High-Def DVD Panelists: No Truce, Attrition or Dual-Format

Imagine a world where there is no chocolate milk, and then two farms emerge to breed chocolate-milk-producing cows. The kicker is that consumers need a special kind of glass to drink the milk. "They might like chocolate milk but they don't know what glass to buy."

That is how Chris Crotty of research firm iSuppli characterizes the Blu-ray/HD DVD battle. Consumers are stymied because, although they may want high-definition DVDs, they don't know which player to buy.

Crotty joined representatives of the Blu-ray and HD DVD camps, along with video processor manufacturer nVidia on a panel discussion at October's CEA Industry Forum in San Francisco addressing next-generation DVD formats.

'Pointless War'

Crotty applauded Blu-ray and HD DVD purveyors for bringing new technologies to market, but added, "This has got to be the most pointless war ever."

Lest the crowd of CE professionals who attended the session to watch Blu-ray and HD DVD proponents shake hands and declare a truce, there was none of that.

"I'm not trying to defend the fact that there's two formats," said Andy Parsons, senior vice president of product development for Pioneer and spokesperson for the Blu-ray Disc Association.

"Everyone's mad at us because we 'allowed' it to happen. What should we have done instead? We're going to give up 10 GB per layer? Should we just throw that away? We all work for companies that are for-profit enterprises."

The two groups could not come to terms, he said, because the two high-definition DVD formats are "fundamentally so different."

So different, that neither is apt to disappear anytime soon, according to Mark Knox, advisor to Toshiba's HD DVD promotion division.

"There's a perception that this battle is just like Godzilla vs. Mothra -- that one of us is just going to disappear," he said during the panel. "But that's not the way things are going to happen."

And don't expect dual-format players to solve the problem anytime soon. "It would be one pretty expensive machine," Knox said.

LG has formally scrapped its plans for a dual-format player, and while NEC is working on a dual-format chipset, who knows if Ricoh, Pioneer or Samsung will ever deliver on rumored and promised products?

Crotty was a little more cynical, asking the panelists about rumors that their respective licensing agreements prohibit the production of dual-format players. Both Parsons and Knox assured us that no such prohibitions exist.

Downloads to Prevail?

Who cares anyway? While the two camps quibble, the online content providers will scoop in and make the disc obsolete in, say, three years, right?

No way, Parsons asserted. "There's a very big reason that's not going to happen in three years. Right now, you're lucky if you can get 3 Mbps [bandwidth]. It's going to take you eight to nine hours to download."

To that, Crotty asked, "What's your computer doing at night?"

Parsons insisted that physical discs aren't going away.

"You've had electronic download for quite some time in the form of VOD [video on demand], but you still find people buying DVDs," he said. "It [download services] can exist as an additional model but I do not see it as a replacement because people have shown they like the physical disc."

When the moderator left the decision to the room, half of the audience raised their hands to indicate they believed downloading services would not displace DVDs in the next three years.
The other half believed online services would seriously threaten DVDs within three years.