New Blu-ray Movies Announced

Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Lions Gate, and Paramount have announced their exciting Blu-ray lineup. The release dates are still yet to be determined. With twenty titles from Sony Pictures, twenty more from Fox, ten from Lions Gate, and quite a few more from Paramount, Blu-ray looks as though it's going to start off with a bang.

[HaHa]

damn that's a lotta love blu-ray is getting ;)

[achira]

blue ray is the future !!!

[kingboy]

Blu-ray needs to begin it`s debut now

[Sexius Maximus]

I'm all about advances in technology, but I'm not about to spend $35-$45 on a freaking movie. Check Wal-Marts website, they have Blu-Rays, and they are way too spendy. It makes you wonder how much it will effect the PS3 game prices (hopefully not much, considering their games probably won't break the 9 gig marl anyway)

[MissAubrey]

NOT!

[Patrick]

Sure beats the heck out of HD-dvd, How many did they launch with? 5! and thats still all they have. The future is blu!

[BOOSTIN]

notice how all those blu ray movies are by sony pictures and other companies owned by sony. thats why there are so many titles in blu ray. how many film companys does M$ own? and 40$ a pop? (walmart prices) i'll pass

[VirtualGamer]

20th Century Fox, Lions Gate, and Paramount? That's news to me. Your right about the price though 40 bucks is a bit much. I checked and the price for Blu-ray seemed to be $30 to $40 and HD-DVD was $25 to $35 at Wal-Mart The Blu-Ray group have to make sure they are priced the same if they want to win the war. Be interesting to know who sets the price? My guess is each individual movie studio. Even with DVD's I have seen some pretty big differents in prices depending on which movie.

[pRo loGic II]

Legal agreements, intellectual property issues and technological pride will likely keep the two camps backing incompatible next-generation technologies from coming together in the near future, executives and analysts said.

"Until everyone agrees to check their egos at the door and help the consumer, there is nothing we can do about a universal product," said Peter Weedfald, a senior vice president of marketing at Samsung North America.

HD DVD and Blu-ray are competing video and storage formats for succeeding DVDs. While some movie studios said in mid-2005 that they were open to merging the two formats, by late summer, such talk had fizzled out.

Meanwhile, the technological world is bitterly divided. Sony, Samsung, Philips and Dell are among the Blu-ray backers. Intel, Microsoft and Toshiba are on the HD DVD side. Hewlett-Packard has said it will support both contenders.

Pride and ill-will seem to play a significant part in the debate. As in the old Betamax-VHS debate, both sides believe they have each found the formula that more perfectly suits consumers' desires.

Steve Kovsky, an analyst at Current Analysis, recalled a meeting in Tokyo last year at a major Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer. A reporter asked about a "universal" player. The executive leading the tour blew up and called the notion "stupid."

"Japanese executives in general are very political, so this was very surprising," Kovsky said. "Technically, it is possible...but at this point, it doesn't look like it will happen, which is a shame, because it will hinder adoption."

But the conflict goes far deeper. The rules that govern the organizations touting the different technologies currently bar manufacturers from combining the two standards into a single drive, Weedfald said.

"The conundrum is that you've got two different camps. You've got licensing issues, you've got trademarks, you've got copyrights," Weedfald said. "You can't just be on the Blu-ray side and say, 'We will put HD DVD in there,' and the reverse is true."

Samsung may make a separate line of HD DVD players to complement the Blu-ray players it plans to release later this year, Weedfald said. This would allow Samsung to support both formats, although not in a single product. The company, however, does not have current plans to do so, he said.

Return on invention
Royalties also play a significant role, said Rudy Provoost, CEO of Philips Electronics. The companies behind each standard hold patents and expect to be compensated for their inventions. Philips, Sony and the others behind the CD standard eventually garnered hundreds of millions of dollars from that invention.

"There are so many players. There is a lot of intellectual that went into this, and companies like Philips and Toshiba and Sony will all look for a return on investment," Provoost said. "That is what makes it a challenging debate. It's like the CD days. Everybody looks for a fair reward."

Philips currently does not have HD DVD on its product road map. In the second half of 2006, the Dutch electronics giant plans to release a Blu-ray player and then follow up in the first half of 2007 with a player that can record CDs, standard DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

The negative repercussions of the war between Blu-ray and HD DVD could end up being even more expensive than the conflict between Sony's Betamax and VHS in the mid-1970s. Back then, consumers who bought Betamax players found themselves saddled with an expensive player and a dwindling supply of movies released in the Betamax format.

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In the current conflict, if Blu-ray wins out, for example, consumers could find themselves being forced to upgrade computers with an integrated HD DVD drive earlier than anticipated, or to buy an external Blu-ray device. Similarly, if people buy HD DVD players, forget buying a Dell PC, which will come with Blu-ray.

"From a consumer perspective, the best thing would be one format," Provoost said. "I don't know if that will be a reality. Eventually, you will have to follow the logos." He added, however, that polarization between the two groups could narrow.

To help consumers, most studios will pop out movies in both formats. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, the laundry list of movies coming out this year on these formats is almost identical.

"It's too early too tell" which will win,

[darktangent]

One of the major selling points of the Blu Ray that is allowing it to have greater support than HD-Dvd is that Blu Ray has better security measures (google for exact features.) But what happens when you tell a hacker that something can not be hacked? You simply encourage them work harder at proving you wrong. M$ found this out as in less than a year someone has found out how to play copied games on a Xbox 360. Now if the Blu Ray security measures are cracked what will happen to it support? Will it stay exclusive even though the major reason for it perhaps winning the format wars has been lost. The bottom line is someone will break into this format and when they do I dont think the movie production companies will shell

[cloud360-7th_account]

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[cloud360-7th_account]

PS3 Era
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