No PS3 For You - Hollywood Considers Grounding Sony Over Blu-Ray Debacle

October 19th, 2006 Davis Posted in Movies, Video Games, HDTV DVDs |

With Hollywood fat cats beginning to realize that 2006 may see the DVD reaching it’s peak in popularity, they are starting to get nervous and have started to show signs of turning on each other. In the latest sign that not all is right in Hollyweird, Variety is reporting that movie executives are upset about being misled by Sony over the PS3/Blu-Ray timeline and are actually beginning to consider alternatives to the Blu-ray / HD-DVD stalemate.

Over the last few years, Sony has continually used the PS3 as a way to convince Hollywood studios to embrace a senseless format war and to get them to refuse to license their movies to the HD-DVD format. There is no doubt that the PS2 has been the most successful video game system ever. With a full year headstart on the Xbox, a slate of exclusive video game titles and a strong international presence, Sony was able to dominate Microsoft and Nintendo in the 2nd generation console wars. Having built this lead with their PS2, Sony has been so aggressive in negotiations over the format war, that it has sparked an anti-trust investigation within the EU.

After sucessfully convincing several studios to boycott the HD-DVD format, industry executives are finally beginning to show cracks in their resolve after Sony has experienced delay after delay after delay in deploying their upcoming third generation console.

“”The more problems the PS3 has had, the more chips Sony has pushed in,” says one senior videogame industry exec. “At this point, it’s a huge gamble.”

In other words, a lot more players in Hollywood will be watching the launch of the PS3 than typically pay attention to a new videogame console.”

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again, until the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD studios can figure out a way to end this format war, I will boycott any HDTV DVD system out there. If that means that I won’t be getting a PS3 as a result, then I’m absolutely fine with that. Why the studios can’t license films on both formats is beyond me, but when companies engage in this sort of monopolistic chicanery, they will never receive any of my hard earned entertainment dollars.

The good news for consumers though is that with all of these delays, the studios may take a second look at this issue and see the benefits of either agreeing upon an open standard or agreeing to supporting both formats. Interestingly enough, in a post analyzing many of the issues brought up in the Variety article, The Home Theater Blog mentions that his contacts have indicated that we could see at least one studio agree to dual distribution by the end of this year.

“The A2 and XA2 along with the Xbox add-on will put HD DVD into insert-number-here additional homes and from there who knows where this will go. One thing’s for certain however HD DVD has established a “beachhead” new window regardless of what Mike Dunn has to say on the subject. The net result of this may surprise even the most ardent Blu-ray supporters; I’m told to expect at least one Blu-ray exclusive studio to announce neutrality, before the end of the year.”

Reading this makes me hopeful that we could see an end to this stalemate sooner or later, but until we see the PS3 deployed on a large scale, I think many studios will take a wait and see approach when it comes to the issue of whether they should be format agnostic. While I’d like to see this technology begin to gain widespread adoption, until we see a solution where consumers aren’t put at risk of buying obsolete equipment so that studios can profit, I will also take a wait and see approach.