Comments on: Blu-ray victory means royalties, royalties, royalties

Every time one of those drives or discs leaves a factory, the Blu-ray Disc Association will get a royalty.

[sismoc]

Consumer products should use open and royalty-free technology

There should be no royalties paid or licenses needed to make a consumer device for playback of pre-recorded media. Consumers should be able to choose from any manufacturer and not just the ones who are "licensed" by the MPAA and it's co-conspirators. This is why there is no legal open source DVD playback software. Can't make a DVD player without royalties.

[daftkey]

Go ahead...

I'm glad you've volunteered your time and money to this great R&D project. Now remember, you need to come up with the entire spec from start to end without using something that's already owned by another creator.

Let me know when I can expect the specifications so that I can start producing players and discs without paying you.

[samkass]

and fairies should come out of the sky...

... and make discs out of magical dust which is bonded together by love and happiness. Everyone should be able to dance in circles all day while fruit blossoms from the ground and fresh spring water flows by to heals all wounds and ills, and everyone should live happily ever after.

[sanenazok]

You go first

It's not the MPAA that holds the licenses, it's the hardware manufacturers.

If you don't like it, don't buy it. If you want to dictate what should happen to inventions then invent something yourself. You can help the Chinese make their own Disc technology, I'm sure it'll be as almost as good as the Chinese made CPU's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson).

So in any event, go out and create something, then put in the public domain. Don't tell others what to do until then.

[cameronjpu]

Everything should be free!

Ever wonder if that includes the fruits of your own labor my friend?

[ethana2]

Broadband

And until they do just what you said, they won't quickly change my mind. Death to optical drives. Long live the internet.
...any way it has to happen.

Although these days I mostly just boycott evil companies. Magnatune and Jamendo for my music, and public domain books for my movies, using my brain's internal renderer. I may consider buying a copy of peach however... just not on a non-free medium.

[TogetherinParis]

So design an HD DVD yourself

Good grief! Everybody doesn't just have to have a fancy DVD
player. You can go without. Or design a player yourself and give it
away like you want Sony et al. to do! Cool stuff doesn't come out of
the air, you know.
If we listened to people like you we'd still be stuck with papyrus
scrolls.

[wildchild_plasma_gyro]

Lord of the Rings comming soon

With these royalties i think the Backers ahould be looking down 2 avenus of thought.

A. how to make for a good adaption over to larger Densities in the market.

B. An Encouragement program to convince More Movie Makers to consider making some more longer movies like Lord of the Rings.

[gerrrg]

and prices going up...?

There's no format war - we know prices were being forced artificially down by competition - should we expect a rise in movie disk prices?

Or has the consumer already spoken and will force prices to remain at current levels?

hmmm.

[samkass]

probably not...

Now the the format war is over, a lot more people will be buying, and economies of scale will drive down prices across the supply line. In addition, I expect the former HD DVD hardware manufacturers to start producing some cheap Blu-ray players soon. And considering all the exclusive deals, most movie prices weren't really affected by the format war-- except the war between HD discs and regular DVD discs.

[cameronjpu]

"Forced artificially down by competition"

What an interesting way to put it. Do you work for Sony? ;)

[krosavcheg]

Prices should remain the same or go down

The true format war is just now starting, it's Blue-Ray vs DVD and DVD right now has a huge price advantage. They say you don't see any advantage on Blue-Ray until you reach the 50" monitors right now so everyone with a smaller than 50" TV isn't going to get much improvement over DVD by going to Blue-Ray.

The minor skirmish over which format the HD disks will take is now over but the real war is just getting started.

[sommer182]

HD DVD CAN SUPPLY CHINA!

Maybe Toshiba can sign a deal in China to be their single source optical standard? Like the professor said, it's a heck of a big market!

And then I can buy all the cheap HD-DVD's I want from the number one knock-off experts in the world!

[djkouza]

knock-offs

Your right on there... and we wonder why they need all the royalties
1. they spend lots of money developing the technology
2. then china steals it and makes knock-offs
3. we buy the cheap knock-off then get pissed it doesn't work just right

[JadedGamer]

EVD

China developed their own optical media standard for two reaons:

1) avoiding royalties tied to patents (DVD and the HD variants)
2) control what was published - Chinese media censorship is officially quite prudish, ref. the recent ban on horror movies

[Gomer37]

With AppleTV, does it matter anymore?

If I can rent high def movies for about $4.00, why would Blu-Ray
even matter?

Who watches movies more than once anyway?

HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray?

irrelevant.

[sommer182]

Who watches movies more than once?

Anyone else seen "Star Wars" more than once? How about "Lord of The Rings?" The "Godfather" or "Scarface", anyone? How about "Titanic?" Yeah, the vast majority of movies aren't worth being viewed more than once, but there are exceptions to ever rule.

And $4.00 for a rental is WAY to high, considering you can BUY a DVD (a decent movie, to boot) for $5.00. I pay $1.50 for new release DVD's at my rental shop, and that is as high as I will go.

[srikanth_janga]

fooled by apple

wow,

you pay $4 for every hidef rental???? you should try netflix with a bluray player. you'll know what i am talking about.

[daftkey]

How "hi" is Apple-TVs Hi-Def?

Could it be that there's a bit of flexibility in what people call "Hi Definition"? Could bit rate really make that much of a difference (among other things)? I don't know, ask the MP3 crowd.

I think we'll find there's still a reason that Blu-Ray movies require a 50-or-so GB disc and yet you can stream "hi-def" movies to the Apple TV over a regular broadband internet connection in real time.

[Mergatroid Mania]

Duh?

I have over 300 DVDs in my collection, and I have likely watched each one at least 10 times (more for the better ones, less for the crappy ones).

At your $4.00 per rental, that would've been $40 per movie.

I know quite a few people that watch movies in their collections more than once.

You really are a Gomer eh?

[open-mind]

Things I Find Surprising

I'm surprised that Toshiba is giving up so easily and quickly. I expected things to drag on a bit longer ... more like Beta/VHS.

I'm surprised that the entire HD-DVD ecosystem collapsed so quickly and easily. Just two months ago it looked fine, at least from a distance. But after one key card fell over, the whole house-of-cards came tumbling down very quickly.

Lastly, I'm surprised that I haven't read much-if-any ******** from people that invested in this movie/player platform that is now dead and mostly worthless.

Toshiba seems like the captain of a ship that they designed, then convinced passengers to ride on. Now they see it headed for the rocks, so they're just ignoring their passengers and diving for the lifeboats. I'm kind of expecting a class action lawsuit.

[sommer182]

Not so Surprising

Part of Toshiba's problem is not enough people invested, but they wisely bided their time. I did purchase an HD-DVD player, but it wasn't strictly to watch HD movies. I needed a new DVD player that upscaled to hook up to my newer LCD, and for $99.00 at Wal-Mart the HD-A2 was a great buy. I do not view it as worthless at all, since it's primary mission of playing standard def DVD's will still be accomplished. I have ten HD-DVD movies, five of which were free with the system. Of the five I purchase, only one is a HD-DVD only movie. The rest I can play on any DVD player in the world. So all I fell I am out on is one $14.99 copy of "The Italian Job." I'm actually considering buying a few of the newer releases in the coming weeks as they will surely go on clearance. As long as they are dual format releases like "The Kingdom", who cares if the HD-A2 dies in five years? I can still play the movie on a regular DVD player.

[MrTroy03]

Wrong

You can not sure a manufacturer for discontinuing a product. The products they did buy will still be under the 1 year (or however long) warranty on the unit.

This is why a lot of people did not purchase either yet, one set of people are getting screwed. It had to be.

The lawsuit would be thrown out.

[ewelch]

Maybe you weren't paying attention?

All through 2007 Blu-ray outsold HD-DVD 2:1. It was pretty
clear to me who was going to win. I bought my Blu-ray player
last June and am enjoying the win even more now.

Not that I don't feel for HD-DVD supporters. I supported OS/2
when it competed with WIndows. I know what it's like to back a
losing proposition. This time it was obvious to me and anyone
else who wasn't already committed to HD-DVD and skewing the
facts to fit the way they bet.

There is no way HD-DVD had a chance. Warner was the last nail
in the coffin. Not the first slip as you seem to think.

Not that there weren't reasons to think HD-DVD might pull it off
if things really got strange. But they didn't.

[Baboo 2008]

Royalties: Microsoft wins

As both HD-DVD and Blu-ray uses Microsoft VC-1 codec (a.k.a. VC9 or Windows Media 9), Microsoft wins too..

[sommer182]

Microsoft and Sony

Wow, hadn't thought of that. BOTH Microsoft and Sony are behind this mess in a way. Sony manipulated the stand along manufacturers into backing one format, along with the studios, when all they really cared about is the gaming segment. And I'm willing to bet that Microsoft didn't care one way or the other, since they are hell bent on pushing downloads and broadband HD Video on us when most of the country doesn't have access yet. If Microsoft had put an HD-DVD drive into the 360...wow. This whole thing could have dragged on for years, physical format discs wuold linger for another decade and...wow. The light bulb goes off, the conspiracy becomes apparent!

[samkass]

h.264

Actually, Blu-ray encourages the use of h.264/AAC, which is pretty
much identical in quality per bitrate. It was HD DVD that
encouraged VC-1. Although both formats supported both codecs
(as well as MPEG2), Microsoft's backing of HD DVD made VC-1
unpopular on Blu-ray.

[pugster]

Yeah right.

Unfortunately, companies make these 'standards' so that they can make royalities out from them. You ever figure out why SD memory cost less than Sony's memory stick?

Toshiba could've lowered its license fees and convienced the drive, hd-dvd, and disc manufacturers to make stuff cheap, flooding the market with an obvious choice to replace dvd-r with hd-dvd-rs. But instead they got greedy, want big license fees for anything made for hd-dvd-rs.

[Mergatroid Mania]

Can't we just get cheap USB Flash drives?

I don't understand why more effort isn't being put into getting those flash drives cheaper.

Wouldn't it be nice to walk into Walmart and buy a movie on a USB (or simular) drive and go home and plug it right into the TV? No DVD or Blueray player required at all.

We just need to get them down in price far enough. And you could have different sizes for different extras. Charge more for additional content.

I love the part about no dvd player required....

[alegr]

Cheaper flash drives

A few years ago $100 would only give you like 128MB. Now you can have 16 GB for that much.

[paulej]

Forget USB drives. Look at SD-type cards.

These newer disc technologies can store 50MB or more. One cannot get that kind of capacity from a USB drive (yet). Once we do, though, I think that these technologies will start to converge.

CDs are physically GIGANTIC compared to an SD card. Personally, I'd much rather carry around small SD-sized devices than either USB drives or CDs. The slim design makes them very portable and, based on the super-tiny size of the Micro SD card, I suspect there is room in the plastic casing to increase the storage capacities. What are the physical limits? Anybody?

Anyway, I definite agree that CDs ought to disappear "real soon now." It really is about time that they get replaced with more modern technology. I've seen the 8" Disk cone and go, then the 5 1/4", then the 3 1/2" disk. Amazingly, the CD has hung in there, but only because they serve extremely well in the delivery of physical media that has the property of being read-only.

If the industry can work together to create an SD-type of device that can accept small cards that are either read/write or read-only, they would definitely be a challenger to those giant 12cm CDs.

[alegr]

Megalomania

I were told a million times already: don't exaggerate.

300 DVDs (90 minutes average?) 10 times is 4500 hours. Assuming that you count 10 years, this is 450 hours per year, or 9 hours per week. You're watching them quite a lot, do you?

[ferretboy88]

great now Sony can keep the prices high.

Screw sony.

[epiccollision]

did you fail economics

the reason the prices stayed so high for so long was the consumer holdback/confusion....the volumes weren't there with the fence sitters waiting for a winner...now with a clear winner volumes will increases dramatically thus making the economy of the players scale much better and the price will plummet

[JadedGamer]

Samsung, Pioneer...

Thn buy from one of the many other Blu-ray manufacturers.

HD-DVD however was always Toshiba's baby.

[MrTroy03]

Idiot

If you invented something why wouldn't you want to get paid for it?

If you invent a tool, it gets patented and copyrighted, and people buy it from your company, you can lease the technology to other companies if you want, and get a royalty for each one they make.

Same thing with Blu-Ray, VHS or DVD technology. If you invent it, it is damn fine to have other companies pay you to use the thing YOU invented!

[psychosmurf]

Oh Yeah, God Forbid . . .

. . . anyone do anything to simply better mankind. Let's put a price tag on everything. Why not? We pay $2000 dollars for medically necessary procedures that cost 1/100 of that to actually perform because of patents and copyrights. Why wouldn't we charge and be willing to pay for something as stupid as this?

Your 'Atlas Shrugged' mentality is old and tired.

[AlexRiedel]

Won't be caught dead...

...buying anything Blue-Ray. Country codes suck and I won't have anything to do with something that Sony has a hand in. Rootkit comes to mind. No thank you. Apple TV, here I come. Download is the way to go.

[kevin.talbot]

better dump your CDs...

If you don't want to have anything to do with what Sony has a hand in, better dump all your CDs and CD players. Sony and Philips were the key co-inventors of the CD format.

But I'd give Sony a break - they just recently decided to drop their horrible DRM system and sell non-DRM MP3s. And their recent portable MP3 players also now play non-DRM.

If you REALLY want to hate someone, how about Apple? They now control nearly 45% of all online music sales in the marketplace and they have a proprietary DRM that they will license to NOBODY. That really sucks and seems very anti-competive.

[djkouza]

yes apple is "evil"

No not really, but they are employing many tactics that Microsoft is always being criticized for. But IMHO they are worse. iPods suck compared to some of the other players Sandisk.... etc.. but they are the "cool kids" it's trendy to have apple technology.

[SacramentoRob]

"A rootkit with your drive, sir?"

Has Sony added any rootkit payloads to their blu-ray drives yet? Gotta love it when the scoundrels are in the driver's seat....

[Penguinisto]

Don't know, don't care.

it's a benefit to having secure operating systems running software and drivers that I trust... something that decidedly cannot be said for Windows ;)

/P

[www.hdgreetings.com]

Why didn't they get good contracts during the war?

Maybe I'm missing something, but when Sony and Toshiba we're doing anything to woo people to the standard shouldn't companies have been using that chance to negotiate low royalty rates?

[t8]

Royalties from Xbox

Imagine Microsoft having to pay Sony to ship a Blue-ray DVD player with Xbox.

That makes Sony the ultimate winner if they get revenue from every Xbox with HD capability.

[bodine465]

That could bite Sony in the a$$

One of the main things pushing sales of the PS3 is the inclusion of the Blu-ray player. If MS were to include a Blu-ray player in every Xbox 360, at around the same price as the PS3, which would you rather buy? A high end gaming machine that plays Blu-ray video, but has a mediocre game selection, or a high end gaming machine that plays Blu-ray video, and has an extensive game base. That could cause PS3 sale to plummet.

[rslc]

Bluray wins = consumer lost

1) Bluray has higher royalty than HD-DVD
2) And Windows Vista includes HD-DVD support.

Now Bluray wins = consumer lost all.
No thanks to Hollywood studios.

And I bet Sony pays them to support bluray,
since Sony can collect more royalties.

[dcarlos02]

Only with music videos

musiktag.eu
Royalties come when DVDs are worth seeing. Which are more popular - musical comedies or horror movies?