A new HD home movie landscape?

I have been following the competition in high definition DVD formats this past year and the recent Paramount/Dreamworks announcement about exclusive HD-DVD support brought an interesting thought to mind.

In the gaming console market there has always been a division with certain exclusive titles such as SoCom on the PS2 platform and Halo on the Xbox platform. If you wanted to experience both of these "block buster" titles you had to own both brands of console. In fact it is well known that some such big name titles are given financial incentive by the console manufacturers to keep certain titles platform exlusive or to provide early exlusivity, even from developers without hardware ties.

So, what if we are in for a similar situation in the new high definition movie market. A landscape where if you want to see a high definition movie from the studio that produced Transformers you'll have to buy an HD-DVD player and if you want to see the latest Spiderman movie you'll have to buy a Blu-Ray player.

If there's one thing we can extrapolate from human history it's that humans with much power will generaly want more power. If they are given free reign they will pursue the path of most personal gain reguardless of the fact that alternate paths may be similarly close but offer greater gain to humanity. Not always true but quite often.

Given past freedoms in the VHS and DVD worlds it would be a pain to get used to such a new landscape. But I think the concept is not unprecedented.

A new niece

My little sister just had her first baby this week. So I have a new little niece. It's very cool. Apparently she was a big baby girl. 8 lbs 15 oz heavy and 20 inches long.

Check this out (1 day old)...



Don't get me wrong, she still feels like she might break if you were to hold her wrong, but everyone says she's large for a newborn. She's also strong for a newborn. Apparently they aren't supposed to hold their head up and look around. But she does a pretty good job of it.

I'm just waiting for her to get old enough to keep her eyes open more than a couple minutes each day and to start making facial expressions. :-)

Jeff

I have a new account with GrandCentral that I can now experiment with. The features are quite facinating. For example the web call button.