AfterDawn: News

Panasonic executive promises busy Blu-ray holiday season

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd's Kazuhiro Tsuga, has promised at CEATAC that Blu-ray backers will go on a binge of price cuts and promotions during the holiday season to push the format. Matsushita is known worldwide for its Panasonic brand of consumer electronics products, and is an avid backer of the Blu-ray Disc format. Tsuga doubts that the "format war" will be seen for any more than another year, with this holiday season being a big decider.

"The BD (Blu-ray disc) companies will try to do our best to promote Blu-ray," he said. "The studios want us to put money in to promote it." He added: "By the end of the year, you will see good products with very good promotion." The Blu-ray backers are also working to make the drives slimmer to make them more suitable for notebooks and PC use.



Matsushita has brand new Blu-ray recorders coming soon, which will record up to 18 hours of Full HD content to a dual-layer Blu-ray disc. Tsuga does not approve of dual format players however, which have been produced by LG and Samsung, and referred to the idea last year as "stupid, stupid." This year he said that Matsushita still has no plans for such a device.

As for HD DVD's recent exclusive support from Paramount Pictures, Tsuga downplayed the deal saying it only lasts 18 months and said that studios are only moving to HD DVD, "because big money came" to them.

Source:
News.com

Written by: James Delahunty @ 4 Oct 2007 17:45

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• 5 comments

• nobrainer

  who cares as the ppl don't, both blu-ray and hd-dvd suck dvd is the format of choice. aacs DRM has been destroyed but blu-ray still has the anti consumer DRM that allows studios to run any code they deem necessary to combat piracy in third lv countermeasures.
  
  and with technology like this: http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/11362.cfm who is going to bother to supposedly "upgrade" to hardware that is crippled with DRM.
  
  BD+ is good for consumers!
  
  http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/04/1836249&from=rss
  
  Originally posted by link: "The first two Blu-ray releases to hit the market encrypted with BD+ (an extra layer of protection designed to stave off hackers) are wreaking havoc on innocent consumers. As High-Def Digest reports, this week's Blu-ray releases of 'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer' and 'The Day After Tomorrow' won't play back at all on at least two Blu-ray players, while load times on other players (including the PS3) are delayed by up to two minutes. 'The most severe problems have been reported on Samsung's BDP-1200 and LG's BH100, which are both said to be incapable of playing back the discs at all. Less catastophic issues (error messages and playback stutter) have been reported for Samsung's BDP-1000. The discs appear to play back fine on all other Blu-ray players ... Calls placed to both Samsung and LG customer support revealed that both manufacturers are aware of the issue, and that both are working on firmware updates to correct it. Samsung promised a firmware update within 'a couple' weeks, while LG said an update is expected in 3-4 days.'"
  

  Track What Companies Have Edited Wiki http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/ (very heavy load atm)

  4.10.2007 23:04 #1

• REAM

  Quote:who cares as the ppl don't, both blu-ray and hd-dvd suck dvd is the format of choice. aacs DRM has been destroyed but blu-ray still has the anti consumer DRM that allows studios to run any code they deem necessary to combat piracy in third lv countermeasures.
  
  and with technology like this: http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/11362.cfm who is going to bother to supposedly "upgrade" to hardware that is crippled with DRM.
  
  BD+ is good for consumers!
  
  http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/04/1836249&from=rss
  
  Originally posted by link: "The first two Blu-ray releases to hit the market encrypted with BD+ (an extra layer of protection designed to stave off hackers) are wreaking havoc on innocent consumers. As High-Def Digest reports, this week's Blu-ray releases of 'Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer' and 'The Day After Tomorrow' won't play back at all on at least two Blu-ray players, while load times on other players (including the PS3) are delayed by up to two minutes. 'The most severe problems have been reported on Samsung's BDP-1200 and LG's BH100, which are both said to be incapable of playing back the discs at all. Less catastophic issues (error messages and playback stutter) have been reported for Samsung's BDP-1000. The discs appear to play back fine on all other Blu-ray players ... Calls placed to both Samsung and LG customer support revealed that both manufacturers are aware of the issue, and that both are working on firmware updates to correct it. Samsung promised a firmware update within 'a couple' weeks, while LG said an update is expected in 3-4 days.'"
  How many average joes give a toss about or know anything about DRM. most people buy dvds to watch not rip, so why should it matter when the majority couldnt care less.

  5.10.2007 03:30 #2

• stumpied

  They average consumer may not care, but if the above mention problems persist, you can be certain the will not be happy.

  5.10.2007 05:31 #3

• BludRayne

  Because of BD+, I will now support HD-DVD. Thank Sony for another dead format.

  5.10.2007 08:09 #4

• borhan9

  This nothing new. this will all take its time.

  15.10.2007 22:48 #5