My 2 cents on one aspect of the format war

First off, all information below is fromindustry insiders at the avsforum. I don't have the time to sift back through all of the pages to provide links for each, but you are more than welcome to. Here we go.........

Whatsome you guys don't get is that Blu-ray is not ready for mass production. Did you know that only Sony has the facilities toproduce BD-50 discs? And on top of that there are only two, and are only capable of producing 4-5 million discs per month. The BDA pushes BD-50's so much. but they can produce very little. Think about it. A movie like 300 can sell as many as 5 million in its first week on standard DVD. So it would take a whole month to make the discs and absolutely nothing else can be made during that time on BD-50. So why don't we see more BD-50 replication plants? It is estimated that they can cost more than $50 million to build. A BD-25 replication plant costs around $10 million, and actually there are only nine of these. So you have 11 total replication plants currently runningto make supposedmillions upon millions of discs for computers, video games, and movies. Nobody is building anymore right now since the format war is going on. Hate to invest all of that money if the technology went under.

HD DVD on the other hand is based off the physical disc structure of standard DVD. It is estimated to cost around $100-250k to reformat a current line to output in HD DVD or only 1 million to build one from the ground up. So with very little investment HD DVD's can be outputting in the same numbers as DVD in no time.

Also disc pricing is important. No one really knew how much that it cost to publish in the formats, but finally an independent company finally has pricing for customerswho want to publish in either format:

http://www.pacificdisc.com/PricingBluRay.html

As you can see, Pacificdisc can not even make BD-50's so BD-25's will have to do. But remember that the BDA is pushing BD-50's so you'll have to add $.25 - $1.00 more per disc if it was made on BD-50 (we don't know the exact number but many feel that it is definately higher than $.50 due to poor yield rates with BD-50)

http://www.pacificdisc.com/PricingHD-DVD.html

As you can see it is much cheaper to have packaged media in HD DVD. This is why many independent/indie studios have chosen HD DVD, because they can't produce in extremely large numbers, but even these figures matter for large studios like Paramount. Which I feel this is one of many decisions for them to go HD-exclusive. HD DVD can get to mass production quickly and the companies that are with them will make great profits.

What are your thoughts?

Limited production facilities, low production output, yield problems, higher replication costs are all problems people following the developing format war have know about for close to two years. There's nothing revelatory about any of this.

Despite all the doom and gloom, whether fabricated or genuine, exaggerated or accurate, Blu-ray is more than holding its own against HD-DVD.

This seems to be the case, there's not a lot of facilities than can do Blu ray- replication, especially author for blu-ray. The cost of a blu-ray plant is actually less than 10 million, theres one company out there than can duplicate blu ray and replicate it .

http://www.usadubs.com

Blu-ray doesn't seem like it will be discontinued, however, if higher capacities start coming out then the nature of technology might make a lot of stuff become outdated.