Blu Ray vs. HD DVD

Seth Shapiro — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 06:39:09 +0000

One of the realities of conducting diligence in digital media is that you shovel and enormous amount of information into your head for a job, and, for a period, become an expert in that particular patch of land. One of the other realities is that you wind up doing another job rather quickly. One of the by-products of that fact is that your cognitive faculties get adept at dumping a whole mass of information just as soon as you don’t need the info anymore. It’s the only way to make room for the new, and has the additional benefit of saving you from focusing on info which will be obsolete within 18 months anyway. The patterns and rhythms of that information remain. And if you go diving back into the same bucket of arcana, a lot of it always comes back. Which is a long way of saying that I studied the two competing high def DVD formats extensively 18 months ago, and it was pretty clear that Blu Ray was just a better technology. It was more expensive, which gave Microsoft and Toshiba a reason (good or bad) to fight it with their own McFormat, but it was bigger, smarter, more extensible, and just better at most of the things that one would buy a high def product for. Bottom line, it felt like another case of Beta vs. VHS, in which a superior Sony format is threatened with extinction largely because it came from Sony. So it was good to see that better product score the decisive win with Warner’s recent decision to go with Blu Ray. Like the beating with a stick of major label DRM, this is a good and sensible market decision. Amen.

EMI steps up

Seth Shapiro — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 06:54:05 +0000

All you haters, eat crow. On the heels of Jobs’ pointed comments about the Big Four labels and DRM, EMI has announced that it will sell unprotected tracks, at 256 kps (double the standard 128), at the iTunes store and elsewhere. Apple’s press release is here but general coverage is everywhere. This offering will apparently apply to everything in EMI’s (parent of Capitol and others) catalog except The Beatles. Admittedly, both companies had their own motives: EMI has major management headaches and is dead last among labels, and Apple is under pressure by the EU to open up its Fairplay DRM to competitors. But it’s a good thing for consumers, and for the industry as a whole. Chalk one up for progress.

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Blu Ray vs. HD DVD

EMI steps up