Stewart Wolpin

Who's On High-Def First?
November 7, 2007

As a season ticket holder at Shea Stadium for 24 years, you can imagine how excruciating and depressing it was to watch the Mets' collapse this season. For less-suicidal sports fans, the reaction was probably detached, e.g. how does a team with so many resources and so much talent fail so spectacularly?

I kinda feel the same way about Blu-ray. 

Let's be clear. I don't have a dog in this race. I have friends on both sides of the great Blu-ray/HD DVD divide. I'm a completely objective observer — I just enjoy watching the game ... well, maybe not enjoy. Agonize is more like it. My interest is not who wins this format battle. My interest is as a consumer. I just want someone to actually win so there's one high-definition DVD format and so we can get on with the rest of our prerecorded movie buying lives. Because, if one of these two camps doesn't hurry up and win, someone will perfect a way to speedily download high-definition movies, removing the need for either physical format. (In the interest of full disclosure, this linked press release was written by my wife — hey, if you can't use your blog to make your wife look good, what use is it?) 

Blu-ray could become the 2007 Mets. They have a huge lead in the number of supporting companies. They have far more resources than Toshiba and its coalition of the willing for winning pricing, manufacturing volume, retail placement and marketing wars. On paper, this shouldn't even be a contest. 

But instead of playing aggressively and taking advantage of its advantages, the Blu-ray camp has been content to play a waiting game, a game of attrition, sitting on its lead, believing its opponent will simply tucker out. Instead, the aggressive underdog has made up ground (although in this analogy, I'm not sure if Toshiba is the Rockies or the Phillies) and has kept the game close. The word "squander" is beginning to be inserted into the next-gen format-war conversation. 

Lately, the Blu-ray camp seems to have gotten the message and has launched a big Blu-ray boosting advertising campaign. But consumers — many of whom either think standard DVD looks great already or believe that standard DVD is already high def — don't care what Blu-ray or Toshiba is doing behind the scenes. And if they do care, this whole format whoop-dee-do is keeping consumers from choosing either format.  

With the content side evenly split (it's pretty much boiled down to Spider-Man vs. Spock), the deciding factor for consumers is hardware price. And with its Crazy Eddie memorial Our prices are insane! policy, Toshiba has done something even FOX announcer Tim McCarver has deemed impossible — they've stolen first. And the longer Toshiba stays on base, the harder it will be for Blu-ray to get them off. 

But the Blu-ray camp has a great prospect in the minors. Instead of promoting him to spark the club, however, they're inexplicably keeping under-performing veterans in the lineup. Buried beneath this suddenly tiresome baseball metaphor, I am referring to a Blu-ray camcorder. 

Toshiba currently doesn't make a camcorder. And most of its attempts to get into the camcorder market over the past few years has not gone well. 

On the other hand, four Blu-ray deck makers also make and sell high-definition camcorders — Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and JVC. And Canon is a Blu-ray supporter as well.  

Toshiba doesn't make camcorders? And the top-selling camcorder brands are all Blu-ray supporters? Sounds like the bases are loaded with nobody out with Carlos Beltran, David Wright and Moises Alou coming to the plate. 

So, which of these Blu-ray-supporting high-definition camcorder makers makes and sells a Blu-ray camcorder that would help create an entire Blu-ray ecosystem for the consumer?

None.

The only Blu-ray camcorders extant are made by Hitachi.

Hitachi? (Insert Lewis Black "I'm shocked/confused" noise here.) They don't even make DVD players, much less Blu-ray DVD players. What in the wide wide world of sports is going on here? 

Blu-ray bulwarks Sony and Panasonic are instead futzing with AVCHD, whose DVDs can be played only in Sony and Panasonic Blu-ray players and no one else's, and let's not even discuss AVCHD on Memory Stick vs. SD. JVC is making hard-disk-drive-based, MPEG-2-based high-def camcorders, and Samsung has just started selling the HMX-10, a vanilla H.264 high-def flash-memory camcorder.

In other words, Beltran popped out, Wright hit into a double play, and the Phillies are in the playoffs and the Rockies are in the World Series. 

I'll leave it to you to figure out who the Red Sox are in all this. I just know it isn't Blu-ray or HD DVD.

Posted by Stewart Wolpin on November 7, 2007 | Comments (1)