Design Stuff

For Blu-ray, the format war has turned into one of those epic quests you see in badly dubbed martial arts movies.

Sure, its kung fu was too good for rival HD DVD to overcome. But hold on to those nunchaku — Blu-ray still has to overcome an army’s worth of fierce competition before it can officially crown itself the master of the global homevid village.

And that next battle starts with the entrenched format Blu-ray is trying to usurp, good-old 480p-resolution DVD, which may not be the "it" product it was back in the early days of the Bush administration, but overwhelmingly remains the go-to platform for delivering recorded movies and TV shows into the home.

"You will now see more of a comparison towards standard DVDs and less about the difference between Blu-ray and HD DVD," says Sony Pictures Home Entertainment topper David Bishop, summing up Blu-ray’s next major marketing push.

Buoyed by obvious advantages, including a better, nondegradable picture, menu-driven nonlinear playback, not to mention sheer product-design elegance — and, best of all, unanimous studio adoption from the very start — DVD quickly caught big-box-store fire and was able to usurp the once-very-established VHS format and make gobs of money for almost everyone involved with it.

Now that HD DVD is going away and the DVD biz is undeniably in recession — despite a boffo summer theatrical season, North American homevid sales declined 3.1% in 2007, according to Variety sister publicationVideo Business — the studios would love it if Blu-ray became even half as trendy as DVD was just a few years ago.

And there is at least some wind at their backs on this. For one, the federal government is mandating that all over-the-air TV broadcasts go digital next February. In the practical sense, this won’t actually affect that many people, since so many Americans get their TV through a cable or satellite box that will automatically convert digital TV signals for their old analog cathode ray tube-based sets.

But emotionally, having a stodgy government body like the FCC think they’re technologically uncool might be enough to convince many of the 50 million or so American households without high-definition sets that it’s time to take the bewildering plunge into the digital world this coming fourth quarter.

For Blu-ray, that amounts to go time.

In explaining the rationale behind the decision that ultimately doomed HD DVD — that is, homevid market share leader Warner Bros.’ choice in early January to forge exclusive ties with Blu-ray — Warner officials agreed that the long-awaited mass adoption of a high-definition TV was nearly at hand, and that now would be a good time for the industry to cut out this confusing dual-format stuff.

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Read More : Variety.com