Blu-ray Mounts Event Offensive
The gloves are off. Backers of the high-definition Blu-ray Disc format are staging a two-day offensive in Hollywood this week, touting their triumphs and offering previews of upcoming releases such as Cars, Ratatouille,, the "Die Hard" movies …
Context & Ripple Effects
The high-definition disc war has been deadlocked since at least mid-2007, when Business Week argued in 'In DVD War, Both Sides Could Lose' that mutual attrition was the likeliest outcome. The fight goes back further still: PC makers lined up against Intel's and Microsoft's HD DVD advocacy back in September 2005, when Dell and HP called their claims erroneous.
Against that backdrop, this week's two-day Hollywood event is Blu-ray switching from spec arguments to showmanship — previewing Disney and Fox tentpoles like Cars, Ratatouille and the Die Hard films to court studios and holiday shoppers directly. Notably, syndicated pickups from Ars Technica and The Inquirer chose to frame the story around reported progress on cracking Blu-ray's BD+ copy protection rather than the title slate, signaling where skeptics think the format's real exposure lies.
First-order effects
- Blu-ray's backers put exclusive studio content front and center for the holiday buying season, pressuring undecided studios and retailers to treat title availability — not hardware specs — as the differentiator.
- The event hands HD DVD an immediate PR opening, since same-week coverage is already questioning whether Blu-ray's BD+ protection layer can hold.
Second-order effects
- HD DVD's camp, which counts Intel and Microsoft among its supporters, is pushed into a counter-offensive on pricing and its own exclusives, escalating the marketing arms race Business Week flagged as mutually ruinous.
- Studios sitting out the war face costlier neutrality: backing both formats doubles mastering and DRM work, while picking one risks alienating whichever camp loses.
Third-order effects
- If exclusivity showcases and DRM durability become the decisive weapons, the winner will be determined less by engineering merit than by studio alignment and copy-protection resilience — a template consumer-electronics alliances may repeat.
- A prolonged stalemate keeps consumers parked on standard DVD, which the New York Times flagged back in December 2005 as the real casualty while both camps fiddled with format details.
The trend: The high-definition disc war is entering a holiday-season phase where content exclusives and copy-protection credibility, not hardware capabilities, decide which format survives.