Most people know the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD format war ended with the unceremonious concession of HD-DVD to Blu-Ray in January of 2008. This was evidenced by the production of HD-DVD players and discs ceasing within the following six months. What most people don’t know is that the war is not over yet. CBHD, also known as China Blue High Definition, has risen from the ashes of what was HD-DVD. CBHD is very similar to HD-DVD in disc size and manufacturing techniques, with some differences in how the video is encoded and played back as well as programming format. Now what is it about the new Blu-Ray vs. CBHD battle that you should know, and is CBHD a real contender?
First of all, Blu-Ray is expensive to manufacture. There has been no real competition to Blu-Ray since HD-DVD went bust, but by the same token, Blu-Ray hasn’t been exactly flying off the shelves either. Since winning the format war the price of some players have dropped (more due to the influx of vendors than direct competition), but the discs are still fairly expensive to manufacture and as a result, purchase. Studios aside, hardly anyone is willing to pay the exorbitant fees that come with Blu-Ray replication. There was an expectation that the media would have been cheaper after being on the market so long but the price really hasn’t changed much. At a corporate level Blu-Ray has an audience mostly for tradeshows and other large format presentations, but when it comes to large-scale manufacturing the costs have been too prohibitive for most corporate uses.
Second, CBHD is less expensive to manufacture. Like HD-DVD, existing replication machines can be retro-fitted in order to make the cost of manufacturing cheaper than Blu-Ray, which requires all new equipment.
Third, the Chinese government is backing CBHD over Blu-Ray in order to provide cheaper entertainment to the Chinese people in these tough economic times. Warner Brothers, realizing that English is a 2nd language in China, started creating some of their titles in CBHD and as of September 2009, Universal Studios and National Geographic followed suit with announcements that Paramount and BBC/Discovery will be doing the same. At this point CBHD is already ahead of Blu-ray sales in China.
Most assuredly this got the attention of Blu-Ray, which decreased the cost to manufacture in June of 2009. So does this make CBHD a real contender? Possibly, but only time will tell for certain. Of course, it is also only a matter of time before HVD (Holographic Versatile Disc) is on the market with its uncompressed video and enough storage to hold 200 DVDs worth of content, but that is a blog for another day.
