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NYT Confirms Movie Studios Paid to Support HD DVD
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:22 PM
from the money-makes-the-world-go-round dept.
from the money-makes-the-world-go-round dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times has confirmed the story that Paramount and DreamWorks Animation were paid $150 million for an exclusive HD-DVD deal that will last 18 months. 'Paramount and DreamWorks Animation declined to comment. Microsoft, the most prominent technology company supporting HD DVDs, said it could not rule out payment but said it wrote no checks. "We provided no financial incentives to Paramount or DreamWorks whatsoever," said Amir Majidimehr, the head of Microsoft's consumer media technology group.'" We discussed Paramount's defection on Monday.
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Your Rights Online: Paramount to Drop Blu-Ray for HD-DVD 476 comments
JM78 writes to tell us The New York Times is reporting that Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation will be dropping support for Blu-ray Disc and going solely with HD-DVD for their next gen DVDs. "Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, said consumers seeking to switch to high-definition DVDs will be enticed by the movies available for HD-DVD players. He added the lower price for the Toshiba devices will appeal to the family market. 'It's a game-changer, what they're doing, and it's why we decided to throw in with them,' Katzenberg said."
Firehose:NYTimes confirms that Paramount was paid $150m by Anonymous Coward
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Yeah... So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yeah... So? (Score:4, Interesting)
And in 18 months, Paramount will [happily] open the doors to Blu-ray. At these market penetration levels for either format, it doesn't matter much yet but by then they may be tired of having the only next-gen DVDs sitting on the shelves collecting dust. You never know.
Isn't it ironic that the consumer vigorously defends his right to "choice" but won't make a move until the choice is made for him?
Re:Yeah... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Consumers want and demand choice all the time. They've simply learned that the market supporting two high-end video formats simultaneously is unlikely (see Beta vs VHS) and so are unwilling to invest in a format that will soon die.
Re:Yeah... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the consumer has clearly chosen not to spend his/her money on more unnecessary crap like Blu-Ray or HD-DVD players. The consumer has decided that normal DVD is plenty fine for them right now.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I think what will
Re:Yeah... So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Fixed that for you.
I'll pay a 50% premium on a burner if the media is 50% cheaper.
Re:Yeah... So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you seen the difference in quality of a HD movie vs a DVD movie when played on a screen that can handle it? It's an amazing difference. Most consumers have -not- seen this, and probably won't until there's good market penetration.
The difference is good enough that I have purchased NEW movies at full retail price for the first time in over 10 years. Crank and Kung Fu Hustle are amazing, and I've heard the third one I bought this weekend, Memento, is amazing as well.
So while the consumer may have chosen not to spend their money, that doesn't mean they have any actual information to base that decision on. Players -are- still too expensive, and I wouldn't have one if I hadn't snagged a used PS3 for dirt cheap, but I expect that will change soon, just like always happens. TVs have some way down already. For instance, 5 years ago a 50" Plasma was $50,000 at Office Depot. I bought a 46" LCD with 10,000:1 contrast ratio (making it pretty much as good as plasma) for $2300, and I could have bought a Plasma with the same size and features for under $3000. That's quite a drop in price for only 5 years.
Re:Yeah... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
No irony there, just common sense.
We want choice in our products and standards for our containers. The disk is the container, not the product.
Re:Yeah... So? (Score:4, Insightful)
I already made my choice: regular DVD is fine. Someone decided for me that I should delay buying another player for at least another 18 months. I just don't know who the next long term deal is going to be with, and it's pretty clear they're quite interested in selling the same shit over and over again on multiple formats.
The last video format conversion was from tape to disc. That was a huge change in the overall experience. Remember those tape rewinders? Tape was a disaster. So are discs actually. The difference in the experience between DVD and HD-whatever-DVD-Ray is too slight. Counting pixels misses the point. Why do you even care how sharp this garbage looks? With these hi-def discs, you still have to actually get up, walk over to a player, and fiddle with physical plastic objects and their stupid covers with those annoying stickers plastered across the opening. Does anyone think it's going to be cool to keep doing that 18 months from now? It's going to feel as intolerable as CD audio feels today.
Just keeping plastic discs organized actually requires special racks, stands, or actual furniture. I have two "media stands" holding DVDs in the corner. They're probably headed for the garage where my CD audio rack is. I recently got one of those ipod stands with a CD audio player on top. I have yet to put a CD into it because all the discs are in the garage. If we ever get a new disc, it gets ripped, and then it goes to the garage. The slight degradation in quality doesn't enter into the decision at all. I just don't care. I'm happy I can listen to music without having to look at all these stupid things or match them with their covers.
Americans are getting fatter. They don't want to waddle over to a player every time they play a different movie. That's totally lame. They want whatever lets them watch this shit without leaving their sofas by pushing buttons on a remote and only ONE remote- not a bunch of remotes with an additional one arriving every 18 months during a long bitter format war. So nobody is going to bother with HD-DVD or Blue-Ray. If you're going to pull a scam like this, you have to offer something worthwhile to the mark.
Obviously, the money is to buy an inferior format. (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, the people who paid believed that the format they don't want to win, Blu-ray, is worth $150 million more than their HD DVD format in true value, so to even the score they had to pay.
That shouts very loudly to me. Someone with $150 million to spend has set the value of Blu-ray as being worth that much more than HD DVD. Thanks for the information. You have voted with your dollars, and shouted to everyone who thinks about it that Blu-ray should win.
From the New York Times article: "The battle over the competing high-definition DVD technologies has sputtered in recent months as Blu-ray discs have emerged as the front-runner. Blu-ray titles are sharply outselling HD offerings..."
Not only the corrupters, but the marketplace also, agree that Blu-ray is better.
I wonder how much it would cost to get Paramount and DreamWorks Animation to adopt 8-track tapes?
I wonder how much it would cost to get Paramount and DreamWorks Animation executives never to take showers or baths? Obviously, to them, everything is for sale, even their technical integrity.
If that kind of thing continues, the word "executive" will become synonymous with the word "sleaze".
Comparison of Blu-ray and HD DVD (Score:5, Informative)
Comparisons:
Blu-ray [wikipedia.org]: "A dual layer Blu-ray Disc can store 50 GB..." with a raw data transfer rate of 53.95 Mbit/s. HD DVD [wikipedia.org]: "HD DVD has a single-layer capacity of 15 GB and a dual-layer capacity of 30 GB;
More comparisons [wikipedia.org]: Blu-ray scratch resistance "has withstood direct abrasion by steel wool and marring with markers in tests" "HD DVD uses traditional material and has the same scratch and surface characteristics of a regular DVD."
"Blockbuster, the largest U.S. movie rental company, decided in June 2007 in favor of expanding Blu-ray support exclusively to an additional 1450 stores. The decision came following a trial in 250 rental stores, in which both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs were available. In the trial it has been found that more than 70% of high definitions rentals were Blu-ray discs." [My emphasis]
"According to a market research company Nielsen VideoScan, as of week ended August 12, 2007, weekly sales of Blu-ray discs were ahead of HD DVD with 66% of the market. In 2007 sales, Blu-ray leads with 66% of the market. Since inception, market share was 61% for Blu-ray and 39% for HD DVD."
This comment [cdfreaks.com] on the CDFreaks.com differences page is interesting, I have no idea whether it is valid: "To make a (HD)-DVD disc you need two moulding machines and an extra process to glue the two 0.6mm substrates together, which means you loose valuable seconds. Also the HD-DVD disc tolerances for flatness & thickness are extremely tight (twice more critical than that of normal DVD). To make a Blu-ray disc you need only 1 moulding machine and you don't have to glue the two substrates, which means less production time. In fact a Blu-ray disc can be compared with an up-side-down CD disc... which is very simple to make. As for disc tolerances of Blu-ray, these are comparable with normal DVD, resulting in an much more controllable production process. This means better yields and that future high-speed discs are easier to make. All in all, you might be able to upgrade DVD lines to make HD-DVD's, but in time the mass-volume production process itself will be less expensive for Blu-ray."
From CDFreaks pros and cons [cdfreaks.com]: "Blu-ray requires a much lower rotation speed of the disc to reach the specified transfer rate of 36Mbps."
And "Hybrid Discs -- Here we can find an advantage for Blu-ray, resulting from the new structure of the disc. Since the recording layer for Blu-ray data is only 0.1 mm away from the surface of the disc there is enough space below to integrate a complete 8.5 GB DVD DL disc."
(I have no connection whatsoever with either format, of course. My only interest is that the format that becomes popular be the best format technically.)
Re:Comparison of Blu-ray and HD DVD (Score:4, Insightful)
Strange since HD-DVD/DVD hybrids already exist, yet I don't know of any bluray/DVD hybrids... so I'd say the advantage goes to HD-DVD on this.
Re:Obviously, the money is to buy an inferior form (Score:4, Informative)
If that's the case, and consumers choose what's best, then why did VHS beat out Betamax, which had better video and audio quality across the board? Why is Windows the de-facto operating system for home computers?
You make it sound like the majority of consumers actually make informed decisions when they go out and buy electronics. I can only assume your post was written tongue in cheek, because it appears you infer that people actually go out and research the underlying technology of various products before they make their purchase.
Personally, I give Blu-Ray an automatic 25% edge in the market over HD-DVD because Blu-Ray sounds cooler, and "HD-DVD" has a sort of legacy sound to it. Seriously. I think that, to the average consumer, the name would have more bearing on their purchase than any technical aspects.
Dan East
Re:Obviously, the money is to buy an inferior form (Score:4, Informative)
The fact is that Betamax had mildly better video, indescernable to most people.
That's true. Consumers were looking through the marketing filters when they made a choice, though. Betamax actually had a huge advantage over VHS in video sharpness, color noise and audio quality, especially as the battle progressed. Color on VHS looked like a Monet painting - fuzzy water colors. The Beta looked much closer to a direct broadcast signal. Most consumers were buying whatever Billy-Bob down the street had. He had a VHS because the early Beta machines were more expensive than VHS machines (because of the way the tape transports were built). Price usually beats function into second place.
The biggest driving force was the cost of blank tape. The first Beta and VHS tapes cost $22-$24 apiece. You wanted a machine to stretch that cost over as many hours of recording as possible. That got VHS the foothold.
The only time [consumer] Betamax started taking market share back from [consumer] VHS was when Beta-HiFi came out. It took the VHS camp a year to respond and created more expensive "8 head" VHS machines, which the Beta camp could do with two heads. "Gosh, 8 heads MUST be better". No, the VHS format needed that to make a marginally acceptable image at multiple speeds. At the same time, the Beta camp figured out how to make much less expensive tape transports, so cost was erased as a factor.
SuperBeta produced a measurable sharpness increase of 20% but all the VHS camp could do is relax the white clip circuits (VHS-HQ) by 20%. Consumers only saw the "20%" figure and concluded they must be the same thing without actually looking. You could turn SuperBeta on and off and see a real difference. Not so with the VHS-HQ switch. S-VHS was actually more akin to SuperBeta but that came years later and required special [expensive] tape. The VHS camp couldn't even respond to Beta-ED but by then it didn't matter for the consumer. Movie stores started stocking more VHS and that created an avalanche effect driving more consumers toward buying VHS machines. Game over for consumer Beta.
Broadcasters adopted the Beta format over the VHS format for news (originally) because of the dramatic quality differences. The VHS based news recorders were blown off the market within a year by Beta. This started the 25 year dynasty of Broadcast technical progression: BetaCam, BetaCam-SP, Digital BetaCam, BetaCam-SX, BetaCam-IMX, HDCam and HDCam-SR. If you saw the last several Star Wars movies, they were shot with HDCam - a Beta format derivative, not film.
At every turn, the consumer didn't look at quality or function one bit. The Beta transport could skip forward and backward at 20x speed with a viewable picture because of the transport design - something the VHS couldn't do. It made smaller Camcorders when they came out with full recording capacity which the VHS camp couldn't do. With a fresh eyeball, the Beta format was hands down the superior machine with lots of technical headroom, but the consumer ignored the facts and went with the flow. Oh well. Here's an ugly page with some technical differences between Beta and VHS [betainfoguide.com], none of which mattered to consumers.
You can have your two Beta tapes for a movie to my VHS one.
I only recall a few Beta movies on two tapes and those were very early rare birds. The earliest Beta tapes were only one hour long but that was fixed quickly with Beta-II and L-750 tapes (which could do 3+ hours at Beta-II).
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
The reason people get upset when they hear about promotional deals is not because it is unexpected, but because it violates the ideal of capitalism that the best ideas will rise to the top and result in the most efficent solutions. In truth, capitalism has a huge bias towards the ideas winning in the marketplace of those with assets to reinvest and use to promote their agenda. However, when it becomes overly blunt, people have a viseral reaction due to what they learned in 8th grade civics classes (in the US at least).
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the way capitalism really operates, the idealistic way American (and possibly other) children are tought to think capitalism operates in middle school.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Mike: No Neil, that's sex, captitalisn is about making money.
The idea of capitalism (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the perfect market cannot exist, and deals like
Re:So what? (Score:5, Funny)
Sure! I need someone to look after the place when I am gone. First week of October good for you?
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People tend to respect the property of others, because not doing so tends to end in vio
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, one could make that argument. But "intellectual property" rights are significantly more far-reaching than physical property rights.
With physical property rights, you build a better mousetrap and you own that mousetrap. You have a "government granted monopoly" over that specific mousetrap, if you want to put it that way. But everybody else's mousetrap is still their own.
Once you patent your mousetrap, you own not just the mousetrap you made, but you also effectively own every other mousetrap in the country that is similar to yours, even though they were made by the hands and tools and materials of somebody else. Your intellectual property takes away the physical property rights of other people.
Lets talk value of a property (Score:4, Insightful)
Now when you say that you have written a piece of work. Can you say that you have paid back for every piece of information that you used to produce that work. You cannot. There are literally millions of small pieces of information that goes into creating that work. It is true that a lot of creativity and effort goes into producing that work, but it is still built on a large amount of information that had required a lot of creativity, and effort. You never did pay for these pieces of information. You just used it and now you are trying to steal when you try to deny the right of those creators and their survivors (ie the public) to also enjoy the fruits of your labour, as you did theirs.
I am not against copyright, as long as it is copyright and not some kind of stupid "intellectual" property right. Copyright has a stated purpose, which is to allow creators to gain some payment for their efforts. But it is only that. Trying to make it into a perpetually owned property is an attempt to steal from the public domain. The same goes for patents, but the problem is less severe there.
In light of the above, copyright should be very limited in time, and scope. It should give some inalienable rights, such as attribution. But commercial rights should be severely curtailed. I believe, to just commercialize a product you should be required to register your work at the copyright office stating your intention to benefit from it, and providing a copy for its library. The right to benefit from it should be only for a very limited time, like 5 years (from the point of registration) allowing for one extension of another 5 years. Anything more in the Internet age is stupid and excessive. Works owned by Corporations should not be allowed to have an extension, that will make it more difficult for corporations to steal from the artists.
Everybody should be required to earn their living, and artists or RIAA/MPAA should not be above it. This means that no perpetually milking the only good thing that you produced.
There is a deeper meaning to the following quote by Newton which some people will never have the humility to understand.
"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
Re:So what? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
I predict lawsuits out of this. There is no plausible technical reason that two studios would simply jump ship like that unless they were bribed. I could see them go neutral possibly, but completely switching at the same time? This is has anticompetitive behaviour written all over it.
Checks (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Checks (Score:4, Insightful)
The statement begs the question; how is it possible to make a payment but provide no financial incentive? There is no such thing as payment, that is not a financial incentive. A contingency is a financial incentive but not a check, but there is no such thing as a payment that is not a financial incentive. Either the reporter is an idiot, or Microsoft is full of shit.
Re:Checks (Score:5, Funny)
I suspect those aren't mutually exclusive options.
not a big deal? seems like a double standard to me (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been saying since this format war started though that if someone REALLY wants to win, they should just pony up a ton of money to get George Lucas to release the unmolested, Greedo-shoots-first Trilogy in their format.
Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently (Score:5, Funny)
Unfair.. and I'm a HD-DVD supporter.. (Score:5, Interesting)
You should never be able to pay a customer to specifically exclude a competitor. For example.. If you're paying a company a sum amounting to $10 to go with your product Y that costs $100 and exclude product X, it would mean your competitor would have to sell at $90 in order to compete - assuming both products essentially do the same thing. It artifically lowers the competitor's price... kind of like what has happened with AMD and Intel.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
With Dual Players Becoming Common, Easy Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so we wait a year and a half. (Score:3, Insightful)
-jcr
Arghhh (Score:5, Funny)
0) "I haven't watched anything on a TV since 1970 and now I'm Jesus Christ"
1) "Even if you don't watch broadcast TV, all movies are crap too. Ditto for music."
2) "I watch TV and movies, but who would pay for them when you can steal, I mean find them online?"
3) "I've never bought a DVD, so they'll pry $25 out of my hands for a blu-ray/hd-dvd disc when hell freezes over - I get them from the library, which is also my only social outlet"
4) "I'll buy hd-dvd/blu-ray when it costs $10 and the discs are $1. My VCR is still running."
5) "Physical media is dead anyway, in fact I don't even _type_ anymore because it involves physical contact."
6) "All video formats are the same, and anyone who says otherwise is blind... I love my 12" vga monitor!"
7) "LINUX LINUX LINUX!!!! Microsoft can suck my dick."
8) "They all use DRM, so I'm going to boycott life, as soon as I get one."
9) "First post!"
10) "All companies are run by Nazis who also control your congresspeople, and you live in a police state that just wants to monitor what you watch. It's too late to do anything about it, but I'm Canadian, which means I'm an expert on how the US sucks."
11) "DVI / HDMI / HDCP / WTF"
So in summary, I have seen an actual HD-DVD played back on a quality LARGE screen, and it looks very very nice.
Probably too good for you, if you don't care about movies. Or if you have anything less than a 60" screen,
which is the same thing. I am COMPLETELY PISSED that there are two formats, and that the movie studios won't do both formats. Is it that big of a deal to master two discs? What a cluster fuck. If money changes hands, whatever. Hopefully there will be a decent dual format player soon. And don't get me started on why I can't rip a movie I paid for legally!
Region coding (Score:5, Interesting)
We've seen big companies embrace globalization when convenient many times before, and then immediately turn around and implement artificial barriers so that consumers can't take advantage of that same global market (the stories here on Slashdot a few years ago about textbook manufacturers come to mind, where they would sell English versions of their textbooks in foreign countries at hugely discounted prices, and then fight over efforts of other companies and individuals to make those same books available back to customers in the USA).
Region coding ought to be universally despised. So far as I know, with HD-DVD I don't have to worry about it. But Sony, showing their true stripes once again, embraced it with BluRay.
Re:Region coding (Score:5, Informative)
Everything seems to point to HDDVD region codes:
If anything, you should support BD over HDDVD simply because it's better technology (higher capacity storage), and if you want to go down the "corporate evil" route, Microsoft is far more evil than Sony, so BD wins by default.
First off, BD is not a "Sony" format, anymore than Cell is a "Sony processor"; they're just part of the committees. One of many. Secondly, if anything, the lack of region codes on PS3 and PSP games should point in the opposite direction. The inclusion of region coding is like the inclusion of DRM---it's a feature that studios will want before they support the format, regardless of how ineffective or stupid it is.
Re:Region coding (Score:5, Informative)
To me, no, everything does not seem to point to HD-DVD region codes (thanks for those links though). From that Amazon page, if you follow their "Read more about region encoding and how it may affect you here" link, you wind up at this page [amazon.com]. As you can see, regular DVD and BluRay region coding is detailed, but there is no mention of such a thing for HD-DVD.
Furthermore, as you noted the other two links you provided are from last year, and refer to discussions that they were expecting to have this year about implementing region coding. Do you happen to have any information about whether those expected discussions have actually happened or not, and if so what the outcome of those "working groups" were?
I'll also point out that the relevant Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] -- that fount of information that is never, ever wrong -- states that, "there is no Region Coding in the existing HD DVD specification, which means that titles from any country can be played in players in any other country." Alternatively, if you check out the Wikipedia article on BluRay [wikipedia.org] (which comes complete with a pretty map), you can see that the opposite is true.
I'm sorry but the very concept of region coding bothers me so much that, until I see clear evidence that the same thing is going to be implemented with HD-DVD some day, HD-DVD easily wins over BluRay. Higher capacity be damned. I'll take at least some level of consumer-oriented freedom over that any day, thanks.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I live in the UK and I've imported over $3000 in Region 1 DVDs from the US/Canada. In Blu Ray happy DRM land - I can't. For I'm lumped in with Africa and Australia. I can't even import Japanese DVDs because they've de
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Paramount's Alan Bell presents additional reasons (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who Cares (Score:4, Informative)
The market has a strange way of sorting some of this stuff out. While the players are several hundred dollars and the movies are well over $20 each, this is just a niche format at the moment. When the players are under $60 and the movies are under $15, wake me up. In the meantime, I'll stick with a Linux MCE setup and use the format that works in the movie jukebox. The last DVD player I bought retailed for under $30. Pre-viewed movies at Blockbuster are either 2 for $20 or 4 for $20. Only those with lots of cash will bother with the expensive formats. Right now they are in the Laserdisk catagory. Nice format, but limited selection at high prices. I did the Laserdisk thing. It had an advantage.. No copy protection. It met broadcast spec NTSC output unlike videotape.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Michael Bay (Score:4, Informative)
Here --> http://www.michaelbay.com/blog/files/Michael-Bay-