On Monday The Shelf posted about plans to launch a new lower cost HD player in the New Year. It seems that the race to find a superior format is heating up again after The Shelf posted about the rival DVD formats in August.
Today Michael Bay has once again expressed his support for the Blu-ray format after announcing on his blog that a Transformers 2 movie would not be in the pipeline due to Paramount signing exclusively to its rival HD. Mr Bay later swiftly u-turned after apparent pressure from Paramount regarding its decision to back HD.
The latest criticism from the Transformers director it not so much expressing his opinions on either format, instead he launches into a conspiracy theory detailing how Microsoft is doing its utmost to ensure neither format comes to dominate, instead paving the way for digital downloads.
On a quote from his website Bay said “What you don’t understand is corporate politics. Microsoft wants both formats to fail so they can be heroes and make the world move to digital downloads. That is the dirty secret no one is talking about.”
He goes further to say “That is why Microsoft is handing out $100m checks to studios just embrace the HD DVD and not the leading, and superior Blu-ray. They want confusion in the market until they perfect the digital downloads. Time will tell and you will see the truth”
Bay clearly has an allegiance to Blu-ray, but besides the fact that a little more data can be held with this format, we are yet to see an offering from either format that looks better in hi-def. If anything the Transformers in HD actually booted the appeal of HD, with superb built in interactivity.
Although the allegations of HD payoffs are unfounded, both formats do make funds being available to boost their appeal. It is true however that Microsoft support downloading as a preferred alternative. Apple has a similar stance although they do back Blu-ray as a studio format.
I definitely think that movie downloading has a future, and as mentioned in yesterdays post is and industry estimated to grow to 350 million euros by 2012. As yet however bandwidth limitations are playing their part restricting the download industry for now, especially considering one HD movie is enough to use up a month’s download allowance on some UK ISPs.
It’s my opinion that one day data storage discs will become obsolete, where we will view movies on demand in our preferred formats, not the studios. For now however Blu-ray and HD have a very real battle to resolve, and my concern is that if a dominant format doesn’t come through both format, as well as consumers, will miss out.
