Note to Chinese HD DVD: Olympics 2008!
by Pravin on August 11th, 2008 in articles.
Did you watch the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on your HDTV the other night? What an amazing show! It was the kind of event that especially shines in high-definition. Watching a few sporting events over the weekend was somewhat hit-and-miss since not everything has been in HD (at least for me), but having your team win makes up for that a little.
So here’s my advice for the forthcoming Chinese-owned HD DVD format: bundle an Olympics highlights disc, or even a box-set, with each of your players. Based on national pride alone, you’re bound to sell at least a hundred thousand units, and word of mouth will bring in the next batch of customers. Communist governments are typically into heavy self-promotion, and I’m sure the government can even be talked into helping susidize this deal big-time. A box set of these Olympics could very well be your Planet Earth, and maintain the same kinds of high ranking in the most loved HD disc sets of all time. An exclusivity deal for this Chinese box set might help your sales momentum carry you forward for quite a while.
What will you need to do beyond that? If you followed the format war in the western world, it would appear that being influential with the studios is a key requirement. For example, we read in a recent Forbes article that Sony’s participation as a movie studio in all the movie studio politics helped keep Lionsgate on the Blu-ray side. But that’s the west, where consumers theoretically drive the market. It’s not that way in China, where studio politics can be trumped by real politics.
In case readers didn’t know, one of the driving forces behind the Chinese HD DVD format is China’s desire to own as much of the technology as possible. They don’t want to be restricted by, or share profits with, all sorts of foreign-owned patents and licenses. This fact alone means that the CBHD (China Blue High-Definition) team gets some government help, and I’m sure that there are many Chinese citizens who are equally happy to show national pride and root for their hometown team instead of the foreigners.
Some analysts point out that studios haven’t signed on to support CBHD, and that Blu-ray is the inevitable winner even against this format. I think they’re ignoring one major difference between China and the rest of the world: the Chinese make plenty of their own movies and music to not need to care about everything that comes out of Hollywood. In fact, even the Indians make plenty of their own music and movies to not need to care about the movies that come out of Hollywood. Is that the same for you and I in the west? Absolutely not. Our entertainment is totally dependent on what Warner, Disney, Universal, Sony, Paramount, etc. put out. Thus, the outcome of the format war here was deeply affected by these Hollywood studios and their control over our western content.
While studio politics might be a hill of beans in the USA or Europe, it don’t mean a thing in Communist China, where the government gets the first and last word. Movie and music piracy is a fact of life there, and people barely care about purchasing original movies in the first place when cheapo copies are freely available.
Heck, I meet plenty of people in this country who have that same attitude. The difference is that copyrights and other intellectual property laws are observed with a little more reverence in western countries. That means that the governments of those countries might actually get a few police officers to care that Johnny Consumer is making his own copies, buying some cheap ones, or getting them off the internet.
Hollywood makes a tiny amount of money in that nation of over a billion potential customers, and the Chinese government does little to fix that situation. They’re polite and appear to give a crap about studios and copyrights, but the Chinese authorities would just as soon keep more of the profits in their homeland. The government decides who gets to play ball and what those rules are. They choose how much time Blu-ray can spend with the ball and how much time their own team will get.
So, CBHD guys: get your act together and put those players out, and look into that Olympics bundle right away. Only time will tell if your format war has the same dynamics as it did in the west. Your hometown advantage can only work for a little while, and you’re gonna have some competition from locally manufactured Blu-ray players soon. And don’t forget that previous attempts to establish homegrown standards over western ones haven’t necessarily panned out.
HD DVD fans: this is not really anything to do with us because it’s primarily designed for use by Chinese in China. I doubt that we’d even get any firmware upgrades (if that’s all it takes) to make our existing players use CBHD discs, and even then, it’ll be mostly for watching Chinese content.
Here are other recent articles about CBHD in case you want to learn more about it:
- CH DVD Details Revealed, Warner on Board? at FormatWarCentral, works with translation of an article from ZDNet China
- Chinese HD Format: It’s blue, but not “Blu-ray” at Ars
- HD DVD lives on in China as CBHD, but will it have content? at BetaNews
August 11th, 2008 at 11:13 am
You are right? Huh? What?
Sounds to me like you are still bitter about HD loss. Or that you have little to write about.
Here’s what you could do to make your web site better and grow in readers; start to convert from HD DVD to Blu Ray and inform your readers on sales of current HD DVD movie sales; introduce your current reader to movies that are no longer available to HD DVD users (Transformers) to Blu Ray titles now coming available. The Olympics will be available on Blu Ray so focus your writings on this.
Jeff B
California Soundworks
August 11th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I’m not bitter about it Jeff. Reread the article and point out if I’m trashing Blu-ray some place in there.
As for the other ideas, something along those lines is already in the works but I haven’t had a chance to do a bunch of it.
August 11th, 2008 at 11:33 am
No you are not trashing Blu Ray at all. You just need to finally break down and convert. By the way I have been a blue fan for working on two years, and have followed and read your web site many many times. Always good information.
Jeff B
August 11th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Thanks Jeff for your Blu input in this Red matter!
August 11th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I got my PS3 over a month ago, but it’s primarily been a Metal Gear Solid 4 workstation. I need to get some more first-hand Blu experiences under my belt before I can start writing some useful articles about it. But that won’t be under this Red banner, and more likely to be some kind of sister site.
August 12th, 2008 at 8:05 am
I have a question that may sound stupid. Do these Chinese HD discs play on the Toshiba HD player. Also, If one was to get regular HD discs in China, would they play, or are they region coded? I ask because my girlfriend is in China watching the Olympics, and wondering if it would be worth it for her to find some cheap discs?
August 12th, 2008 at 8:15 am
CBHD discs may be physically compatible with HD DVD players, however they’re likely to contain data that can’t be properly decoded without a firmware update (which we’re unlikely to get). Remember, this Chinese standard eschews as many of the typical western trappings as it can, which means it uses proprietary compression that did not exist on HD DVD titles.
I don’t know if regular HD DVD discs are available in China or ever were, but your girlfriend might find something. Recordable HD DVD media never really got off the ground, so I’m sure she won’t be finding pirated movies, that’s for sure. Since region coding was not implemented, any discs she finds are likely to work just fine, however the audio and subtitle options may be different on the Asian version of a disc than for North America.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
HD DVD still is better than Blu-ray for simple reasons, like price and better players. But eventually that *may* come to an end. China could, of course, choose to affect the course of future events in the high definition optical disc arena in such a way that HD DVD continues for many years rather than slowly (but at great prices for the very well-off adopters who are not at all bitter because they *won* in more ways than any Blu-ray/spending-lots-of-money-for-1080p individuals did) not get replenished with new titles or future players. Transformers looks great on HD DVD and it costs a whole lot less than the equivalent Blu-ray title. Loving my HD DVD and laughing at Sony as it soaks its customers for high definition movies!
So, China, what’s it going to be?
Change the course of world history and decide the real winner of the next-gen hi-def optical media format! This match ain’t over.
Give us a Chinese format high definition video disc, with HD DVD compatibility of course, and make the world a better place!
August 14th, 2008 at 10:22 am
After debating about it in my mind, I purchased a XBOX HDDVD player that plugged into my HTPC. With 6 movies I paid $114. 6 blu-rays (without a player) would have cost me about $120-150. At rates of 50-75% less than blu-ray titles, I’ll continue to buy HDDVDs. Yes, I do have a ps3, but can’t see spending those high prices to expand my bluray collection beyond the 1 that came with the ps3. This China thing might make things interesting and provide a future supply of HDDVD. Maybe microsoft will just open source the HD codecs and take sony and bluray down.
August 15th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Okay,
One of the best players on the market for $399 is the Sony BDPS350. It is half the size, runs 4 times faster and plays just about all of the codecs (except DTSMD).
Still better than that is the PS3 of course! Nothing is held back (notice sales have overcome 360), and 87% of these owners watch Blu Ray movies on it (over 14 million sold).
If you check www.blu-ray.com and look at the movie titles, you will see pricing and sales. All of these titles are sold through amazon, which many sell for less than $15 each.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Monthly sales figures on products that people only buy once are misleading. People don’t buy a new console every week or every month, so once you’ve “voted” that’s it for a long time. These monthly figures only appear to show you how popular something is. And until the 360 and PS3 have equivalent installed user bases, it’s a little tough to directly compare one console’s popularity over the other. The only thing that’s for sure is that the 360 is the #1 console for 360 fans, and the PS3 is the #1 console for PS3 fans.
The PS3 is the best Blu-ray player deal out there. Yes, you can get cheaper machines, but they’re not going to be as handy as the PS3. Not for another year, at least.