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How to sell high-def

Even with fanboys, who buy every movie they can simply to support their format of choice, several high-profile library releases have barely made a dent in high-def sales. I believe this comes from the fact that most consumers don’t want to repurchase movies they already own on DVD.

This week I got my hands on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Blu-ray Disc) and Blade Runner (HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc). They were both so impressive. I was saying to myself, “This is how to double-dip.” Not to say these recent versions sold gangbusters, but they certainly give us an idea of what a next-generation release should look like.

I was very disappointed with Goodfellas, a Scorcese staple and a defining gangster film. It got a sub-par transfer and practically nothing in the way of features, and especially nothing new. These other films got great packaging, piles of extras and several versions of the film along with top-notch transfers. This is certainly the way to represent an older film.

I should add the Star Trek: Season 1 (HD DVD) box set. Although it was priced out of the atmosphere, the treatment it received earned the price of admission. Completely remastered with new special effects and loads of features, even coming with a phaser gun, it is the standard for a box-set.

However, nothing beats the deal that Warner achieved with Blade Runner coming in at $27.95 on Amazon with five versions of the film, two documentaries and dozens of other special features. It’s the same price as single disc movies and comes with five! This Ridley Scott classic is surely the deal of the decade.

If as much care was placed into every library title, I believe more people would clearly see the benefits of high-def movies. It is the best version of your favorite film ever. Best picture, best audio, best features, best packaging. You can’t go wrong with that. Kudos to the studios that truly care!

Warner Bros. screwing everything up

I’m not going to comment on the rumors of Warner’s future exclusivity plans, I’ll leave that up to the fanboys. What I do want to comment on is the recent screw ups Warner has been doing.

It started with the release of Harry Potter gift set on Blu-ray which included one HD DVD in place of the Blu-ray version. What an awkward mistake that was. The disc was even labeled as HD DVD. This was followed with the Blade Runner 5-disc set shipping with two duplicate discs labeled differently. And finally (for now), Terminator 3 is found to have an encoding error on the disc. There are two copies of the movie, one is a PiP version, and the movie is in 1080i and the PiP is in 1080p.

Oops. This is a big problem to have on such high-profile releases in the course of one month’s time. At least two of the errors can possibly be attributed to the replication centers (but who runs HD DVD and Blu-ray in the same facility?), but the Terminator 3 issue is certainly a mastering err.

I’ve seen several people say things like, “It would be better for Warner to drop Blu-ray than to piss off more customers,” but these are HD DVD fanboys pretending to be pissed off. It’s an interesting phenomenon we find with fanboys, they hate their competitor but are entirely offended when their competitor makes mistakes like it affected them personally.

But there is only a level of patience some consumers have, so Warner really needs to get their act together. You can’t have a problem like this every week and think nothing ill will manifest. At the least, people will hold off buying a title until they hear it’s all right.

Twas the week before Xmas

One week until Christmas, so what’s going on in the World of Format War?

Best Buy is currently running a BOGO that includes the HD DVD version of Bourne Ultimatum and Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix. This is the first time new release titles have made it into one of these sales.

The Playstation 3 receives firmware update 2.10 adding Blu-ray 1.1 compatibility. This adds PiP functionality which is being brought out in upcoming releases from Lions Gate, Sony and Fox.

Fanboys are being fanboys.

Samsung to release Blu-ray HTIB

Usually news like this waits until the beginning of the new year at CES, but Sigma Designs has just announced their system-on-a-chip is going to power Samsung’s new home-theater-in-a-box (HTIB) with Blu-ray Disc. The HT-BD2 system will be feature-packed with 1080p/24, and 1100W 7.1 audio support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS:HD Master Audio.



There was no announced retail date and no pricing offered, but it has previously been said to be at $1,499. I expect we’ll get the full detail at CES in January.

I’m not a fan of HTIB, but they are widely popular in the consumer market. The specs make it an easy way to get the latest technologies in home theater.

VUDU adds TV programming

If you haven’t heard of VUDU yet, it’s about time you did. It’s basically a small box not much larger than an AppleTV which streams over 2,000 (currently) movies over a broadband connection to your TV. Recently they’ve worked a deal to provide digital copies of Universal Studio’s Bourne Identity pre-loaded on the box in high-def.

Today they have added TV content which you can watch at $1.99. Shows include, 24, Arrested Development, Family Guy, Firefly, NYPD Blue, Prison Break and Shark, amongst others. This is pretty cool.



Movie rentals through VUDU range from $0.99 to $3.99 depending on title. You can also purchase a movie which downloads to the unit from $4.99 too $19.99. The box sells for $399 with no subscription fee.

This box comes with a unique remote control, but you can also control it via PC or touchpanel. Currently they don’t have a program you can install but they provide documentation and codes for integration.

Rob Enderle is a liar

I’m sorry, I usually stay out of format war politics but this has to be said: Rob Enderle is a liar.

As you may know if you’ve been reading my articles, I’ve pretty jaded on the whole “format war” and think it’s all a joke. I previously wrote one blog comparing two of the most polarizing people involved in the war: Bill Hunt and Rob Enderle. But now it just plain needs to be said in no uncertain terms. The lies spread in the columns of Rob Enderle are malicious.

Could it have something to do with the fact that Mr. Enderle is on the payroll of Toshiba, the main backer of HD DVD, or is it just a mental deficiency the tech world has been writing about since 1994?

I want to point directly to his latest article and point out exactly where he’s lying. Yesterday he published an article on Digital Trends called, “Will Time Warner’s Move to Blu-Ray End HD War?” This headline makes it sound as if Warner had already selected Blu-ray, which they haven’t, but within the article he is his usual self. Here are a few selections where he flat out lies:

[Player] sales on the HD DVD side also went vertical on the opening days of the Christmas buying season, and this, coupled with the defection of several studios to the HD DVD camp, put the momentum back in that direction

Notice the bold part, I have highlighted it to point out his first lie. “Several” studios have not defected from Blu-ray. Viacom’s Paramount dropped support for Blu-ray bringing Dreamworks and Dreamworks Animation along with them because Paramount is the parent company of Dreamworks. It has been widely reported that this was the result of a $150-million buy-off from the HD DVD group. If all three studios were independent of one another it would hardly make for “several” regardless of the fact that Paramount controls the distribution of both Dreamworks studios. Let’s continue.

Dual-mode players remain too expensive, and recent changes to the security scheme on the Blu-Ray [sic] side broke most of them

He’s referring here to the recent Fox titles released with the BD+ security scheme. The second-generation Samsung Blu-ray Disc player and the first generation LG dual-format player would not play the titles. The players weren’t broken, mind you, they would still play every other title barring the few new Fox titles. Both players received firmware updates in mid-November repairing the problem. To report that the players were “broken” is disingenuous and compounding it with the fact that the problem was solved nearly a month ago is double malicious.

The place I do agree with him is that digital download is the future. It most certainly is true of music now. However, this isn’t South Korea where every home has broadband, and the broadband we do have isn’t fast enough to handle multiple streams of high-def content. Music works because it was relatively fast to download an MP3 even on a 56k modem (hell, I was doing it on 28.8k back in the day and it only took a few minutes). Blu-ray movies exceed 40GB in size, and HD DVD movies are around 26GB - that’s a lot of data. Until the infrastructure is in place to handle high-def downloads in minutes instead of days, high-def optical media will have its niche.

Because I hate this so-called “format war,” these lies being spread by “analysts” only serve to confuse the consumer and prolongs the war. If he’s not maliciously lying about these facts, he’s obviously not well-informed enough to make predictions regarding the formats. If he’s getting paid to give a third-party perspective of the war, he’s doing a terrible job of learning the relevant facts - which leads to the assumption that perhaps he’s just paid by Toshiba to spread FUD under the guise of a third-party analyst.

Online movie rental during the holidays sucks

It’s that time of year again, time to wait endlessly for your next movie to arrive in the mail. Normally it takes one day for Netflix to receive a disc and one more day for me to get the next one, but half-way through December it’s been two days so far and Netflix hasn’t got my last movies, and I expect I won’t get the new ones until the weekend. It happens this way every year about this time. Every industry realizes this is the slowest time of the year so they make preparations, but apparently the online movie rentals either can’t figure it out or simply can’t do anything about it.

So what do you do? Add a disc to your account for a month to compensate? Make sure you get the movies in the mail before the day’s shipments go out? If you have any ideas to get my next films here earlier, I’m all ears.