Some proposed new features to DVD may make BD's job even harder.
OPINION: DVD revival - 3/7/2008 12:20:00 PM - ContentAgenda.com - CA6539511
OPINION: DVD revival
By Paul Sweeting
March 7, 2008
In the aftermath of Blu-ray’s victory over HD DVD in the high-def format war, many commentators predicted Blu-ray’s reign would be short lived, soon to be done in by digital downloads. But as Sony officials know, Blu-ray supporters’ biggest immediate challenge is to get consumers to make the leap from standard DVD to high-def.
“The battle really begins now to move people away from DVD to Blu-ray,” Sony Electronics president Stanley Glasgow told reporters at his semi-annual roundtable last week, according to VB sister publication TWICE. “We have a lot of work to do now, so we are not gloating. Upscale DVD players have gotten better and better. We need to explain the additional feature sets, PIP, BD Live and other features.”
It may not only be upscaling DVD players that Blu-ray finds itself up against, however. Barely missing a beat after abandoning HD DVD, Toshiba and Microsoft, two of that format’s principal backers, have turned their attention to an attempt to overhaul the standard DVD format by adding a host of new features and functionalities.
At the most recent DVD Forum meeting last month, Toshiba got itself reelected as chair of the Steering Committee for another two years, leaving it well-positioned to guide future developments in the format.
At the same meeting, according to a summary posted on the Forum Web site, the committee approved the formation of a new working group (dubbed WG-12) “to study and specify network applications and related network specification of DVD Forum formats, make recommendations for better interoperability and functionality of network-connected DVD Forum specified devices and content and communicate on relevant recommendations with other standard creation organizations.”
What that means in non-Forum legalese, I’m told by sources familiar with the plans, is that the new working group will look for ways to incorporate some of the same next-gen functionality developed for HD DVD into a DVD 2.0 format, including the HDi interactive layer and the advanced network connectivity.
One of the co-chairs of WG-12 is Microsoft, which played a major role in developing those capabilities for HD DVD (the other co-chair is Panasonic).
Toshiba and Microsoft are also working through the DVD Copy Control Assn., which oversees the CSS encryption format used on standard DVDs, to try to breathe new life into the old format.
Microsoft was behind a proposal to DVD-CCA—originally floated two years ago but revived in modified form late last year—to introduce “managed-copy” to standard DVDs, under which consumers would be able to copy their DVDs to a hard drive under carefully DRM’ed conditions, for streaming over a home network.
Since then, Microsoft has largely abandoned the effort, after meeting multiple objections from the studios.
The studios have since introduced their own proposal for managed-copy, but it met a cool reception from other members of DVD-CCA, in particular the computer and software companies, who felt the studios’ more limited proposal would not attract enough consumer interest to make it worth implementing.
There the matter sat until last week, when Toshiba unexpectedly raised the issue on a conference call, according to several knowledgeable sources, signaling an apparent new interest on the part of the CE company in managed-copy.
Whether Toshiba will have any better luck getting the studios to go along with a more comprehensive managed-copy proposal than Microsoft had, my sources have their doubts.
But clearly, Toshiba is doing everything it can to try to keep the DVD format relevant, now that it no longer has a horse in the high-def sweepstakes.
Whether anyone would actually build a machine that includes all the new functionality under discussion, even Toshiba, depends entirely on whether enough studios signal a willingness to release DVDs that take advantage of the new capabilities.
And that will likely depend on how quickly Blu-ray takes off.
