Posted on 05/06/2006 12:41:32 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A major video game conference next week could prove pivotal for a multibillion dollar war over high-definition DVD standards brewing in Hollywood.
While most gamers are heading into the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) hoping to view the latest and greatest in video games and consoles, a key subplot will be Sony Corp.'s plan to use the PlayStation 3, the newest version of its market-leading video game console due late this year, to get its Blu-ray high-definition DVD standard into homes.
By offering DVDs with far more capacity than current standard DVDs, studios hope to breathe new life into the $24 billion home video market. But their failure to use a unified format has paved the way for a costly battle similar to the VHS/Betamax war that caused widespread customer confusion in the late 1970s through mid-1980s.
There are two rival next-generation DVD standards, including Sony's Blu-ray and HD DVD, championed by Toshiba Corp..
While Blu-ray has drawn more support among Hollywood and electronics firms, HD DVD has garnered an ally in software giant Microsoft Corp., which plans to offer an external HD DVD drive for its Xbox 360 game console that will turn it into a high-definition DVD player.
The Xbox 360 hit stores late last year, and is the first of the next generation of game consoles offering high-resolution graphics and more realistic play.
DFC Intelligence, a market research firm based in San Diego, California, forecasts that the worldwide video game market will grow to around $42 billion in 2010 from $28.5 billion in 2005.
"The next move in the Blu-ray/HD DVD competition will be in the game industry. What Sony and Microsoft decide to announce publicly or to dealers at E3 next week will be key," said Richard Doherty, an analyst with research firm Envisioneering.
Microsoft has not given a shipping date or pricing for its HD DVD add-on disc drive, while Sony has not yet announced pricing for the PS3, which is due in November.
A widely expected price of $499 for would make the PS3 competitive with or cheaper than most stand-alone HD DVD or Blu-ray players. Toshiba has released an HD DVD player priced at $499.
"If Sony says it will sell the PS3 for $499, then people may wait until November to buy a PS3. If it doesn't give a price, then it might help in the sale of HD DVD players" in the mean time, said Doherty.
The high-end Xbox 360 package currently costs about $399 without a next-generation DVD player.
HD DVD titles have been trickling into stores since mid-April along with the first HD DVD players, while the arrival of the first Blu-ray format titles and hardware are now expected in June.
Video game analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities sees the DVD standards war determining the winner in the current video game console battle instead of the other way around.
Sony's decision to allow Microsoft to grab first-mover advantage with its Xbox 360 launch in November was "almost certainly" the result of Sony's desire to dominate the high-definition DVD market, Pachter said in a recent report.
Based on his assessment that Sony will win the high-definition DVD war, Pachter predicted that the PS3 would again be the dominant console at the end of this console cycle, although he predicted Microsoft would capture about 42 percent of U.S. and European combined next-generation hardware sales through 2007.
Microsoft's much-anticipated Vista operating system, to be available in early 2007, is also slated to support HD DVD, which will boost the installed base of HD DVD technology in PCs.
In the article mentioned at post #20, price of $250 mentioned...also mentioned that BFG was going to offer a card, ASUS also...and Nvidia has cooked up a deal with physics middleware develeper Havok ...
The NV/Havok deal is pretty weak: it allows users with SLI systems to offload physics calculations to the second GPU, thus nullifying the main advantage of SLI since you can't use the dual cards for GPU and physics calcs at the same time (and the quality of the phsyics on the second GPU isn't nearly as good as on the Ageia PPU.)
The Asus card is available now with GRAW bundled; BFG to follow very soon.
I dont think either standard will go anywhere in DVD sales.....sales are tanking
now as it is. Who is going to invest in new gear?
How are ROM prices doing these days? Given how costly many video games are, and how dense and cheap flash is getting, I would think there would be some advantages to returning to the good old days of video game cartridges. True, a 1GB cartridge can't hold as much data as a DVD, but having data be readily available without long delays could reduce the amount of data that was required. Whereas CD and DVD video game machines tend to wear out or break, there are lots of Atari 2600's that are over 20 years old but still work great.
There's no need for a physics calculation unit on the PS3; developers can devote a Cell SPU to the task, problem solved.
The Inq didn't specify between nm processes--they said that Cell yields are horrible, period, regardless of die size.
If I didn't know better, I'd say The Inquirer and Register are both well-done satire.
DVD sales are tanking? That's new to me. The format's incredibly successful. If sales are down recently, that would probably be more due to the lack of any decent movies worth buying, rather than a rejection of the format.
The problem with HD-DVD/Blu-Ray detractors is that most of them don't understand that it will take years just to resolve which format is the "true" next-gen DVD, let alone replace the current DVD format. DVD itself launched in 1997, without a format war, clearly meant to be the successor to VHS... and didn't gain widespread acceptance until 2001-2002.
Regardless, there's a long-term need for Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, and the sooner they launch and the sooner one wins, the better.
Uh, yeah, except that I think most can infer when IBM flat-out atated not too long ago that yields at 90nm were swell (which isn't much of a surprise given that the tech for it is very mature) that they were, indeed, referring to the yields at the smaller size (which, in all likelihood, is true given the complexity of the Cell architecture.) That beind said, sure, the Inq is known for every-so-slightly exaggerating things on occasion, *cough*.
There has been a slowdown for more than a year....
Even bigger news, is that Mexico is #2 behind the US in bootleg sales....not China which the studios have been claiming year after year.
Not really. The advantages of either over the existing DVD format are miniscule compared to the advantages DVD had over VHS.
Yes, really. The advantages DVD had over VHS are irrelevant to the need for a higher-capacity DVD, especially when you consider the storage requirements of HDTV.
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