1.4 million in the same period. Since inception for both formats, 3.01 million have sold to Blu-ray and 1.97 million to HD DVD. This means the 2006 year ended with 410,000 and 570,000 for Blu-ray and HD DVD respectively. The growth for both formats is 634% for Blu-ray and 246% for HD DVD.

Industry analysts are expecting the fourth quarter to be a lot closer with the exclusive release of Paramount/Dreamworks picture’s Transformers and Shrek the Third. Tom Adams of Adams Media Research expects these titles will help boost HD DVD numbers as the year closes but gives Blu-ray the overall advantage. In-Stat analyst Gerry Kaufhold believes the next-gen interactive features on Transformers and other titles will also give HD DVD some help and expects dual-format players to gain popularity next year.

In revenue, Adams is projecting $186 million for Blu-ray and $91 million for HD DVD by the year’s end.

Netflix posts 3Q profit

After half a year of lower than expected revenue reports, Netflix announced today a 23 percent increase in profits over last year. Beating analyst expectations by about $8 million, this news boost Netflix stock by 13% in after-hours trading.



Blockbuster Online has been very successful this year and it has been cutting into Netflix’s expected growth. Netflix struck back by lowering prices and engaging in more aggressive advertising and is very optimistic for the fourth quarter.

With this news, Netflix has increased expectations. I just hope they can manage another price break soon.

1080p/24p explained

Lately you have probably been hearing about what’s called 1080p/24 - a new feature that has just become available with the introduction of Blu-ray and HD DVD. I will try to explain this nomenclature in an easy to understand way.

To start with, I have previously written about what 1080p is, and I would advise you start there. A quick overview: 1080 is the number of vertical lines of resolution, and “p” stands for “progressive.” This means 1,080 lines are displayed constantly.

24p is what we will focus on in this article. This is a bit more involved, so I will have to go back in time, so please indulge me.

The history of frame rates

Back in the early days of Hollywood film making a lot of standards were developed that we still use today. Among these standards are the Academy film ratio (1.85:1), Cinescope (2.35:1) and 24 frame per second cameras. This frame rate was selected as a balance between natural looking human expression and cost. When making a movie, film stock gets expensive and when you film at 24 frames per second it uses less film than 50 frames per second, less than half the cost actually.

Television vs Film

With the advent of television new standards were created. Although they used the aspect ratio of film (1.33:1), they chose 60Hz to broadcast television programs (later, in PAL regions they chose 50Hz). Hertz (Hz) is cycles-per-second, so 60Hz is 60 frames per second.

Here is where the problem begins. When reproducing a 24fps at 60Hz everything would be sped up and it would look like you were watching the film in fast-forward. To solve this problem, Faroudja created a technique called Telecine. This is often called “3:2 pulldown.” This process creates four film frames for every five video frames and then plays alternating frames three times each and two times each and alternates every four frames. This means four film frames play in the time it normally takes to to play five video frames. However, this process has changed over time. Progressive-scan video and high-definition video has made it so one frame is added to every four (playing one frame three times and the next twice) to make it easier to upconvert and to compress. Both processes cause “judder” but the second causes a bit more.

Judder causes the image to jerk a bit. Usually this isn’t much of a problem, but in scenes that pan this judder can be seen and is often distracting.

Bringing 24p home

Pioneer was ahead of everyone for years making their plasma televisions operate at both 60Hz and 72Hz. Why does this matter? Let’s do some math. 60 divided by 24 = 2.5 and there is no such thing as half a frame, which is why it is necessary to add an extra frame. 72 divided by 24 = 3 so each frame only needs to be played three times, eliminating the need for the telecine process.

Blu-ray Disc is encoded at 1080p/24p right on the disc. HD DVD is encoded at 1080p/30p with a layer of metadata that flags the duplicate frames so if it is output at 24p it will drop all the flagged frames for a 1080p/24p output.

Starting this year, several companies have started manufacturing LCD panels with 120Hz refresh rates. 120 can be divided by both 24 and 30 with an even number of frames. Most 1080p front-projectors can natively display 24fps. Pioneer still has the 72Hz plasma panel.

Since there are already dozens of Blu-ray and HD DVD players out right now I’m not going to list all the capable players, but this is a spec that is listed, not one of those hidden specs like what version HDMI it has. But what is important is that both the player and television must support 24p for you to get this feature.

So is it worth it? 24p has a natural film quality to it that you don’t get from any other digital source. Of course when you are engrossed in a film, the judder usually doesn’t distract from the story on the screen, and that’s what is important. Don’t go out of your way to get 24p unless you’re quite serious on getting the best video possible. I’m convinced that you will enjoy Blu-ray and/or HD DVD enough without having to worry about technicalities of a frame rate.