The HD format war continues though now the battle is more about whether there needs to be a “format” or not. Discs are on their way out, we all know this is coming, but it may be coming even sooner than I’d imagined. The digital-haves may skip BluRay for movies and go straight to digital. The digital-have-nots may skip BluRay sticking with the regular DVD format until they become digital-haves. After all is the typical American home likely to invest in big HD sets and players sooner than they’ll get access to broadband and a computer? I sure as heck don’t know the answer to that one, though the geek in me wants to say the latter, but some average-joe instinct calls me back to the former.
These thoughts hit me as I was reading this article “When discs go the way of disco“, by John Murrell over at SiliconValley.com and it also brought to my mind why I haven’t yet bought a BluRay player (i.e. a PS3) or really gotten crazy on buying HD discs. I did buy a HD-DVD player attachment to my Xbox 360 and bought roughly 8 discs in the excitement before I realized just how much the same movies on the same physical media (plastic disc) were costing me over and above regular DVDs.
I’ll admit that over the DVD years I have accumulated quite a collection of DVDs ranging from movies to TV shows. I’d bet that my average price for those has fallen drastically to $10 or maybe even a little under. I keep my eye out for good old movies and shows on special and am a huge fan of the $4.99 special. Consequently, when I reached for that 9th or 10th HD-DVD at $24.99+ I balked and all purchases ceased and just as well as HD-DVD took a bullet to the brain-pan in the interim. However, I’m not all that interested in jumping on the BluRay bandwagon yet.
This certainly isn’t because there is no difference between a DVD and HD disc, there absolutely, definitely is. I purchased the most recent Harry Potter disc last fall which has DVD on one side and HD-DVD on the other. I accidentally started watching the regular DVD side and was very disappointed until I realized my mistake and the difference was remarkable. Remarkable enough to pay a premium for? Yes, but not a 60+% difference and certainly not for BluRay which is still adding features that HD-DVD has had all along.
Since I am a HD snob at this point, instead of buying discs, we’ve been recording HD versions of movies via PPV via DirecTV or via Xbox Live. I don’t get the “extras”, but really the extras on most movies anymore are really not interesting. Commentaries anymore seem to be more about the movie makers getting together and getting caught up with each other than providing any in-depth discussion of the content of their film. Of course this may be due to the fact that there really hasn’t been much in the way of great films for the last couple years… Sorry, back on topic. Consequently, for me the economics of spending $4.99 for a HD movie that I can watch whenever I want and repeatedly, but without owning physical media seems like a bargain compared to owning physical media of a movie I’ll probably not watch all that often after a couple years of its release for $24.99. Besides in a couple years BluRay discs will be back down to the $14.99 level with bargain discs beginning to appear. Maybe then, the economic calculation will change again, but then again I have over 2TB of storage on my network already so…
