No Hollow Victory
It's been a long time since any industry pundit was willing to bet on
the success of Toshiba's HD-DVD, but the protracted war over the future
of high-definition content delivery continued regardless. Staggering
and limping its way through a litany of awful sales figures and
high-profile studio defections, HD-DVD was the zombie format - struck
with lethal blows from all sides, but refusing to fall down and stop
twitching all the same.
This week brought merciful respite, and the end, when it came, was
swift. Months of horrible news for HD-DVD snowballed into an
unstoppable force after its studio support crumbled just before
January's Consumer Entertainment Show. A month and a half later,
Toshiba has finally pulled the plug - cutting the format's life support
off and consigning it to history's gallery of noble technological
failures.
The reason for HD-DVD's continued staggering across the battlefield,
mortal wounds notwithstanding, has been well aired by now. Although
ostensibly a Toshiba-backed format, HD-DVD's most staunch ally in the
past year has been Microsoft. Its HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360
accounts for around a third of total sales of HD-DVD players, and there
have been credible reports that the format's studio support was being
propped up by co-marketing deals funded from Microsoft's expansive
purse.
Microsoft's objective in all of this was simply to prolong the agony
of the high-definition format war. Divide and conquer has been a
strategy that has served Microsoft well over the years, and its
ambitions with regard to high definition content are very clear.
Although it sells technology used by both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD
formats, Microsoft's hope is that consumers will ultimately spurn both
formats in favour of downloading HD content - preferably through
Microsoft's own services, like Xbox Live. If achieving that means
fermenting a format war that damages consumer confidence in both sides,
so be it.
So just how much damage has HD-DVD's zombie act done to the prospects
for high definition disc formats? Has it bought enough time for HD
downloads to become a realistic prospect for consumers, or even for the
concept to start to take root in their imaginations?
I'm not convinced that it has. Blu-Ray's victory comes early enough
not to be a pyrrhic one - and there are strong signs to suggest that
although downloads are beginning to earn their place in the HD content
market, there will be at least another healthy generation of disc-based
distribution before the world is ready to go entirely digital.
The problem which HD downloads face is simply that the market is not
yet ready for them. Broadband connections even in relatively developed
countries like the United Kingdom simply aren't up to the speeds
required for multi-gigabyte downloads of movie content. Although speeds
of 25 and even 50 megabits are advertised by some providers, the
reality for UK consumers is that their broadband probably runs at
somewhere between 2 and 5 megabits - and much, much lower in certain
areas. With some notable exceptions, much of the rest of the world is
in the same boat; the reality of broadband lags behind its promise.
Consumers, too, aren't quite ready for download content. I don't doubt
that they will be, and sooner than many pundits believe - the
attachment to physical products is not remotely as strong as some high
street retailers and content publishers would like to think, as the
incredibly fast transition from CD to music downloads is proving.
However, we're simply not quite there yet, and it certainly doesn't
help that few consumers are sporting home networks and properly
configured media servers, replete with large hard drives, in their
living rooms. Equally, it doesn't help that while consumers may be
prepared to shed their attachment to physical products, they're still
not going to give much ground on the question of ownership - and rental
models where movies "time out" after a certain period, or can only be
watched a certain number of times, are likely to prove to have very
narrow appeal.
This isn't to say that HD downloads won't form a part of the video
content market going forward - indeed, I suspect that the landscape of
the next ten years will be much more varied than the DVD-dominated
market of the last decade. Downloads, existing DVDs and Blu-Ray will
all have roles to play in this market - but the important news for
Sony, and arguably for the games industry as a whole, is that Blu-Ray
certainly does have a role in this landscape, and a very important one
at that.
Challenges remain, of course; Blu-Ray's prices need to come down, both
for hardware and software, before it can seriously start challenging
sales of DVDs, but already figures for the uptake of key Blu-Ray titles
are encouraging. Most of all, it's clear that Sony's "trojan horse"
strategy has worked. With over ten million PS3s sold through, Blu-Ray's
installed base from that console alone was more than ten times the
total HD-DVD installed base - and even if many of those users don't buy
too many Blu-Ray films, it still represents a very healthy potential
market for the format.
It's not fair, perhaps, to say that Microsoft's gambit has failed. If
Blu-Ray had become established a year earlier, it would have been a
serious blow to the Xbox 360, and to Microsoft's ambitions both in
downloads and in videogames. On the other hand, Sony can heave a sigh
of relief that the damage done has been fairly limited - and can
undoubtedly expect a major boost both for PS3 sales and for its share
price off the back of Toshiba's capitulation.
It's also worth noting that for the media market as a whole - from
consumer electronics through movies to games - the final end of HD-DVD
means the end of a major source of confusion over high definition.
Spurred on by strong sales of HD television, 2008 can at last become
what every year since 2005 has been predicted to be by various analysts
and commentators; the long-delayed year when high definition finally
takes its place at the head of the table.
(gamesindustry.biz)
Mstation Games Review
Fri, 29 Feb 2008
