March 10, 2008

Beyond Blu-Ray's Victory

By Jonathan Tombes

The emergence of a leading standard for high-density, optical disc storage has obvious repercussions for consumers and network providers.

The first no-brainer is that content will shift to the Blu-Ray version of the 405 nm blue-violet laser storage technology and that sales will follow. (The HD DVD format, which also used blue rather than red lasers, lost out after Toshiba announced three weeks ago that it would no longer develop and manufacture HD DVD players and recorders.)

Research from MultiMedia Intelligence that we posted two weeks ago is predicting a dominance of Blu-Ray IP-enabled devices by 2012. More near term, in a post today on the engadgetHD Web site, Ben Crawbaugh is betting that that surge of titles into the Blu-Ray catalog will push it over 90 percent market share for the first time ever by the end of next week.

Buying (or renting) these high-density DVDs will be high-definition television (HDTV) set owners, many of whom first unwittingly encountered Blu-Ray as they pondered flat-screen sets on the show floors of consumer electronics retailers.

Into the mainstream

The expectation that HDTV content from network providers will look as good as those images spinning off a Blu-Ray drive at 35 Mbps sets up one of the "ugly" aspects of the ongoing HDTV transition that we noted in January.

Yet whatever the delta between the content that cable, satellite or telco providers can offer and what presents on the latest DVD player, the appetite for those brilliant images is only going to increase.

"HD is going to become very mainstream now," said Neil Brydon, product marketing manager for Motorola's IP Video Services unit.

Speaking of the three groups of network providers that are positioned to serve that critical mass, Bryden said that whether it's MPEG-4 AVC via direct broadcast satellite (DBS), or MPEG-4 AVC encoders in the IPTV space or MPEG-2 via switched digital video (SDV) to the cable market, each has "the technical capabilities to deliver the signal cost effectively."

"The cable operators have a number of different options to get more efficiency," Bryden said. "Ultimately, they will move toward MPEG-4 AVC."

One part of several solutions aimed at easing the transition will be to take in MPEG-4, decode it and then re-encode it to the legacy MPEG-2 set-tops, he added. That contrasts starkly with technology available for two decades, when at its advent HD "was science fiction."

"There was no way to deliver it," Bryden said. "It really took a long time for it to become a reality."

- Jonathan Tombes