So, as I’ve repeatedly mentioned, I’m in the process of getting my whole HD system setup. One of the steps in that process is getting an HD movie player. While I’ve already decided to go with the PS3 I don’t really have anything against the HD DVD format (except that stupid Universal won’t release stuff on Blu-ray. Stop that.).
Anyway, as anyone who watches a fair number of movies will tell you, buying every single movie you’d like to see gets expensive fast. With these next-gen video discs clocking in at $20 or more (with list prices near $35-40 for some titles) this is even more true.
That’s why humanity invented the video rental store. As we’ve been through with Chuckles, he’s not really a fan of the chain stores. For my purposes (and in order to make this post applicable to more than the 3 people in the same metro area as me) I’ve decided to focus more on the national rental stores.
As independent local chains have their own unique advantages so do larger chains. Perhaps the most important of those advantages (for their local store) is the need to position themselves in the marketplace. In order to maintain their hardcore customer base, they need to be seen as a chain that supports an individuals rental habit.
Besides the traditional brick and mortar retailers I’ve mentioned so far though, the environment has obviously expanded in the past decade with a much larger group of online disc rental outlets. This includes Netflix and most recently Blockbuster’s new online arm.
So for the purpose of temporarily acquiring high definition video content for home enjoyment, what is the best method?
Well, for the moment it seems that online will be your best bet. Since neither Blu-ray nor HD DVD has received much acceptance in the marketplace yet (people keep talking trash about the PS3 and most Xbox 360 owners don’t want to plunk the $200 for the HD DVD add-on), your best bet is probably online.
The first place I contacted about the availability of HD discs was Netflix. From browsing their site (I’m not a member so I didn’t have complete access) I learned that they had “over 200 Blu-ray titles” and “will make the full range of HD [DVD] titles available at the moment they’re introduced.” Wanting more specific numbers, I contacted the reps at Netflix to get them. While I haven’t gotten a response on their total number of titles, I did get this: “Netflix has more than 70,000 titles on standard DVD format and all of the titles that are on HD [DVD] and Blu-ray.”
I don’t know how they define ALL titles for HD DVD and Blu-ray so I don’t know if they’re including small discs indie studios or pornography in there or what. If they ever get back to me with an exact number I will update this post (or if anyone here is a Netflix member and enjoys counting that will work too). With regard to HD disc popularity when compared to traditional DVD their response was simply that “there’s not that much demand for the HD [DVD] and Blu-ray format.”
Next I hit up the Blockbuster Online site. From there I was able to gather that as of yesterday they had 149 Blu-ray titles and 162 HD DVD titles. I spot checked online availability of 26 Blu-ray titles and found that only 9 were currently available, 13 had short waits, 1 had a long wait and 2 (which were released on Blu-ray a while ago) were listed as “Coming Soon.”
I did the same with 26 HD DVD titles and found much different results: 20 available, 2 short waits, 2 long waits, and 2 “Coming Soon.” Clearly if you’re looking to get your HD viewing on from Blockbuster it seems that HD DVD has significantly higher availability.
When I asked the reps at Blockbuster about the demand for the different formats the contact their said that they “have not broken out the rental performance of Blu-ray and HD-DVD titles.” Adding later, “We will continue to monitor the high def DVD adoption rate and hardware penetration.” Blockbuster would obviously be using this data to decide how much more capacity is really needed. I’d assume if they see continued demand on the Blu-ray stock that they would start keeping more copies on hand.
Of course the one advantage that Blockbuster has when compared to Netflix is their traditional local stores. Blockbuster has been using this to their advantage for their recent promotion of the “Total Access” program that will allow you to return movies you have rented online in exchange for other movies at the store.
While it has been noted that Blockbuster’s turnaround on DVDs returned via mail can be slower than Netflix, the ability to drop them off at the store and get immediate credit for having returned them circumvents much of this problem. Additionally, the extra rentals at the store that do not affect your online rental limits are a nice bonus for customers.
Still, if one is interested in renting HD movies, what good do exchanges at stores do if the stores don’t carry HD movies? To this end Blockbuster felt the need to inform me that as of right now, “Blockbuster is carrying high def DVD, both Blu-ray and HD-DVD, in approximately 250 stores in the U.S. for both rental and retail.”
This caught me by surprise since I had not heard anything about it. I called 4 stores in the DC metro area and none of them carried HD discs. The employees I spoke to seemed genuinely surprised when I informed them that a number of Blockbusters did. When I followed up with Blockbuster about finding a local store that carries the discs, they suggested that “the best bet is for the customer to contact their local store to determine if they carry Blu-ray or HD-DVD” so I hope you have better luck finding one than I did.
I also emailed the corporate communications office at Movie Gallery (the parent of Hollywood Video) but have not yet received a response. I’ll just assume that they are not going to be pioneers in the whole HD video field. I’m sure there are probably more online disc rental sites that I didn’t investigate but since I don’t know anyone who uses something besides Neflix or Blockbuster those were the only two I went with.
Please note that I have avoided the entire HD download paradigm that is starting to appear (720p movies on Xbox 360 and Amazon’s unbox service) because I’m not a fan of digital downloads that can’t be transferred. If it seems like it’s an area of interest I might follow up on it later though.
February 22nd, 2007 at 10:21 am
Isn’t unbox a service that also scans your entire hard drive for digital media content and then reports all of that back to Amazon for the DRM thugs?
I logged in to my Netflix account and clicked the HD DVD tab in the genres menu bar on the right of the screen. Netflix requires me to enable this feature in my account.
“High-definition movies will be available to you at no additional cost!”
Basically, I have to keep affirming that I want to be able to receive Blu-Ray or HD-DVD and restating that “yes, I have a compatible player.” One thing I noticed was the HD setup they show as an example has a still from Les Pact des Loups (The Brotherhood of the Wolf) which I love. Five movies from my queue are available in Blu-Ray: Identity, Unforgiven, Bullitt, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Good Night, and Good Luck. By adding HD-DVD to my queue, I have the same movies to upgrade to HD or Blu-Ray plus Brokeback Mountain and The Deer Hunter.
So, it would seem that I have both good taste and now totally screwed myself, as I do not possess either HD format player or TV.
February 22nd, 2007 at 11:35 am
can you turn HD off once you’ve turned it on? Perhaps if you tell them your Blu-ray and HD DVD player got into a fight and consequently neither one works now.
Also, I’ve never used unbox or bothered to learn anything about it so I can’t really comment on what the software does.
February 22nd, 2007 at 2:26 pm
I read about it on some website somewhere, probably PennyArcade.
I was able to turn off both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats without disturbing my queue at all. I was unable to obtain a total number of movies available in either format, however. There does appear to be a bounty.
February 22nd, 2007 at 7:31 pm
In your Netflix queue you can click on the arrow next to the format of the disk and change HD-DVD or BD back to SD, and they will send the SD DVD rather than the HD-DVD or BD without affecting your queue.
And DEN, don’t diss Universal for not releasing Blu-Ray because Sony, Disney and Fox are only releasing on Blu-Ray for the moment. Sony is trying to use its copyrights to shoehorn a monopoly in hardware which would be considered an antitrust violation if anyone were in the White House other than the Bush scoundrels.
In my view the PS3 Blu-Ray player is crap. It doesn’t look nearly as good as the stand alone Blu-Ray or stand-alone HD-DVD. I bought the Toshiba HD-DVD player for $429 figuring that if HD-DVDs disappear, I wouldn’t have lost that much.
February 22nd, 2007 at 10:11 pm
I didn’t really want to talk about it but since Clif brought it up here’s my position on HD-DVD. It’s about the same as Blu-ray but it has less space and its preferred encoding format is VC-1. VC-1 is owned/patented by Microsoft as is the system used for interactive menus on HD-DVD.
Also, I only single out Universal because if they’d just support Blu-ray then we wouldn’t even be having this format war. I don’t think there’s a significant enough difference between the two formats that it matters which one wins.
My personal preference is the one that sticks it to MS a little bit more.
Regarding the Sony ‘monopoly on hardware’ that you mention. The Blu-ray group has the following companies on its board of directors: Apple, Dell, HP, Hitachi, LG, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Sun Microsystems, TDK, Thomson, Twentieth Century Fox, Walt Disney, and Warner Bros. So it’s not “just Sony.”
As far as the PS3 Blu-ray player being crap. I couldn’t tell you. I just got my PS3 and just finally got the HDMI cable for hooking it up to my TV today as well (1080p video games look NICE) but I still haven’t had a chance to calibrate it. Whenever I get a Blu-ray in the mail (or break down and just buy the Departed) I’ll get it all configured. What I’ve read online though, doesn’t give the PS3 bad Blu-ray scores. The couple other blurbs I’ve read hasn’t sounded bad either (I just can’t locate them at the moment).
What makes the PS3 nice is that it does support the 1080p output of Blu-ray and it has HDMI 1.3. Whenever I get a new tuner that also supports HDMI 1.3 I’ll be able to get the highly detailed/uncompressed audio from Blu-ray and SACD discs.
Also, while you say you paid $430 for HD DVD which isn’t a huge investment, I paid $600 for the PS3 but will get at least $80 of that back through the sale of my PS2 and in the event that Blu-ray doesn’t end up hanging around, I’ll at least be able to use the thing to play games and possibly even download movies if it comes to that. I was torn on whether to get an Xbox 360 or PS3 but the lack of HDMI on the 360 is a dealbreaker since my TV can only get 1080p over HDMI.
February 23rd, 2007 at 6:11 am
I didn’t say it was just Sony. But Sony’s efforts to shoehorn its copyrights into its hardware sales is thought by many to be an antitrust violation. There seems to be some movement in this direction by the EU competition authorities, I’ve been told.
My guess is that the format war will persist and will be “solved” in the end by multi-format players, pretty much the same way the DVD+R, DVD-R war resolved itself. The LG combo player is the first step in that direction.
February 23rd, 2007 at 6:21 am
The thing is MS is doing exactly the same thing with HD DVD. So I feel like ‘one side is trying to shoehorn something into the new format’ isn’t something that’s unique to either format.
I’ve also always been under the impression that Microsoft is intentionally trying to fragment the market so that digital downloads become more ubiquitous and they have a chance to leverage their position as a DRM provider to take a large portion of the market.
Like I said though, I’m not really that particular to either format. I’d just like one of them to go away quickly so that HD discs can become more ubiquitous. If HD DVD ends up the preferred format at the end of the day I won’t be that upset, it was only a small premium in my video game system.
I just want to be able to watch all the HD movies on the same player and just Universal starting to release movies on Blu-ray would make all these issues go away.
February 23rd, 2007 at 8:12 am
Also, sorry if I sound genuinely annoyed here. I just get frustrated when HD DVD is portrayed as the ‘good guys’ and Sony as the ‘bad guys.’ They all have pieces that are owned by various corporations who stand to make a bunch of money if their standard is adopted.
That’s why I just want to get it over with so that we can stop dealing with corporations fighting with each other and just move onto me getting to watch all movies in 1080p.
February 28th, 2007 at 8:15 am
FIGHT THE POWER!