Ordinary Gweilo

Spike’s column in BC Magazine this week muses on one possible reason why HD-DVD & Blu-Ray have failed to take off:

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.

Well, maybe more than just looking different – DVDs replaced video tape and (in Hong Kong at least) laser discs because they were  smaller and more convenient.  The picture quality on laser discs was good, but after lugging two quite heavy discs home you would need to get up from your chair at least twice to turn over and then swap the disks.  No need to do that for a VHS Video tape, but they were easily damaged and had to be rewound after use.  In Hong Kong, DVDs had another advantage – multiple languages and subtitles.

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray don’t offer any equivalent advantage over DVDs (apart from the box being fractionally smaller), so it’s all about picture quality.  And maybe Spike is correct and people don’t care too much about that:

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.

Ah, VCDs.  Pretty much an Asian thing as far as I know.  As with laser discs, a complete film will not fit on one disc, and the subtitles are not switchable (though you can have a choice of two audio tracks), but the picture quality varies from murky to poor.  However, if you only plan to watch a film once (particularly if it isn’t going to win any awards for cinematography – i.e. most HK movies) why not save money?  

Which certainly doesn’t auger well for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.  Presumably the strategy (if there is one) is that they are currently for ‘early adopters’ only.  Then in a year or two the prices of discs and players will fall and they will move into the mass market, gradually replacing DVDs.  By which time we’ll be downloading whatever we want to watch from iTunes or its competitors.   Great strategy, guys.