This Week In Marketnews: The Image Constraint Token

Marketnews: Custom Corner: Image Constraint Token - Real Threat or Tempest in a Teapot? Part 1

* image courtesy of the HDMI Sucks Facebook group, used without permission.

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Rogers Video Selling Previously Viewed Blu-ray Movies

Speaking of the video rental business, I noticed this weekend that Canadian video rental retailer Rogers Video is already heavily promoting sales of previously viewed Blu-ray movie titles.

At an average price of about $15 and change each, that's a pretty frugal option if you've already got a Blu-ray player and actually feel the need to own movies.

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Over At Marketnews: Blu-ray In Budget-Price Acer PC

Marketnews: Acer Offers Blu-ray In Price Point Desktop

When you see Blu-ray drives adopted in budget PC boxes, that's a pretty telling indicator that the technology has truly arrived.

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Paramount incents you to rebuy your movies on Blu-ray

What a clever, albeit obvious way to entice consumers to buy movies on Blu-ray that they already own on DVD!

TWICE: Paramount Launches Blu-ray Upgrade Promo

Los Angeles — Paramount Home Entertainment revealed a special Blu-ray Disc promotion Wednesday that will give consumers a $10 upgrade rebate for upgrading their Paramount and DremWorks DVDs with Blu-ray versions of the same titles.
The promotion, which begins with the Sept. 2 release of “Transformers,” will enable purchasers to mail-in promotional certificates located in the packaging of the Blu-ray products, along with the proof-of-purchase tabs from both the DVD and Blu-ray versions.

Of course, there's a fair amount of impetus to make hay while the sun shines with regard to Blu-ray. Momentum is building on the digital delivery front, so studios need to grab as much Blu-ray action as they can, since the window is closing on optical media.

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LG bows next-gen products

I've been a little slack on re-reporting new product announcements, since I'm up to my eyeballs in projects lately. But with LG's latest announcement, I can kill two birds with one stone, and both play to two of my particular peccadilloes: LED illumination and digital delivery.

TWICE.com: LG Bows LED LCD TV

In TVs, LG unveiled its 47LG90 1080p LCD TV with TruMotion 120Hz frame-rate processing and LED backlighting. The unit, which ships in September at a $3,599 suggested retail price, has a 47-inch screen size and uses an array of 1,536 individual white LEDs. LG has developed local dimming technology to control the lighting of each individual LED to vary between full brightness or full shut off, enabling a 1,000,000:1 mega contrast ratio, the company said. The set also features a new teardrop design, blue color accents and a “high-gloss” black finish.

In addition, and perhaps most importantly, LG showed a 3rd gen Blu-ray player that incorporates download technology via NetFlix:

The highlight of the showcase was LG’s third-generation Blu-ray Disc player, model BD300, which is slated to reach market this fall. It will be only the second set-top device compatible with the Netflix instant-streaming offering. The first was a dedicated $99 Roku player introduced earlier in the year. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 will also add the capability this fall.
The Netflix instant-streaming video service offers more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes in standard-definition format online for virtually instant playback. Users will be required to register for a Netflix subscription membership, allowing its traditional mail-delivered disc rentals and now streaming video services via a broadband connection.

It may seem incongruous to incorporate downloads into an optical media player, but hey, why not? Think of it as a bridge for consumers from one format to the next. Clever.

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Last Month In Marketing Magazine: I Came Here To Bury Blu-ray, Not To Praise It

Print media has a much longer time factor behind it's publication than online media, which is why so many news outlets depend more on their online editions than their print ones.

My point, and I did have one, is that way back in February of this year Marketing Magazine asked me to do a piece about Blu-ray's victory over HD-DVD and the ramifications of digital delivery. The piece appeared in the March 10 2008 print editon of Marketing Magazine, which was themed as their Digital Content issue.


With their site upgrade they haven't yet updated their archive of back issues online, so editor Rob Gerlsbeck gave me permission to reprint the article right here on Lee Distad's Professional Opinion.

Read this doc on Scribd: Blu-Ray1

Big thanks to my friends at Marketing Magazine for asking me to contribute, not to mention the hilarious graphic that accompanied my text!

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Blu-ray Copy Protection Hacked: That Didn't Take Long

Hilarity abounds in the Ars Technica coverage of the demise of BD+ as a copy protection system.

Ars Technica: SlySoft on Blu-ray BD+ crack: next time it will be easier

Last week, SlySoft announced that it had definitively cracked the extra layer of DRM that helped make Blu-ray more popular with the studios than HD DVD. The company announced in a post on its forum that the new version of AnyDVD HD (6.4.0.0) will allow users to make "backup security copies" of Blu-ray discs that use BD+.

The real comedy lies in this one quote from a BD+ developer:

The AACS DRM used on both HD formats was cracked relatively quickly, so thestudios put a lot of their hopes on BD+ to preserve the sanctity of the Blu-ray format. Not long after BD+ was certifiedin June 2007, one of its developers boasted that it wasn't likely to be cracked "for 10 years."

See, you just can't go and say things like that. It just lights a fire under the people who reverse engineer stuff for a living, and they make you look like a fool.

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No Blu-ray for XBOX360

Despite Microsoft's vehement assertions to the contrary, the rumour that a Blu-ray drive for XBOX360 would be released continues to have legs. Maybe this will put an end to it:

RetailBRIDGE: Xbox 360 Won't Support Blu-ray, Microsoft Says

"Xbox is not currently in talks with Sony or the Blu-ray Association to integrate Blu-ray into the Xbox experience," Aaron Greenberg, group program manager for the Xbox 360, told Reuters this week, emphasizing the fact that theirs is "the only console offering digital distribution of entertainment content."

Downloads. It's all about downloads. All I'm saying is don't get too attached to your optical discs, okay?

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Rumor: Circuit City Feels Bad About HD-DVD, Plans To Make Amends

I haven't seen an official announcement, but it's been leaked on both Electronic House and CrunchGear that US retailer Circuit City is willing to give consumers who bought an HD-DVD player from them within 90 days of Toshiba's official throwing-in-the-towel speech a full exchange towards the purchase of a Blu-ray player.

I for one find it hard to believe, since it's a smart, sound business move full of positive PR, and that hasn't been Circuit City's style for years. We shall see, I guess.

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Sony Still Clinging To The 20th Century

The thing in the photo above isn't the stunt double for the Monolith in 2001: A Space Oddessy. It's Sony's new entertainment hub, the HES-V1000 .

Intended to be the centerpiece of the connected home, it features audio distribution, a 500-gig hard drive, and a 200-disc Blu-ray carousel changer.

What!?

Not to be negative, but I still have flashbacks to the hideous service issues that haunted Sony's 200 and 400-disc CD jukeboxes back in the 1990's, not to mention the later 200 disc DVD players.

So here we are in 2008, and Sony's built a carousel into a putative home media center. There's a technical term for this in our business. It's called "Are you fucking kidding me?"

If any of you is considering this beast, please also consider the extended warranty. That's all I'm saying.

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This Week In Marketnews: Blu-ray, Hooray!?

Custom Corner: Custom Corner: How the end to the Format War Will Benefit Custom Integrators

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Notes from the Format War

Random Rumoroids (not quite Factoids, if you get my meaning), none of which quite qualifies for their own post.

*it appears that Yamaha's Blu-ray player has been pushed back to Fall, instead of the Spring launch they originally intended. My source wouldn't confirm the underlying reasons, but at this point I suspect that it's perfectionism rather than hedging their bets to see which format will win out.

*a source for another brand, which shall remain nameless, commented to me last week that he was "pleasantly surprised" by sales of their HD-DVD players. However, the aforementioned brand already has a Blu-ray player developed and in reserve, just in case.

*more easily confirmed than the first two items, but Best Buy.ca is flogging select Blu-ray disc titles at CA$19.99 this week. So if you think that Underworld's undergood plot and characterizations could be trumped by Hi-Def visuals, have at it.

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Kaleidescape Throws Hat In Blu-ray's Ring

It's about time they climbed off the fence, given that Kaleidescape's people have been beyond cagey on this subject for over a year now.

Marketnews: Kaleidescape Announces Support for Blu-ray

Popular (and pricy!) entertainment server manufacturer Kaleidescape announced to its dealers this week that the company would be producing a player in 2009 that would play back Blu-ray discs, as well as “regular” DVDs and CDs. The product will work with the company’s existing media servers as well.
Called the Blue-Laser player, the device will support the H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 formats. The company is “optimistic that it will be possible to import Blu-ray discs” at the time of the product’s launch next year.

As interesting as this news is, it remains merely a sideshow, as I well know that Kaleidescape harbors secret plans of being instrumental to the paid HD download wave in the near future, which is just one more reason for Hollywood to hate them.

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Circuit City Denies Siding With Blu-ray

I was hoping that today would be a Circuit City-free news day. For the last week this blog has felt like one big Circuit City, HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray lovefest, and I was hoping to give it a rest and talk about something else for a while.

However, Circuit City has vehemently denied the rumor I was irresponsibly circulating earlier this week that they were unloading their HD-DVD hardware preparatory to throwing their weight behind Blu-ray, so I need to report on it.

PunchJump: Circuit City to back HD DVD; clearance 'inadvertent'

Circuit City stores will continue to sell HD DVD products at retail amid a recent clearance of stand-alone players at select locations.
A representative told Punch Jump Wed. that Circuit City will continue sale of Toshiba Corp.'s HD-A3 HD DVD player at $149 and the HD-A30 at $199.
The clearance of third-generation HD DVD players was said to be inadvertent.

I don't know what's worse, that they're publically stil giving HD-DVD legs, or that their store level operations are out of control.

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Singlehandedly subverting the Format War since 2006

I totally LOL'ed at the first comment posted on this week's CE Pro column "Are Blu-ray, HD DVD Incentives Changing the Format War?" :

Posted by Michael on 01/31
at 10:31 AM
I have been advising and selling my clients DVD Players that upconvert to 1080; because if you persuade them to choose either format which happens to be the format that looses the war the first question you receive is why did you sale me that player?...I followed your advise your the expert.

Does this mean that when either Toshiba or Sony (or both, but right now probably just Toshiba) hold a downbeat press conference, they're going to publically blame me for their problems?

I can only hope.

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This Week In CE Pro: Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD, So What?

CE Pro:Are Blu-ray, HD DVD Incentives Changing the Format War?

For the record, my working title for this week's column had been Format War Getting Weird, but it was judged to be too snarky to lead with.

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Blu-ray vs HD-DVD still full of mixed tidings

It's still hard to draw a clear picture. Although, honestly, things aren't really looking so hot for either format.

On the one hand, Circuit City has just started clearing out all HD-DVD hardware and software. Rumours persist that it's not just inventory reduction prior to new hardware, but a commitment to go 100% with Blu-ray. If the latter, that might be the first indications that the struggling retailer is beginning to get its act together.

Yet on the other hand, there's evidence that the fantastic sales increase in Blu-ray players that was trumpeted last were salted with the free Blu-ray players offered as package deals with televisions by Sony, Panasonic, and Sharp. A free player is nice if you were going to buy a TV anyway, but it's not necessarily the driving decision maker, is it?

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Playstation 3 gains ground at Christmas

More good news for Sony and for Blu-ray.

Mercury News.com: PS3 holiday sales total 1.2 million

TOKYO—Sales of Sony's PlayStation 3 game machine sales totaled 1.2 million in North America during the key holiday season, the electronics and entertainment company said Monday. The performance gave a lift to its Blu-ray video format because the console also works as a Blu-ray player.
...
Nintendo said previously it had shipped 13.2 million units worldwide of the Wii by October. The Kyoto-based maker of Pokemon and Super Mario games is expectingto sell a cumulative 23 million Wiis by March 31, the end of its fiscal year. Sony has said previously that it sold 5.6 million PS3s worldwide as of the end of September. The latest will add to the tally but the company did not yet have the numbers from the other regions.
The PS3 has lagged behind the Xbox 360 console from Microsoft, which has sold 17.7 million Xbox 360 consoles globally over the last two years.

Despite the fact that I love indulging my sense of schadenfreude when Sony miss-steps, I have to say that it is a relief to see Blu-ray start to gain ground, considering that I called the format war in their favor last October.

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Simpsons The Movie on DVD, and Wal-mart's commitment to Hi Def

So yesterday, I had a reason to be at Wal-mart, and picked up the DVD release of The Simpsons: The Movie. Since it's impossible for me to be in a retail store without analysing it, here's what I noticed about their software department.

The Simpson's: The Movie was $24.88 for the DVD, but there was a gift set for $27.88 that included little plastic figurines of the Simpson family. I might have bought that instead, since I'm kind of a sucker that way. Except: the gift set was only available in 4:3 full screen, not widescreen? Seriously, who still has a 4:3 television?

Wal-mart seems fully committed to pushing both Blu-ray and HD-DVD. The display cubes in the center of the main aisle were almost entirely stocked with new release Blu-ray and HD-DVD titles, and all the end caps facing out were 100% HD format discs. Your average Wal-mart employee might not be able to explain the benefits, but as a company they are fully committed to putting both formats in front of shoppers and watching what happens.

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Saumsung's big Blu-ray bundle

While much of the attention has been focused on using game consoles to build the installed base for either Blu-ray or HD-DVD, and while everyone acknowledges that the mass-market is what will win the format war (as opposed to high end, chi chi HiFi buyers), Samsung is the first CE brand to bundle Blu-ray playback into an inexpensive Home Theatre in a Box package.

The Retail Bridge: Samsung Intros Home-Theater-in-a-Box With Blu-ray Player

For many in the CE industry, the term Home-Theater-in-a-Box (HTiB) is synonymous with low-end equipment and mass-market, price-before-performance technologies.
...
The HT-BD2 is set to debut at CES and will ship in early 2008 at an MSRP of $1,499.

This is a significant move in the format war, and in my opinion, it won't be Playstation 3's or XBOX360's that win the war(nor even $99 players). It will be how many commoditized price point HTiB boxes that the format and it's champions can get into people's homes.

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