After going all touchy-feely in my last column, this time I’ll let the pendulum swing in the other direction and go all geeky on you. There was a seismic event in the admittedly small world of home video at the beginning of January when Warner Bros, the only Hollywood studio to release their products in both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, announced that they would drop HD-DVD after June, 2008. This possibly signals the end of the high definition home video war, something that I care about even though I suspect the majority of the world couldn’t give a rat’s arse.

Let’s step back and look at some history here. For every home video format since the dawn of time, there were always two competing formats. For videocassettes, there was Panasonic’s VHS versus Sony’s Betamax. Beta was the technically superior format but VHS won because it was the first to be able to fit an entire movie into a single cartridge.

Then came the 12-in videodisc and we had Pioneer’s laser system versus RCA’s ‘needle in the groove’ discs. Pioneer won that smackdown but the format never took off. Quality control, production problems, cost and the fact that most people thought they were just very expensive LPs meant that videodiscs were mostly confined to the collections of 40-year-old virgins and karaoke parlours.

In the late ’90s, the clouds parted, the sun shone, the angels sang and the DVD was born. At least that’s how you looked at it if you worked for one of the major Hollywood studios, because for them DVDs basically became a licence to print money. People loved them so much that, for a few years, the studios couldn’t make them fast enough to keep up with the demand.

Did you know that initially there were two separate DVD formats? Toshiba came up with the one we all know and presumably love but Sony had one as well. It never came to market because Warren Lieberfarb, the president of Warner Home Video, managed to convince the heads of the other studios that going through yet another format war would be counterproductive to the acceptance of the format. History shows he was right because the DVD was the greatest success in the history of consumer electronics.

At any rate, less than 10 years after DVDs, we now have high definition DVDs. These discs can store up to 10 times more
data, resulting in a format with significantly better video and
audio quality.

Now you’d think that everyone would have learned their lesson from the successful introduction of DVD but, once again, we’ve got two formats, Blu-Ray from Sony and HD-DVD from Toshiba. The thing is, the winner stands to earn billions of dollars from patent royalties. And Sony, having lost the format war twice, wasn’t going to go down without a fight. This meant that Hollywood studios were split roughly down the middle with Paramount and Universal releasing HD-DVD while Sony, Fox and Disney released Blu-Ray discs. Only Warner Bros, the 900-lb gorilla of the home video world supported both formats. But at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, Warner announced that, starting in June, they would release their high def titles only on Blu-Ray.
Warner did this in an attempt to end the format war. In 2007, sales of regular DVDs started to plummet and sales of HD were not large enough to make up the difference. The perception was that people were holding off on buying regular discs because they knew there was a better format out there. But at the same time, they weren’t buying the new formats because they were waiting for the dust to settle and for one HD format to be declared the victor. In the weeks following Warners’ announcement, sales of HD players, which in the US had been split roughly 50-50 between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, shifted to 93% Blu-Ray. Paramount and Universal both claim they will still stick with HD-DVD but, really, the writing is on the wall.

All well and good, and perhaps 2008 will see a change in sales figures. Except that a lot of people are tired of buying atoms (plastic discs) and would rather buy bytes (digital downloads), and those people are waiting for someone to come up with a sales model that makes sense, whether it be Apple’s iTunes or someone else. In the US, most of the major players are also offering various ‘on demand’ channels on cable or satellite, including high definition options. Not to mention everything else vying for our leisure-time attention, including video games and massively popular internet sites ranging from YouTube to Facebook.

And, to be honest, my suspicions are that the general public either doesn’t give a shit about the increased quality offered by HD DVDs or doesn’t want to invest the money in new players, TVs and audio systems required to get the most from this new format. I believe that DVDs succeeded in no small part because they physically looked completely different from what had come before while Blu-Ray discs look essentially like standard DVDs. Higher definition audio formats, both SACD and DVD-A, were both met with total indifference from the general public; why should there be general acceptance of a higher definition video format when most people think that standard definition DVDs are good enough? In a world in which most people are happy enough with the fidelity offered by compressed MP3s or the low resolution images on YouTube, why do they need high definition video?

This idea smacked me in the face recently when a friend told me how happy he was to find the film 2001: A Space Odyssey on VCD. VCD is about as low fidelity a medium as you could find. And the thought of watching Stanley Kubrick’s meticulously filmed images on a smeary VCD rather than a super-sharp Blu-Ray was like comparing a Big Mac with Kobe beef. But, let’s face it, more people eat Big Macs than Kobe beef and are quite happy to do so. For this friend, VCD will be good enough.

I have just watched the Blu-Ray version of 2001 myself. It’s a spectacularly good transfer, the closest I’ve come to the experience of seeing the film in 70mm in cinemas when it was first released, and I won’t be able to go back to watching it any other way. But I realize that I’m not normal in this regard and that, even if I consider 2001 to be a visual masterpiece (because it has less than 20 minutes of dialogue spread across its 160-minute running time, it is a supremely visual experience), for most people, just seeing the movie is enough. If my friend doesn’t care that the stars aren’t perfectly twinkly and that the details of the space ships aren’t quite crystal clear, who am I to tell him he’s wrong?

And, honestly, while I love watching some films in high definition, it doesn’t really matter for most of the product that’s out there. While Roger Deakins’ Oscar-nominated cinematography for The Assassination of Jesse James may cry out for Blu-Ray, something like The Office is still going to have me laughing my butt off even if I’m watching it on an iPod.