WITH Warner Brothers' defection last month to the Blu-ray camp, Sony would appear to have won the battle with Toshiba over which format—Blu-ray or HD DVD—is to become the ultimate high-definition replacement for the venerable DVD.

Five of Hollywood's eight big studios, which account for 70% of the home-video market, have now opted (or, not to put too fine a point on it, been bribed with barrow-loads of cash) to release their high-definition prints solely on Blu-ray discs. The move has sparked a fire-sale of discounted Toshiba HD DVD players, with an entry model going for less than $100.

AFP

The hard sell begins

The movie studios have been in a state of panic since their DVD sales—which account for nearly half the industry's $45 billion annual revenue—fell off a cliff last year. They are desperate to revitalise home video sales. Most are praying Blu-ray will do the trick.

But it can't make up the lost revenue over night. Between them, Blu-ray and HD DVD sales account for only a tiny portion of the DVD market. Hence the urgency to get the format war settled quickly—so the full weight of the industry's marketing muscle can be put behind a single standard.

Pundits have applauded Warner's move as a crucial step towards breaking the deadlock. The thinking is that Toshiba will now go quietly into the night. But there are good reasons why it won't.

The most obvious one is that nothing decisive can be resolved until the next big selling season gets underway, and that's not until next Christmas. A lot of things can change between now and then.

At the moment, Blu-ray discs are outselling HD DVDs by a margin of two to one. But that's largely because Sony included a Blu-ray player in its new PlayStation 3 (PS3) game console. Most new PS3 owners buy a couple of Blu-ray films out of curiosity. But a PS3 costs $499, not exactly cheap, and most owners have better things to do with their consoles than watch movies.

Excluding video-game machines, Toshiba has outsold the whole of the Sony camp in terms of actual players in living rooms, thanks to its lower prices. In other words, Toshiba has a bigger installed base of committed videophiles.

Retailers love them, but would prefer that one or other of the formats would just go away. The format war has left consumers confused over which to choose, with many resolving the issue by refusing to commit to either. Retailers complain that over half the people who purchase HDTV (high-definition television) sets don't bother to buy high-definition video players to go with them. By all accounts, they are unlikely ever to do so.

That's largely because the “upscaling” features built into today's HDTV sets have got so much better at artificially boosting the resolution of ordinary DVDs. Apart from sprucing up the video signal more effectively to reduce the electrical noise and optical defects, upscaling is no longer limited by the native resolution of the HDTV set itself.

A year or so ago, the best you could buy was a 720p set, with the screen's 1,280 columns and 720 rows of pixels being refreshed progressively (that is, all at once at every cycle). The alternative, 1080i, was a fudge that worked by having half the rows in a screen of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels refreshed in one cycle, and the other (interlaced) set of rows during the next cycle.

By flipping rapidly between the screen's two alternative sets of lines, interlacing aims to trick the eye into thinking it is seeing a higher resolution than is actually present. But the price paid is a slightly jerkier image and a flickering that can cause headaches and eyestrain. That's why computer monitors abandoned interlacing for progressive scanning years ago.

The native resolution of the vast majority of HDTV sets today is 1080p. As such, the set's screen can now handle the highest resolution generated by its scaling electronics. To the average viewer, an ordinary DVD played on a modern HDTV is not only a huge improvement over the picture on a standard TV, but practically indistinguishable from that produced by a Blu-ray or HD DVD disc—and all for half the disc cost and no extra piece of video gear.

Hence the lack of enthusiasm for either format. And the longer mainstream consumers find upscaled DVDs good enough, the more likely it will be that some other technology will emerge to eclipse both Blu-ray and HD DVD. Already a couple of alternatives are limbering up.

One candidate is the thumb drive, the non-volatile memory stick you plug into a computer's USB port. Their storage capacity has soared over the past few years from megabytes to gigabytes. Industry insiders expect that, within a few years, a 32-gigabyte USB drive capable of holding as much as a Blu-ray disc will cost about the same as the latter does today. And it will be more portable, more rugged, easier to play and recordable to boot.

But before Moore's Law can work its inexorable magic, the telephone companies will start pushing their own alternative. Over the past few years, firms such as Verizon and AT&T have been laying fat optical pipes over the “last mile” from their local telephone stations to people's homes. In what they call a “triple play”, they aim to bundle television and broadband internet access along with telephone services in order to slow the inroads being made in their own business by the cable-television providers.

That's only half of it. Verizon's FiOS (fibre-optic service) can deliver raw data at speeds up to 50 megabits per second. That's twice the as much as needed to deliver the video quality of a Blu-ray or HD DVD disc. AT&T's U-verse isn't far behind.

Both see high-definition video as the key to beating the cable providers, which can't match the phone companies' ability to provide massive bandwidth to individual households. The cable industry's new DOCSIS 3.0 technology can transmit data at a whopping 160 megabits per second, but the bandwidth has to be shared by all the households on the same cable loop. As a result, few cable subscribers can get more than five or six megabits per second—nowhere near enough to pump high-definition video into the home.

What has become clear is that Blu-ray and HD DVD are both interim solutions—if even that. They are marginally better than upscaled DVDs, but neither will stand much of a chance against fibre's ability to deliver high-definition video on demand. Meanwhile, neither comes close to giving the kind of “immersive reality” that vision engineers drool over.

The human eye can discern over 500 pixels per inch horizontally and vertically (say, 26,000 by 14,500 pixels on a 60-inch screen). To achieve true immersive reality—the “killer app” that consumer electronics makers see on the horizon—requires displays a dozen times sharper than today's HDTV sets.

The Japanese have made a start. The Ultra-HDTV technology that NHK, Japan's public broadcasting network, is currently investigating has 16 times more pixels (7,680 by 4,320) than an HDTV set. And that's just the beginning. The betting is that both Blu-ray and HD DVD will go the way of the VHS tape, as ever sharper images begin to grab our attention.