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Weekly News Roundup (9 November 2008)

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

CNN's fake holograms were pointless

Obamania is sweeping the world. I watched the election coverage because I love elections, or anything where you get to find out a result at a set date (sports, exams …). I think I can be considered quite knowledgeable on the US election, at least this one, so once I saw PA go blue, it was pretty much all over for McCain. Ohio, Virginia, Florida all going Obama’s way just meant that, as I had predicted, the election will be called for Obama once the polls close in the west. I’m sure the networks would have preferred it to have lasted a bit longer, but there’s only so much one can take in regards to fake holograms. The most disappointing thing for me was that I had put some money on Obama winning between 311 and 338 Electoral Votes, but he got (it looks like right now) 365 EVs – it’s all Indiana and North Carolina’s fault (plus Nebraska’s single split EV). I did put money on Obama getting more than 338 to hedge my bets, so I didn’t lose any money, but I didn’t win any either which was a shame.

Better news is that it seems my third replacement PS3 (fourth overall) is problem free at last. Fingers crossed. I did go computer shopping, but I ended up buying a system that’s totally different than the one that I thought I would buy last week. That’s just so typical, isn’t it. And despite all the distractions, there happened to be quite a bit of news this week, so let’s get on with it.

Starting with copyright news. Following up on last week’s news about MPAA winning against the Chinese DVD manufacturer GoWell. Apparently what happened was that GoWell made a DVD player that played back copied CSS protected discs – not ripped discs, just discs that you copy with Windows Explorer or something which is still encrypted. Normal DVD players won’t play these files, but GoWell made one that did, which is why it got into trouble with the MPAA. GoNotSoWell, it seems.

Real Networks want the public's help in their fight against the MPAA

In the other MPAA case, Real Networks is appealing to the public for support. They are promising free licenses to RealDVD for all trial subscribers once they win the case. If a free license isn’t important for you, then making a stand against the MPAA is. They may have had a case against GoWell, but CSS in itself is a ridiculously crap encryption that can be broken just by sneezing on it, and to see so much money being wasted on licensing and defending just seems like such a waste. Also a waste is all the money the MPAA spends on lobbying politicians, and no sooner had Obama accepted McCain’s concession, the MPAA issued a statement to clarify their intent to work with the new administration on matters of copyright. The kind of people who voted for Obama, especially the younger generation, won’t stand for yet another administration that’s far too friendly and accepting of the MPAA’s position, and I hope President-Elect Obama stands firm on the principle of fair use.

BD+ broken?

Copy protection schemes, like Blu-ray’s BD+, are only effective when people aren’t actively trying to find ways to circumvent it. But people are, and they have, which brings the dream of Blu-ray playback on Linux systems one step closer. Remember that CSS was broken as a way to get DVD video working on Linux, so you would think that the BDA had learnt that lesson and officially licensed a Linux based decryption software to prevent people hackers from doing it the hard way.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to fighting piracy. Stick or carrot. The stick approach, like what EA has been doing lately and getting into trouble with, doesn’t seem to work too well. EA has had to back down time after time, but stories of more snafus won’t help. This time, EA forgot to print one character from the CD key for the game Red Alert 3 and their solution is for customers to guess it by entering all 36 possible options (or send in a picture of their improperly printed CD key for verification). If there was one company that could do without one more DRM related scandal, it was EA. The other approach, carrot, is to not try and prevent people pirating stuff, but work with it for everyone’s benefit. A new technique for online video sharing sites allows ads to be inserted into videos whenever copyrighted work is detected. Not the most ideal solution, but it’s better than having the video removed. One can also fight piracy on the pricing front, and that’s what Warner is doing in China with low-cost online rentals. Why can’t they do low-cost online rentals here? And even the lack of copy protection can be seen as a promotional tool, with DRM-free MP3s now getting a new “MP3 100% Compatible” logo to promote the fact. The anti-DRM movement has helped to fight piracy more effectively than DRMs, it seems.

High Definition Let’s move onto Blu-ray. Sony/Universal are coming out with a vending machines that sells Blu-ray movies and PS3 games. It’s funny that Universal is helping Sony out, because if you look at the companies that have contributed most to Blu-ray, it’s Paramount (Iron Man, Transformers), Warner (I Am Legend, The Dark Knight) and now Universal. All three were HD DVD studios, two of them exclusive until the very end. Interesting.

The Dark Knight on Blu-ray is set to break all Blu-ray sales records

The other HD DVD exclusive party was Wal-Mart, and now they’re bigging up Blu-ray too by devoting more shelve space to Blu-ray for the holiday shopping season. The low cost players that have started to arrive will suit Wal-Mart’s pricing strategy, something that wasn’t possible last year this time which forced them to go HD DVD exclusive for standalone HD players. The lower hardware prices, movie sales and in-store promotions are all part of the big holiday promotional push for Blu-ray, which is set to cost up to $25 million dollars. Money well spent, or waste of it during harsh economic times? Regardless, analysts all predict Blu-ray player prices will nosedive in the next month and a bit. HD DVD’s price crash was seen by probably the very same analysts as a sign that it was doomed, but this time without any real competitors around, the outlooks if fairly different. The Dark Knight on Blu-ray, which is predicted to sell by the truck load, and coupled with cheap Blu-ray players, should see uptake increase. If it works, this could be the most significant holiday season for Blu-ray – the one that decides whether it can replace DVDs, or merely supplement it as a niche format.

And as I normally like to do at the end of the HD section, there’s a bit of news about H.264. DivX 7 is nearly ready for release, with the first beta player being released with H.264 support.

And in gaming, PS3 sales bottomed out last week, but bounced back during the week thanks to GTA IV I think. Just goes to prove that games sell consoles, more than the other way around. Unfortunately for the PS3, it has the lowest attach rate (the average number of games people buy for the console) out of the big 3, with the Xbox 360 way in front followed by the Wii. The Xbox 360 being released earlier helps it, plus the lower prices of the console. The Wii and it’s fun (and hype) factor is helping it too. The PS3’s excellent Blu-ray and media hub functions, is making things worse when it comes to games attach rates. Console manufacturers make money off games more than consoles (that’s if they’re not losing huge amounts of it by selling them below cost, like Sony does with the PS3), so attach rate is everything (especially if your consoles has sold in greater numbers, like the Xbox 360).

In other PS3 news, firmware 2.52 has been released to fix problems with 2.51 which was released to fix problems with 2.50 (which was released to fix problems with …). Sony really need to do better release testing when it comes to their firmware, and there are more reports that 2.52 is borking PS3s by making the not reading disc problem appear after updates. It’s only a matter of time before someone launches a lawsuit, if Sony’s not careful. Sony is also patenting a Wiimote like controller for the PS3.

Will we ever see a slim, sexier Xbox 360?

The NPD October figures should be released next week, and it is widely expected that the Xbox 360 will do extremely well thanks to recent price cuts. But Microsoft is hinting that the last round of cuts will be the last round, period. It was always a matter of time before price cuts are so large that they no longer make any financial sense. The next logical step, at least in my mind, would be for them to make a more reliable and “sexier” version of the 360 – doing that, even for higher prices, will drive sales.

One company not looking to drive up more sales is Nintendo, who thinks they will have enough Wii stock for this holiday season, but you never know. If you want one for Christmas, for yourself or as a gift, please take my advice and buy one today, just to be safe.

And that’s all the news we have for this relatively busy week. Obamania will subside I think, as reality of the current situation sink in (two wars, global economic crisis, terrorism, disease, environmental disasters, and of course the big one, movie piracy). Those of us that have wasted countless hours following the election will now have to find something better to do, so the question is then can we fill our empty lives with something else to worry about? Yes We Can!

Update: The real picture of the Xbox 360 Slim, now that it's available

Update: Seems a lot of people are finding this page on Google or somewhere when searching for pics of the Xbox 360 Slim, so instead of providing just the pic for the prototype one, here’s the real one to the right.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (9 November 2008)

Blu-ray: The State of Play – October 2008

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

There has been a lot of stories recently about how well/badly Blu-ray is doing, and I thought a post on it to clarify a few things.

There seems to be a lot of negativity surrounding Blu-ray at the moment, which is strange because Blu-ray has just had it’s best ever week in terms of sales, thanks largely to the release of Iron Man. Before we get to the negativity, let’s have a look at the Blu-ray sale stats from Nielsen VideoScan for the “Iron Man Week”:

Period: Week ending 5th October
Top 20 Sales (by disc volume): 13% of market (87% for DVDs)
All sales (by dollar volume): 15.68% of market (84.32% for DVDs)
Total Sales: $26.84 million

The above figures are impressive because if you’ve been keeping track of the Blu-ray sales stats as I’ve posted them in the forum, then the top 20 sales (by disc volume) averages around 8%, and the all sales (by dollar volume) is around 7%. That’s almost double of what normally happens, and it’s all due to one title (the second most popular title on Blu-ray for that week sold 7 times less than Iron Man). With 13 to 15% of the market, either by disc or dollar volume, that’s pretty impressive for a format that’s really only started to compete about 6 months ago (when Toshiba called it a day on their HD DVD format).

Steve Jobs: No to Blu-ray ... for now

So why the negativity? Well, this last week or two, two pieces of news stories did dampen the enthusiasm a bit for Blu-ray. One was Microsoft saying once again they have no plans to add Blu-ray support. This isn’t a big deal really, because the PS3 is the best console/player for Blu-ray, and the Xbox 360 with add-on drive won’t be able to compete on quality or even price. The second piece of bad news, and this is a big one, is Apple’s Steve Jobs calling Blu-ray a “Bag of Hurt” and wanting nothing to do with it until “things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives”. The high licensing cost of Blu-ray has always been a weakness of the format, but to hear it from someone like Steve Jobs is something else.

So how is Blu-ray doing actually? If I had to give Blu-ray a report card score, then I think at the moment, it gets a solid C, maybe a C+. Why the pessimism, you ask? Well let’s just go through them.

First of all, while the Nielsen VideoScan figures, for the Iron Man week at least, is looking great, those stats are a bit misleading (aren’t they all!). Note that the top 20 sales figures are denoted in disc volume. This favours Blu-ray slightly because Blu-ray sales fall off quite rapidly after the top 20 items, in fact, or sometimes as in the case of Iron Man week, fall off after the number 1 item (7-to-1 sales ratio between Iron Man and second place Forgetting Sarah Marshall). DVDs, on the other hand, is almost the opposite, with most sales coming from the bottom end of the sales charts due to discounting and the larger catalogue of movies.

And if you then look at the all sales by dollar volume figures, that’s misleading as well. Blu-ray movies are priced higher than DVDs, usually $2 to $3 higher than the premium DVD version (2 disc collection, for example), and up to $10 higher than the budget DVD version (single disc version). And so if you compare dollar volumes, then Blu-ray can sell less discs, but still have the same dollar volume as DVDs. And considering that many older DVD releases are on sale for under $10, and that Blu-ray has no titles in this price range, it further favours Blu-ray.

The best way would be to compare disc volumes only, because that’s the only way we can see if Blu-ray is successfully replacing DVD as the home video format. For whatever reason, these stats are not available, or not published, and so an educated guess (not including the Iron Man week stats, which might be a one-off) would be that if Blu-ray holds about 7% of the home video market by dollar volume, then it would translate to perhaps about 5% to 6% by disc volume. That’s not too bad, but for a format that has been the sole HD disc format for 6 months already, the gains, if any, are small to say the least.

DISH 1080p: competition to Blu-ray?

But while Blu-ray has no HD disc format competitors, it does have competition in general, and not just from DVDs. High definition downloads and subscription television are becoming more widely available. While normally A/V quality from these services cannot be compared to Blu-ray, a recent review of DISH’s 1080p service did say they the differences were small. And of course, downloads have the convenience of not having to have a physical disc collection, which while being attractive to many people (me included), does not have the convenience of a digital media collection (and full quality Blu-ray managed copy is nowhere in sight). A VOD type service would be allow for greater access to a larger collection for many people, and traditional non-interactive cable services with 1080p would be cheaper than building a large collection, especially if you only watch movies once.

Then we have DVD upscalers, which can already do a decent job of getting faux HD to your HD panel, and Toshiba’s innovative work on improving upscalers even more so with new techniques. In other words, competition is plenty and one gets the sense that Blu-ray doesn’t have a whole lot of time before it has to establish itself as *the* format for HD. Recent figures in Australia showed that only 17% of HDTV owners had Blu-ray players. The heavy reliance on the PS3 as a Blu-ray player is also shown in these figures, with only 7.5% of Blu-ray players being standalone types (the rest are all PS3s).

And the economic problems don’t help, of course.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The holiday shopping season is just around the corner, Blu-ray hardware prices are falling already in anticipation, hit titles such as The Dark Knight and WALL-E are coming soon as well, so Blu-ray might just have a holiday season to remember. The timing may not be great, but Blu-ray needs to do well in the next few months and if it can, then its future will be safe.

Posted in Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K) | 2 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (5 October 2008)

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

I started last week’s WNR with news that my PS3 was fixed. I think I may have spoken too soon, as I’m now having problems with the wireless controller/remote. So my PS3 may be broken again, I posted earlier this week, but I may have spoken too soon, as the same problem hasn’t reoccurred yet. A lot to cover this week, so I’ll have to put my PS3 problems off for another week, until I’ve managed to replicate the problem again.

Starting with copyright news, Wal-Mart is the latest to abandon DRM. Normally, that’s good news, but because DRM is the world’s stupidest invention, it has grave consequences for users who did not pirate music and were honorable enough to buy DRM’d music from Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart will shut down its DRM authentication servers, meaning that the DRM’d music files will no longer play. As if people needed more incentive to pirate music.

Apple FairPlay Sued by Norway

And to prove how stupid DRM is again, Apple has been sued by Norway over Apple’s FairPlay DRM. DRM not only makes genuine consumers mad, it also prevents interoperability and fair competition, which is why Norway is suing. I’ve always thought DRM was more about proprietary technology and licensing fees, as opposed to piracy and all that. Sony agrees with me apparently, when the President of Sony Pictures Television said that DRM is one of the the major causes of piracy, although he has no intention of dropping it.

So not only does DRM cause consumer frustration, is anti-competitive, causes piracy, but it may also be killing Blu-ray. Apparently the prohibitive cost of implementing AACS (mainly licensing fees) means that it’s hard for independent producers may have to look elsewhere. Nearly $5,000 may be required to just publish one title on Blu-ray, and that’s for AACS licensing only. HD DVD’s specs said that AACS was optional, but the BDA insists on all Blu-ray discs to carry it, even if the content owners don’t wish to have it (so you can’t really say it’s all about copyright protection). The BDA’s insistence to push DRM onto consumers and producers equally is why I wish HD DVD had won the day, and I’m sure independent producers wished for it too.

So is piracy really that big of a deal in the movie industry? Sony, the champion of DRM and copyright control, is asking ISPs to once more become copyright cops. And yes, this is the same interview in which the Sony Pictures Television President also said DRM is a major cause of piracy and that they love DRM – therefore, they must love piracy. You know who also loves piracy? The MPAA. Despite the deteriorating economic conditions, movie ticket sales are up. Piracy is also up. So therefore, piracy helps movie ticket sales. The MPAA must be very pleased.

And following on the Spore DRM uproar, more and more gaming execs are turning away from DRM. Spore was a hit title that was always going to sell well, DRM or not, but for any other title, bad publicity caused by DRM could really just kill the title.

RealDVD: Not so legal, says MPAA

And finally in copyright, the big news of the week. The MPAA and Real Networks are now locked in a legal battle over the legality of Real’s RealDVD software. As reported earlier in the WNR, RealDVD is Real Networks’ “legal” alternative to DVD rippers, because it keeps the CSS encryption intact on DVDs and then add their own layer of DRM to prevent sharing of the copied movie. Despite this, the MPAA is not happy and wants RealDVD to be scrapped, and is suing Real Networks for breaching CSS licensing (again, despite RealDVD not touching CSS at all). This one will be worth keeping an eye on, as the legal decision could go either way. The way the MPAA is acting could be considered anti-competitive, not allowing a particular use of a product just because they’re not making money from it (I don’t think the MPAA is against this sort of “managed copy”, as long as they’re the ones to profit from it I suppose). And Real could have the capital to fight this all the way too. The Electronic Frontiers Foundation, champions of user rights and fairness in copyright protection, states in this article why they think the MPAA should lose this case. I’m not a fan of Real’s products, but I support them on this one 100%.

High Definition Onto HD news now, next week will be when the Iron Man Blu-ray sales figures filter through the Nielsen VideoScan figures. Early indication suggests that Iron Man Blu-ray will be the best selling Blu-ray title of all time, but I suppose that’s not really saying much. This week’s figures include the release of The Godfather Trilogy on Blu-ray, and as expected, it gave Blu-ray sales a bump to become the second best week (I think) ever (the best week being the Transformers bump). Next week should see Blu-ray break all it’s own records, although whether it will set records in terms of sales ratio to DVDs depend on how well the DVD version sells. With DVD users like myself preferring to buy movies a few months after their initial release, and Blu-ray owners (and early adopters) generally preferring to buy all the latest releases as quickly as possible, the figures should favour Blu-ray, but we’ll have to wait and see.

HD DVD in zombified form still selling well

The weird story of the week though is about HD DVD. Yes, that old thing. Apparently, HD DVD sales are still going strong, mainly due to the rock bottom prices that movies and hardware are being sold at. If anything proves that cheap will always outsell better, this is it (better in this case means a format which has a future versus one which definitely doesn’t). DVD will always outsell Blu-ray if this principle holds true, and DVD will never become a obsolete format as long as Blu-ray is alive (thanks to Blu-ray being backwards compatible with DVD). Toshiba is still not supporting Blu-ray, but they are adding PS3 technology to their TVs. I think the more accurate statement should be the PS3 using Toshiba technology, as the Cell processor that Toshiba will use in their LCD line-up is now a Toshiba owned product.

And as predicted a few weeks ago, prices for Blu-ray hardware will drop for the important holiday season. More reason not to buy a Blu-ray player until later this month or in November, December, when the sales really start. I’ll post any good Blu-ray deals I find in the usual place.

Although I’m quiet optimistic that Blu-ray will do quite well during this holiday season, mainly thanks to the major releases of Iron Man and especially The Dark Knight, it could always use a boost. Apple has always been a Blu-ray supporter, sitting on the board of the BDA, but it is strange why they haven’t announced support for Blu-ray in their computers yet. The theory is that Apple have their own plans in relation to movie distribution, and Blu-ray is not part of it (or you might even say that Blu-ray is against their plans).

Another way to promote Blu-ray may be to include the SD DVD version of the movie in the same package, like HD DVD combos (but clumsier in that you need 2 discs, but better in that the discs can be used at the same time). Disney is doing just this with the Sleeping Beauty Blu-ray version. The way I see it, if Blu-ray is to fully replace DVDs, then it will need a combo format of its own. If Blu-ray is happy to be the more expensive alternative to DVD, to exist side by side with it, then the current marketing strategy is working fine.

And in gaming, Xbox 360’s with the Jasper update may (or may not be) appearing in stores already. Jasper reduces the size of the GPU to 65nm, which will help reduce heat production and improve stability.

Will we ever see a slim Xbox 360?

The rumours of a “slim” Xbox 360 just won’t go away though, and there is definitely a new iteration of the 360 coming possibly early next year.

And that’s all the news for this week. I’m going to have to keep a close eye on the MPAA vs Real Networks legal battle, as I think the verdict of this case could prove quite important. If the MPAA wins, then unless they themselves come up with their own managed copy solution (which Real could then sue them for not allowing themselves to do the same thing), then the idea of a disc-less home theatre is dead. If Real wins, then we could see more and more products “circumvent” CSS legally. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (5 October 2008)

Weekly News Roundup (28 September 2008)

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

I finally got my PS3 back to fix the Blu-ray drive problem. Unfortunately, it acted up in strange ways at first, but a full system restore seems to have solved these issues (so if you get your PS3 back from repairs, do a full system restore first – takes a couple of hours, but it’s worth it). I’ve finished upgrading the search system on dvdloc8.com as well. I think it’s easier to find stuff now, but I’m no expert on search engines so I don’t really know what I’m doing anyway. If you search for “bat” and the first result returned is Last Stand of the 300 – The Legendary Battle at Thermopylae, then you’ll know why.

I’m going to do something different this week and start with the copyright news. Oh yes, very different. The RIAA has rejected a Judge issued damages amount and want to go to trial to get more money from a teenager. The Judge initially ordered damages capped at $200 per song, but the RIAA wants to get the maximum $700 per song, because I supposed with the current economic climate, they need the money or something. Actually it’s because the Judge believed the defendant’s claim that it was a case of “innocent infringement”, because Whitney Harper (16 at the time of the infringement, now 20 years old) didn’t know about copyright laws, how KaZaA worked and all of that. In the eyes of the RIAA, everyone is guilty, so obviously there is no such thing as “innocent infringement”, and so the RIAA wants to go to court and get a jury to decide on damages. When the RIAA is not going after 16 year olds, they are going after single mothers. A single mother was convicted and the RIAA was awarded $222,000 in damages, but a Judge has now ruled that the damages rewarded were “wholly disproportionate” and “oppresive”. I say the industry response to copyright theft can also be described as “wholly disproportionate” and “oppressive”.

Download Heroes episodes instead of recording them: illegal?

The outgoing Bush administration wants a new International agreement concerning copyright protection that companies like Google are trying to fight. Shortly after, the US senate passed a MPAA/RIAA/BSA approved bill to crackdown further on copyright abuse, to create a new office of the Copyright Czar, funded by taxpayer money to help big business maintain the profit margins. Well at least they’re consistent on this last point, and it’s good to see with all that’s going on at the moment, preventing you from downloading the latest episode of Heroes is what’s most important. Speaking of downloading Heroes, here in Australia, illegal downloads have been described as an “epidemic”. Piracy is popular here because we get shafted by free-to-air TV stations, which pay big money to secure TV shows (thus preventing the cable networks from having first-run on these shows), and then stuff the program full of ads and show them at the most inappropriate times (if they show them at all). And if you missed a show on TV, didn’t record it, then is downloading it really a crime? It is though, legally speaking, I think.

PlayStation Store Downloads: Beware of DRM restrictions

Moving onto gaming related copyright issues. Activision will now go after individual pirates, targeting people who have pirated the Xbox 360 game Call of Duty 3, and is seeking damages of between $30,000 and $150,000. And if you purchase content from the PlayStation store, be aware that you cannot re-download content, which means if you had to wipe the HDD to do a full system restore due to a shoddy Blu-ray drive, then you’ll have to re-purchase everything. If you had pirated the stuff instead of paying for it, you’ll get better treatment, so what kind of message is this sending to consumers anyway. The Spore DRM thing refuses to go away, and talks of class action lawsuits as well as censorship on EA’s part means this one will drag on for a while now.

In other words, DRM sucks.

High Definition Let’s skip to HD news, because the copyright stuff is depressing. Transformers on Blu-ray: it’s apparently great news for Blu-ray and also the worst to ever happen to it. Depending on who you read. As I mentioned in the last WNR’s, Transformers on Blu-ray caused a sales surge to give Blu-ray the best week ever in terms of sales ratio to DVD. Then the following week, sales dropped back to normal and so there was a huge drop in Blu-ray sales for the week-to-week numbers. And these numbers have caused some in the media to write more “Blu-ray is doomed” stories, because a 13.39% drop in sales means that just, despite Blu-ray sales being up 29% and 16% for the two weeks prior.

Transformers on Blu-ray: causing debates about Blu-ray's popularity

This forced EngadgetHD to write a story debunking these rubbish stories, and rightly so. There is truth to the story that Blu-ray isn’t doing as well as it should be, but to take facts and stretch them to present an extreme point of view (to gain hits, no doubt), is not on. Unfortunately, this happens all too much these days, and not just in less than important news items like Blu-ray sales. But unfortunately, EngadgetHD’s article did their own bit truthstretching and number fudging, as they came up with the wrong conclusion that Blu-ray’s market share (compared to DVD) has actually doubled. They came up with this statement based on only two sets of data – one in March for the week when I Am Legend was released, and another for the Transformers bump. While bothmovies are similarly “hit” titles that will be similarly (but not equally) popular amongst movie lovers, they were both released under different circumstances. I Am Legend was available simultaneously on DVD and Blu-ray, whereas this latest Transformers Blu-ray release was Blu-ray only, and occurred in a week where there were no other Blu-ray and DVD releases of note. So basically you have one that released in a busy week and thus having a 6% market share for the Blu-ray version, while you have another title that is released in a week where it is the only major release and only available in Blu-ray with a 12% market share. So what do these numbers tell you? Nothing at all, other than when a popular movie is released only on Blu-ray in a week when no other releases were as good, then the Blu-ray market share goes up (and then goes immediately down the next week).

Blu-ray Sales Stats

What is probably better is to compare actual sale figures. It isn’t a good way either, because sales fluctuate seasonally, but because Blu-ray is playing the catch up game, its number should be ever on the increase as it gains more market share and tries to beat the slowly “dying” DVD format. Unfortunately, data on the week I am Legend was sold is not available. The earliest data I have is from the week ending April 20th. For that week, Blu-ray sold $9.93m. I had a search on the ever useful Blu-ray Disc Stats website and it seems that was the week that Aliens vs Predator: Requiem were released on Blu-ray, as well as the classics Commando and Predator, as well as the new release Juno. The other titles were “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead”, “Mariah Carey: The Adventures of Mimi” and “A Passage to India”. To do a comparison, let’s look at the week ending September 14th. Now this week had some good releases, Kill Bill vol 1 and 2, the new comedy Baby Mama, classics such as Cool Hand Luke and Jerry Maguire. Jackie Chan’s The Forbidden Kingdom was also release in the week, and so were the latest seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and Smallville (other titles: “The Alps”, “Day Watch”, “Don Giovanni”, “The Fall”, “How the West Was Won”, “Manilow Live!”, “Night Watch” and “Rudy”). And it was also the week following the Transformers release, so I’m sure it sold some as well. So how did this week compared to that week in April? Total sales for the week ending 14thSeptember was $9.18m. That’s a drop of 7.6%, despite the most recent week having tons more releases than the other one back in April. So what does this tell you? Not much really, because again we’re comparing different titles that appeal to different segments of the market and one was a week with a new to disc release, and the most recent one was full of (admittedly box office heavy) catalogue releases.

Catalogue releases bring up the question: which DVDs will you re-buy on Blu-ray? I think the fact that this is being debated suggests that Blu-ray will have trouble with titles already available on DVD, as I don’t think there are many that will upgrade every single DVD they have to Blu-ray. I do plan on upgrading selected titles, such as Band of Brothers, The Godfather Trilogy, LOTR Trilogy, Star Wars – only because I’ve watched these about a million times (each), and so the investment is worthit. Otherwise, I’ll stick with my existing DVD collection, which is still growing faster than my Blu-ray collection as I’m not buying shit movies that I watch maybe once on anything other than in a “Under $10” sale. So without catalogue releases, how can Blu-ray increase market share? Cheaper Blu-ray hardware is a start. Remember when the BDA said that cheap HD DVD players were a sign of desperation? A Sony Blu-ray player available for under $200 on Amazon just last week must mean something then. What was also a bit desperate was Amazon’s attempt to run a run-of-the-mill 3 for 2 promotion, but a misplaced link in a newsletter and they ended up having to honor all Blu-ray titles at Amazon as part of the 3 for 2. Ouch (especially in this financial climate).

Toshiba threw in the towel on HD DVD rather quickly, but they’ve not forgotten their customers and are still releasing firmware updates. These machines are still top of the range DVD upscalers at the very least, and the crazily cheap money these players went for after HD DVD’s demise still makes them excellent value (and more so if Toshiba continues with the firmware updates). Toshiba is still saying no to Blu-ray though.

And finally in gaming, not much going on this week. I think the Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 in Japan again, but the Wii reclaimed top spot. PS3 sales have slumped rather quickly in Japan, but more surprising is the surge in Xbox 360 sales. Microsoft’s new strategy of wooing Japanese game publishers to publish exclusive titles on the 360 seems to be working.

PlayStation Home: Finally coming to a PS3 near you

And we’re very much near to Sony unveiling its PlayStation Home system. “Finally”, I hear you say, will it revolutionize how gamers interact with each other, and will it be a Xbox Live killer? We’ll just have to wait and find out, I suppose. The firmware update to allow this puppy to run on the PS3 will be huge, I suspect, and given my recent experience with firmware, I think I shall skip it until other more fearless users have volunteered to be guinea pigs for it.

So that’s it for this week. It was long one, thanks to my Blu-ray rant in the middle, plus all the other rants around it. Until next week, WNR readers!

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (28 September 2008)

Weekly News Roundup (7 September 2008)

Sunday, September 7th, 2008

In the digital entertainment news world, the news items are represented by three separate, yet related, groups. Copyright news that deals with the legal ramifications of digital copyright, HD news that deals with the emergence of HD video, and gaming news that talks about the next generation game consoles. These are this week’s stories.

Dun. Dun.

Let’s start with copyright news. In Italy, the MPAA’s president have been giving the Italians some advice on how to deal with piracy: get the ISPs to do your dirty and unconstitutional work. Not very original at all. The Italian courts have been quite reasonable in their dealings so far in relation to digital copyright, and they even said that downloading films, music or software is not a crime if it isn’t done for profit.

If the ISPs don’t get on board, than colleges will be the next target. It’s not the first time that the MPAA has blamed college students for their revenue losses. “What revenue losses?”, I hear you say, and you’re right, the movie industry has been making record profits of late. The “revenue” they refer to, of course, is the imaginary one that has been lost due to people pirating and not buying movies. This of course assumes that the college student that downloaded 500 movies would have paid for those if piracy had been prevented. Yes, I’m sure it’s is entirely plausible for a college student to have a $10,000 DVD collection on campus. And not only that, each student would have to have their own collection, as sharing a movie is also illegal according to the MPAA.

IsoHunt - taking the fight to Canada

IsoHunt’s fight against the RIAA is now turning into a fight against the CRIA (Canadian version of the RIAA), but the first strike has been from IsoHunt. Taking an offensive step in the litigation process, IsoHunt has tried to explain how torrents work and why it shouldn’t be considered copyright infringement if a website only hosts the torrent files. The law lacks sufficient clarity when it comes to these types of issues, such as whether linking to a third-party site that hosts pirated material is the same as hosting the pirated content yourself. Second degree piracy, or something. Torrents are the same … you can link to a torrent file which is basically just a text file, but without the trackers, seeders and leechers, you can’t do anything with the torrent file.

PlayTV - no DRM?

Sony’s new PlayTV add-on for the PS3, which adds TV recording facilities to the PS3, might be DRM free after all. How long before PlayTV recorded shows make their way onto the Internet and will Sony defend against charges that it is making devices that facilitates piracy? Or will Sony, one of the largest makers of blank media (and one of the largest uses of blank media is related to piracy, of course), turn a blind eye when they stand to make a profit from all this. DRM-free is the right thing to do, but the “holier-than-thou” attitude towards DRM from Sony is hypocritical from a company that has profited from piracy, like most other media/electronics/gaming companies.

High Definition Let’s have a look at HD news. Sony has came out with a bold prediction that Blu-ray will be the last optical format. Either they’re extremely confident that no technology will ever better Blu-ray in terms of storage, production costs, speed, or that they don’t think the good old optical disc has much life left, now that there are alternative methods of distribution. I’m more inclined to believe the latter, and it seems another Blu-ray backer, Samsung, agrees with this as well.

Samsung: Blu-ray only has 5 years left

Samsung says that Blu-ray only has 5 years left (which, ironically, is just about the time that Blu-ray will overtake DVDs, by many other’s predictions), and after that, downloads and whatnot will take over. I have no idea what will happen, as downloads/streaming will depend a lot on how sound the Net infrastructure is and whether it can cope with the added demand (and the news that Comcast is starting to cap broadband usage suggests that the infrastructure is getting stretched). There’s also the slightly tricky issue of getting consumers on board, as without a simple plug and play device to download/stream movies, people will be turned off by it. But video on demand is the future, and by “on demand”, I don’t mean having a 10,000 Blu-ray disc movie library which you have to store, catalogue and search through whenever you want to watch a movie. Either way, it sounds like Sony may be onto only a temporary winner when it comes to Blu-ray.

Which is why it was so strange to see that the first movie on a possible Blu-ray killing distribution method, USB memory sticks, is actually a Sony movie. What with the PS3 ready to do video streaming as well, it looks like Sony is hedging its bets on both Blu-ray and purely digital distribution. And who can blame them?

Samsung's 240 Hz LCD

Back to Samsung. They are saying that they will concentrate on new display technologies such as OLED TVs (thinner, brighter, better than LCD technology). 3D TVs without the need for goggles is another one to watch out for. Both Samsung and Sony are working on 240 Hz TVs, which will give motion that is so smooth, that it is very close to what our eyes can see in everyday motion. If you’ve ever watched a Blu-ray movie on a 120 Hz screen (especially compared to a 60 Hz one), you’ll know why this is a good thing. It’s just a shame that not all HDTVs are 120 Hz by standard, which is what I would have expected by now (if Blu-ray was more popular, I think 120 Hz would be too, as Blu-ray’s 24 FPS output is perfect for 120 Hz due to it being a multiple of 24).

And finally in gaming, more Xbox 360 price cuts are coming, with the Arcade bundle now $199 and cheaper than the Wii as Microsoft tries to catch onto the casual gaming wave. I can’t complain about any price drops of course, but I wish they would upgrade the hardware to at least make it less noisy and more reliable (surely technological advances should allow for this to happen now without dramatic product cost increases).

GTA may be coming to the Wii as well, which kind of goes against the family friendly image of the Wii, but there are quite a few violent games on the Wii already.

And that’s it for this week. I’ve been busy with some mundane stuff recently, upgrading the forum software for one which is a pain in the proverbial due to all the modifications I’ve made to it. Hopefully, I can get it done by next week, or somehow wipe out the entire forum in the process, whichever comes first. To be continued …

Created by Dick Wolf.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (7 September 2008)

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Archive for the ‘Electronics’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (9 November 2008)

Blu-ray: The State of Play – October 2008

Weekly News Roundup (5 October 2008)

Weekly News Roundup (28 September 2008)

Weekly News Roundup (7 September 2008)

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