Friday, March 17, 2006
Ars Technica: Blu-ray Discs Too Expensive to Make?
Posted by Damion Chaplin in "HARDWARE" @ 09:00 PM
"Blu-ray and HD DVD players will both be available in the next couple of months. Blu-ray will launch with a mere handful of titles, with production to slowly ramp up through the rest of the year. (HD DVD will launch sans movies.) However, some studios are going to be on the sidelines for a while. One of those is Image Entertainment. CEO Martin Greenwald is on record as saying that the cost of releasing movies on Blu-ray is going to be prohibitively expensive."
Wasn't this the reason HD-DVDs were supposed to be better? Because they're cheaper to produce? They don't mention HD-DVD in the article. I'm thinking that these smaller production companies are going to be the real decider here. The big studios will gripe about the new costs but in the end will absorb it (probably by passing it down to us), whereas the smaller companies would just as soon stick with standard DVD until one format or the other becomes cheap enough. Would you agree, of do you think one format will be adopted quickly (like DVD was) regardless of new costs?
Wasn't this the reason HD-DVDs were supposed to be better? Because they're cheaper to produce? They don't mention HD-DVD in the article. I'm thinking that these smaller production companies are going to be the real decider here. The big studios will gripe about the new costs but in the end will absorb it (probably by passing it down to us), whereas the smaller companies would just as soon stick with standard DVD until one format or the other becomes cheap enough. Would you agree, of do you think one format will be adopted quickly (like DVD was) regardless of new costs?
