- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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I'm against piracy, whether it's on the High Sea or the High Street - Adamson Rust
Blu-ray gets licensing boost
WHEN STEVE JOBS DESCRIBED BLU-RAY LICENSING as "A bag of hurt" recently, he obviously touched a nerve amongst the format's patent holders and licensees.
Despite winning the format war and consigning HD DVD to the Betamax bargain bin of tech history, Blu-ray hasn't exactly set the world alight. Sales have been dissapointing and low levels of early adoption have meant prices just haven't fallen rapidly enough to drive more mainstream consumer interest.
But a consortium of interested parties are now putting their heads together in order to take some of the pain out of Blu-ray licensing.
Panasonic, Philips and Sony are currently working with Blu-ray patent holders in order to set up a 'one-stop shop' for anyone wishing to use the technology.
Gerald Rosenthal, once a bigshot in IP at IBM, is fronting the the programme which will launch sometime in mid 2009 assuming, that is, all of the patent holders are willing to play ball.
"By establishing a new licensing entity that offers a single license for Blu-ray Disc products at attractive rates," said Rosenthal, "I am confident that it will foster the growth of the Blu-ray Disc market and serve the interest of all companies participating in this market, be it as licensee or licensor."
It's proposed that hardware manufacturers would be charged a flat licensing fee of $9.50 to install a player and $14.00 for a recorder. Disc makers would have to cough up 11 cents for a read-only, 12 cents for a recordable and 15 cents for a rewritable.
The cash would then be split between the various owners using complicated and undisclosed mathematical voodoo. µ
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I really liked the HD-DVD before the war was settled but hadn't bought either at the time. After the war ended, I bought a PS3 to use as my Blu-Ray player. I'm still waiting for the prices to come down. Maybe Toshiba needs to continue work on improving their technology and re-release it with lower priced movies.
My concern is about Blu-Ray in computers. For that, it's not just the cost of equipment. It's the DRM crap that has to get stuffed into the OS. This requirement needs to be removed.
are these people living in. DVD recorders cost twenty bucks. If bluray wants general adoption they'll have to sell recorders for twenty bucks, maybe not this year but definetly next year. So: that'll be $14 for the license, $2 for the hardware, $2 for transportation and packaging and $2 of profits to be split by all involved. If I was a manufacturer of hardware, frankly, I just wouldn't bother making bluray drives.
HD-DVD was great for what it could do at a minimal cost, compared to Blu-Ray players of the time. Again, prices really haven't dropped as much as they should and would have had, if the competition kept up. For your reference, a link from newegg for some Bl-Ray players.... http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&SubCategory=531&N=2100590531. The cheapest one on newegg costs about $219, which if you think that the format is now reasonably aged, seems a bit on the higher side.
Problem is, Blu-Ray consortium, they are more concerned with raking in the moolah rather than worrying about widespread adoption of the format. Economy of scale is what i'd like to preach to them money grubbing SOB's
Its too expensive. Once HD-DVD crumbled , Blu Ray free reign to rob the lot of us for cash.
Paying £20 for a copy protected limited use HD version of a movie is absurd.
Personally I can stay with the DVD version, just get smaller tv or stand further away and save 75% of the cost.
And you can make backup copies of DVDs you buy, very easily indeed...
And the illegal file sharing community will continue to boom while HD movies cost £20 each.
Given the choice of £20 in my wallet or £20 in someone elses wallet, I'll have it in mine...
I really dont see what all the fuss is about, Blu-ray might look good, but its just too expensive, DVD's work on everything, i know that if i buy a dvd film i can watch it on whatever i want -tv, computer, etc, but with a blu-ray you need to either buy a ps3 (really expensive) or a blu-ray player, which are well ott in price. It just isnt worth it.
Betamax was a vastly superior tape technology to VHS but VHS won out because it was "good enough" and a whole lot cheaper. I liked HD-DVD because it was "good enough" for the job and it had the promise of being cheap and backward compatible, This time Sony learned their lesson -- they forced the market using cash bribes to the studios -- but the result is an expensive, unfinished technology that is not backwards compatible.
A disaster all round. Maybe rationalizing the IP licencing features might make it a mass market technology. We'll just have to wait and see.
Martin, what a crock of crap you just posted. In what way is Blu Ray not backwards compatable?? it plays all exsisting DVDs just like HDDVD!! and cash bribes? the only on record cash exchanges were when Toshiba bought off paramount and dreamworks. your an idiot if you think both sides were not offering incentives to potential studios and hardware vendors.
Blu Ray is also doing better than DVD in its lifecycle and thats with a global downturn. I had HDDVD and i have Blu RAY either was good enough but Blu Ray won. Toshiba was cheap because it was running at a massive loss as there profit loss wright offs disclossed. Im just glad we have a HD format going forward, who cares what names on the tin, but stop the disinfo.
...how many luddites are reading a tech web site. Odd.
It's so so simple, dump BLU-RAY and bring back HD DVD. They will never learn to K.I.S.S
Interesting, wasn't there just an article last week about how well Blueray was doing and how the format has taken off? Now all of the sudden its the other way around?
On a side-note, I forget, are we entering Global Warming, or Global Cooling right now? And how about next month?