Tech Connect: Online Distribution a Reality?

While the debate and speculation rages on over the next generation DVD format- HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.

But, new formats aside, this Slashdot article, a new company is offering a service where one can download and burn the material to your own DVDs. The service works like other online rental services; the customer pays a monthy fee for unlimited downloads and from there one can burn them to DVD for play later. As the service is just beginning, the company, CinemaNow, only has a number of titles around 100 and they are not exactly A-list titles. But now is the important test now is to see if the service can be profitable. If it can be profitable on this level, then most likely, irregardless of the Next-Gen Format Wars just beginning, we could see the big Hollywood firms taking advantage of this or similar distrobution services.

So, how does this relate to the Anime companies? The actual retail costs of DVDs in the US is a point of contention among many fans. With consumers looking for the cheapest prices, often finding Internet retailers cutting MSRPs from single percentages to a full 1/3, and many US licensing companies facing minimal profit margins on individual disc sales, perhaps a method of online distrobution as provided by CinemaNow or similar service would be something to look into. Ideally, marketing to old fashioned retail stores, shipment, and packaging models would change completely and in many of their current capacities, be compltely eliminated from the cost structure as we know it. Though CinemaNow offers a monthly subscription, perhaps individual licensing companies could offer a "flat rate" per episode or cost for a batch of episodes, still dropping prices but at the same time increasing their profits on products. Should this movement gain popularity, especially in the tech communities which are frequently citing "outdated distribution models" and requests for more online distribution, this might be an important factor in continuing to pull the anime industry out of its current slump.

Tech Connect: HD-DVD or Blu-Ray?

This seems to be a topic sweeping tech circles and the Hollywood industry; in the anime community, it is being discussed mostly in theory. And I think many anime companies are taking the right stance towards the new formats: they seem to be waiting for a winner in the format wars before announcing new releases on new formats or transferring their current libraries.

A review of Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai is posted here on High Def DVD Digest[highdefdvddigest.com]. I found the article linked through this Slashdot article[slashdot.org]. According to High Def Digest's review, there is a gap between what the capabilities of the format are and what technology is available on the market. This is good for the format because there is still room for it to grow. Hot in its heels though, Sony is planning on releasing Blu-Ray two months earlier, according to Anime on DVD [animeondvd.com] according to a news post on 26 April. The new release is supposed to debut in June.

With the popularity of DVD coming only in the late 1990s as the true successor to the market-popular VHS videocassettes, many anime companies were starting to have DVD libraries by 2000; AnimEigo, as I remember, announced around this time that their entire library from there on out would be in DVD format. And with the new format, a competition for the market right of succession, it seems they're going to sit this out until that successor is determined.

If I can though, I would like to make a prediction about the format war. I personally think that HD-DVD will win out. Sure, it is technically inferior to Blu-Ray but it's not as if American DVDs (both Hollywood and anime) are stretching the limits of the format that warrant such a large gap in size between DVD and Blu-Ray (not to mention HD-DVD to Blu-Ray). Another feature HD-DVD has over Blu-Ray is the ability to be backwards compatible with current DVD players. So, while a new player will need to be purchased, an HD player will play both HD-DVDs and regular DVDs, thus making many collections not obsolete right off the bat, as was with DVD from VHS (until the dual unit decks were introduced). I think these two defining factors are what is going to drive the market towards HD-DVD; after all, even though Blu-Ray is the technologically superior, Sony has lost the format war to a technically inferior foe before.

None of this is to knock on Sony or Blu-Ray; to be honest, Sony is one of my favorite electronic companies. Also, I think Blu-Ray is a much better format for data storage due to their huge size and capacity. I plan on buying a Blu-Ray burner as soon as they become more affordable.