I’m interested to hear the USA side of it, however. And I fully understand that at these conferences, each side is trying to present their best front. I’m sure you’ll do a good job of following the IFA for the HD side of it, Pravin, and I look forward to reading what the HD camp has to say.

Not saying that BD has something to be depressed about or that the presentation contain outright lies, but that these kinds of talks are pretty formulaic.

CEDIA comes up very soon and we’ll get to hear about USA numbers, which is more relevant to us.

Trolling? I don’t even know what that is, and I’m a college student. But, seeing as how I’m pretty new to the whole debate between HD and BR, I guess I understand. The whole format war is interesting to me, and since I love my Playstation 3, it’s pretty obvious who I’m going to support.

I have to hand it to Bret for keeping things interesting. There are some really bad trolls on the internet, and they’re orders of magnitude more disturbing than Bret.

for example, they’re adding a new feature to the site called “u-shop” which i don’t know what it does yet.

and they’re adding another new feature so you can share you favorite scens from one of your HD DVDs with a friend with an HD DVD player/.

oh, and Bret, stop trolling.

I read someplace that using either format for backups is rapidly becoming a moot point because hard drives today (compared to when these formats were launching) are already getting so big that you’d need numerous discs to perform a full backup. When a common hard drive was only about 160GB, a few discs didn’t sound like a bad idea. But as drive sizes have gone up, we end up needing to look beyond HD DVD and Blu-ray to something that can store around 1TB on a single disc (which will still end up being smaller than the hard drives in use at that time).

Hmm, I wonder if that will be the next high-def DVD war…

About the Studio Canal… GE owns Universal, and GE makes plastics that supply Blu-ray plants. Everybody wants to make money how and where they can. I think Universal operates as its own business entity and that the various owners probably keep their hands-off unless there’s some big reason to interfere.

It’s like seeing a few ants roaming around. Since it’s only a few ants and it doesn’t look like they’re causing a problem, you let them go. But when you see a strong line of them going somewhere, that’s when you are more likely to do something about it. Similarly, high-def discs are a big deal to us, but they’re just a small phenomenon in the overall home entertainment market. Remember, combined the two formats only now started outselling VHS. I’m sure Studio Canal and other interested parties will leave Universal alone unless or until there’s some good reason to speak up.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=455

I love it how Paramount in the article above is trying to defend their decision without saying that they received $150 million and coming up with reasons otherwise. I think that with the IFA approaching, blu ray is looking just as good as they ever were, even without the support of Paramount. Samsung, Sony, Daewoo, Philips, Sharp have all announced new players. Loewe has announced a new player 6 cm tall, and there are two new members to the BDA.

I’m sure you’ve heard Pravin that Studio Canal is now supporting blu ray, instead of being hd exclusive. Since Studio Canal owns 20% of Universal, HDs longest exclusive studio, what do you think the impact of them supporting blu ray, especially overseas?