If I were a consumer who’d invested in the HD DVD format, I’d be fighting, suing mad right now. If I were a studio head who’d placed my company’s future in HD DVD, I’d be panicking right now. And if I were a shareholder in a motion picture company that “chose” the HD DVD format, I’d be starting a management ouster.
As announced on Friday (word spread through the motion picture industry — or at least my little part of it — much faster than the rain we were told was coming), Warner Brothers has decided to go all Blu-Ray all the time. Since only two majors — NBC Universal and Paramount (plus Dreamworks Animation) — remain in the HD DVD camp, industry wisdom has declared that format dead.
[By the way, those of you who truly want to understand why the newspaper industry is dying? When I searched for “dvd format war” on the latimes.com site, the number of search results returned? Zero. The headline of the article is “DVD format war appears to be over”. Luckily, Google came through.]
That consumers have been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for resolution to the self-created “format war“, has been a not-very-well-kept secret in the industry. Unlike the major corporations who invested blood, sweat, and tears into manufacturing a battle that didn’t need to happen — not at this time in our changing media world — consumers knew that major investment in new technology was not the best idea.
More problematic for the hawks: consumers didn’t need the technology. Bonus features and layered content were cool concepts, sure, but worthy of the investment? Repurchasing favorite movies for possibly the third time with little increase in perceived value? Consumers shrugged.
Of course, all industry eyes are on the Internet. Physical media is so twentieth century. Downloads are the future. Blah, blah, blah. Oh, and, no. Until high-speed Internet can deliver feature-length films in a rapid, error-free manner, the DVD format will continue to find shelf space in households around the world. Internet access is part of the mix, not the whole story.
I, for one, am glad the issue of DVD technology has been laid to rest. The so-called war was the clearest sign possible that Hollywood wasn’t ready for the future. It was also the clearest sign ever that Hollywood is out of touch with consumers. We are not puppets.
But Hollywood has a long, hard slog ahead of it. DVD formats, competing download services, it’s all the same thing. Hollywood wants to own the message. Consumers want something entirely different. Can Hollywood really give the people what they want?
High-speed Internet can deliver feature-length films rapidly and with good quality. Just not from any legal source! Just like with the music industry, those who pirate movies can generally expect a better experience than those who go through legitimate channels.
Aside from a few freely-available codecs, there’s no special software to install and no vendor lock-in or restrictions on movement. Excellent quality 720p movies are around 8 GB each – that’s about a 3-hour download for me, so not quite real-time yet, but if I’m in a hurry I can get an SD version in under 20 minutes.
I’d happily shell out $2-$3 for a legal download of the same content from a site with a good catalog and no-hassle download system.
I think I may be something of an anomaly in that when I get a movie, it’s because I want to watch it once, and maybe come back to it again in a year or two if I liked it enough the first time. Since there seem to be a lot of people out there willing to shell out $20-$30 for a DVD, I suppose that’s a market the studios aren’t willing to lose. It’s just too bad that they penalize us one-time viewers with overly restrictive DRM schemes to try to enforce that behavior.