From the archive: Blue shift - Blockbusters go with Blu-Ray
The announcement that Blockbuster US has decided to go with Blu-Ray for the next generation DVD format might seem at face value as the decisive cavalry charge in the war.
Don’t believe it. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (the rival format) represent two different philosophies in home entertainment. HD-DVD may be on the way out to live a cult existence alongside Laserdisc and Betamax on the eBay of the future but what it represents won’t be giving up the fight anytime soon.
Sony, the main force behind Blu-Ray, wish to continue the dominance of the physical format that has dominated how most people watch film since the first days of video. Microsoft, the backers of the HD-DVD, are banking on the power of the internet to prompt a paradigm shift in how we interact with film media content. And hopefully (for them) consumers will be using Microsoft products all the way through this transition.
It’s actually rather strangely that Microsoft has been drawn into the format battle in the first place as HD-DVD has only ever been seen as an interim format. Tied into Microsoft’s XBOX360 (which can play HD-DVD with an expensive add-on, masking the XBOX360’s apparent price advantage on the PS3) HD-DVD was has always seemed like a half-hearted riposte to the ideal of a continuing physical format for films. The game Microsoft is playing ties into how the networking (and the big one - the internet) has changed everything.
Already in its infancy, in the age of broadband this has hit the home DVD rental business hard as consumers have realised that an internet run DVD rental business, such as I Love Film and all the imitators, offers the discerning film watcher far more choice. In the same way that Amazon brought a massive catalogue of books to everybody with an internet connection and a postal address, so too did online DVD rental. Customers used to complaining that their local DVD store never had quite what they wanted in suddenly themselves with access to almost every DVD ever released on a subscription payment model, not per individual item.
On the other end of this spectrum the ease with which digital media can be copied and distributed has created massive changes particularly with regards to file-sharing and piracy which are beyond the scope of this doodle of a post.
Currently television is being redefined as viewers are being given the opportunity to select their own programming: watching what they want, when they want. A next step is download-on-demand which has been happening for years but is hampered for the mainstream by technically running a computer into a television. Once everybody’s internet connection runs into their television why bother going to the video store in the first place!
Back to Blockbusters’ decision to go with Blu-Ray it makes sense for almost every reason imaginable starting with the colour and alliteration (Blockbusters’ traditional livery is rather appropriately also blue). Its little wonder that a company founded on the video rental/retail model of watching film would choose Blu-Ray, a format that attempts to renew the physical value of film as a retail product - something that the benefits of network computers (i.e. the internet) utterly demolishes and redefines.
Although it offers better picture quality and sound than HD-DVD, Blu-Ray doesn’t take into account that the rules of the game have changed. Similar to all those 1950s cinema innovations designed to fight the loss of cinema audiences in response to the rise of television, another home video format merely regurgitates the past rather than admit the possibilities of what could be.
So, briefly restraining my Brave New World technocratic impulses, perhaps what is really happening is the continued fragmentation of media enabled by networking. Film watchers will want a prestige product for whatever they are told are their favourite films (S.W.A.T. and Speed for Blu-Ray apparently until the catalogue grows) just like Blu-Ray but they may also want a cheaper more easily available format with far greater choice just to watch.
Does this sound like anything familiar? Yes it’s the split between cinema and television all over again but this time with how we watch films at home.