Michael Bay's format war conspiracy theory: it's a Microsoft fix
By Evan Blass 
posted December 4th 2007 8:19PM
posted December 4th 2007 8:19PM
It's no secret that Michael "Transformers" Bay prefers his high definition optical discs in the Blu variety, but what we didn't know was how convinced the man is that the whole format war is nothing but a stalling tactic, with Microsoft pulling all the strings. Responding to a commenter angry over Paramount's decision to burn Optimus and friends onto HD DVD only, Bay claims to have the inside track on the "corporate politics" at play here, suggesting that "Microsoft wants both formats to fail so they can be heroes and make the world move to digital downloads." He goes on to claim that Redmond has only been financially backing HD DVD over "superior Blu-ray" to create "confusion in the market" until such time as high def digital downloading goes prime time. In other words, if you believe Bay, Microsoft is backing a known loser in order to prolong a war it doesn't want anyone to win. Pretty wild theory, if you ask us -- hey, this guy should make movies.[Thanks, Timothy and Kiwi616]
well, I would assume (i read the whole wikipedia page for blu-ray, but couldn't get these details about the compression and encryption) that the encryption methods used in both these discs (AACS DRM) make the video take up more disc space per second of video than the original raw video data in the studio. Of course, encryption can be used to actually reduce the amount of disc space used, but that is generally 'lossy,' and results in a lower quality image.
Therefore, the arguments made here that AVIs having quality similar to an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray Disc could make sense, as long as the original video images were equal and a lossless codec was used for the AVI. however i don't think an AVI can support that much data in a single file, so MKV files were invented to do that. Therefore, when it comes to comparing Discs to Downloads, keep in mind that similar image qualities in downloads can actually take up much less bandwidth than the data on the discs, because the data is only encrypted once for the codec in the AVI (making the files smaller by a bit, usually), whereas the discs are encrypted twice with a codec and the AACS (and i don't think lossy codecs would be used, because that would defeat the whole purpose of high volume media, wouldn't it). So, in that case the only two ways (i can think of, not that there aren't geniuses at work on this right now) downloaded movies would be smaller files would be if; one, the files aren't DRM'd because they're pirated, or; two, they aren't DRM'd because the movie industry finally gives up on that entirely and tries to spend their energy making good movies so that people buy merchandise and theater tickets. no matter how good the image quality gets, and how expensive the hardware needed to watch that video in your home becomes, watching a great movie in a nice theater on a huge screen with great acoustics will always be the better experience.
BUT, if MS or any other conspirator (people should look up what that word means, you know it has a stupid connotation that is nigh going to replace its actual meaning) were trying to stall these discs to make way for downloadable movies, those movies would likely be encrypted to larger files as well, or implement technology like the failed Viiv chip. Otherwise the data could be saved to disc, even if streamed (VLC can do it, as well as screen capture apps), and I am sure that another attempt at hardware like the Viiv (which tried to guarantee that a streamed movie would not be saved to disc) would be hacked like everything else. So, what will eventually happen? something even cooler and more awesome-o will come out and nobody will care and i will have wasted so much time writing this and people will archive this post and laugh at it like they laugh about the mistakes we all lived with for years because f the VHS/BETA wars.
in the end, though, companies make more money smply because some saps will have bought the losing hardware and then go and buy the winning hardware, lots of geeks will have to have both, football fans will still live in poverty to afford the biggest ebestest flat screen and switch it out every year, and manufacturers will continually tool both the studios and the fans around like this. The result is you get what you pay for! if people spent their money based on the content of movies, and not the barely perceptable differences between the technologies, they'd get better movies. They wouldn't obsess over image quality because they'd be immersed in the story and their excited imaginations would make it real for them.
Besides, the more you watch movies the faster you go blind, then you can't tell the difference between a super-8 and an imax image.
I personally will not buy any blu-ray, hd-dvd, or big ol' tv until it goes obsolete. Then it'll be cheap, and i can watch documentaries about people going blind and crazy trying to get the best mage quality ever.
who cares if MS is holding things up. consumers will still fork out their children's tuition and healthcare for whatever geeks on forums like this say is the best TV you can get. All this effort to numb our minds.
MS is also holding back technology to clone Kubrick. They would probably fund Bay if Kubrick was revived so that neither of them would get enough money to budget a good film.
oh, and while i'm at it, apple pwns MS even though apple is money hungry too. But Falcon Northwest pwns them all. my post pwns all your posts.
"when you build a better mousetrap, along comes a smarter mouse"
-locksmiths say that.
Michael Bay's trolling : It's Sony fix
Michael Bay has shown time and time again that he is a complete idiot. Some people just don't know when to shutup. And Transformer's sucked.
Exactly Correct! Everyone was in on the HD-DVD standard, till Sony got the briliant idea t start another format war!
They failed to learn from BETA and UMD movies...
Sony is all about THEIR standard. They only make devices that take MemoryStick. They want all their equipment, and their music, and their movies on their standard, so you have to use their equipment.
There would be NO format war if Sony had not jumped ship from the HD-DVD group.
Michael Bay's entire claim to fame is making mediocre movies with big budget action that have NEVER come even CLOSE to delivering on their potential. He has never even been NOMINATED for a serious award and is 3 time Razzie award nominee for "Worst Director". The guy makes schlocky, action films with enormous budgets, thin plots, non-existent character development and action scenes that make it impossible for any reasonable person over the age of 19 to suspend belief. (And I'm including Transformers, which had awesome special effects, a couple of hot young girls but little else.)
So frankly I don't care what this tool has to say about the format war. If anything, HD-DVD is going to rule the HD disc roost because the people that can't afford a high-speed line for online-delivered content aren't going to throwing away wads of cash for a "superior" format that doesn't provide a superior experience since both formats have wasted space on them.
Well Beta wasn't a complete failure, it did very well in the broadcast industry.
@Tavis:
Talk about conspiracy theories... Somehow you managed to get "highly ranked", but your facts are totally wrong. Blu-ray is NOT a Sony standard. In fact the consortium that licenses the technology (the BDA, "Blu-ray Disc Association") is comprised of all of the following companies: Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung AND Sony. People need to get their facts straight before spewing off. And being that your spewing is being done on the internet where all of this info is readily available, there really is no excuse for your ignorance.
@Tavis
Which is why the PS3 surprised the crap out of me with the bring your own mic, SD slot, and open hard drive. I was definitely like ???
@tavis
you're 'facts' are not entirely true.. a little bit they.. but what else do you expect? Sony is a Business!! they try to be superior to all other businesses, just like other businesses try to be superior to other businesses.. business is all about getting money from customers!
i mean imagine you have a new type of disc made, and you don't support but let other companies support instead you support Blu-Ray? well what money do you make? you have to pay dunno 25% (?) to Sony just to make a player? while if you make a player for your own format, well whom do you pay? yourself .. ???
greetzz
Just to clarify something in an earlier reply; the Beta used in the broadcast industry is NOT the consumer Beta. It uses the same size cassettes and that's about it.
im calling it now... services like this will take over sooner than people expect (before hd-dvd or bluray really get a foothold). and if ms did this on purpose its a move of genius.
Digital downloads may be the future, but the future is not now. Most Americans simply don't have the bandwidth to comfortably download a Blu-ray-sized film. This will all change, but given the cost and time required to upgrade our entire network infrastructure, it's going to be years and years away.
xbox live downloads are 720p and file sizes are 5-7 gigs (depending on length). and they look very comparable to hd-dvd/bluray (far closer than it should look)
I agree, it doesn't really make sense to introduce a new physical format at this point. By the time it takes any serious hold in the market, it will just be in a position to delay the inevitable. (downloads)
And in response to Chuckles McGee not everyone has reliable access to high speed internet. But if these people aren't spending money on broadband, they most likely not in the market for HD content. At least not a significant amount that it should sway the markets direction.
even if the aren't high def they look fine. i download movies that are compressed to a 700MB AVI file and i think they look pretty damn good on my 720p monitor. considering they are less than a fifth of the size of a normal DVD, i'd say that's pretty good. when those AVI files are burned to a disc they look like a normal DVD. and to be honest i dont use discs a whole lot any more. downloadable content is the way of the future but i dont think MS is driving a conspiracy against optical media.
frankly the difference between a standard DVD and HD-DVD/BluRay is not a big enough difference to get me to switch to either format any time soon. the fact the a blank DVD is 10 cents and a blank BluRay disc is 10 dollars is a huge factor for me. and if i need 20GB of storage, i'll use a external HDD.
@aaron... yeah, but it takes a majority of the US about 2 weeks to download it.
@Justin
People don't have access to high bandwidth internet to spend the money on it. Sure, it's easy to get high speed in major metropolitan areas, but go outside and there is zero high speed access. I guess there is the option of DirecTv's internet service but that's about as shitty as Michael Bay's films, well not quite that shitty but really bad.
Digital Downloads may be coming sooner rather than later but I'm hard pressed to believe a MS conspiracy theory. I might be convinced if Microsoft did not have a financial interest in HD DVD. Just doesn't make sense.
We're talking about Michael bay here......seriously
#1 Trailer Producer of all time....actual movies....com'n fellas
Call me old fashion but unless the price of dled movies cost substantially less than their physical counterpart, I'm not buying into it. This is the same reason why I don't buy games from services like direct 2 drive. I don't believe in paying the same price to not have a box, cd case, or manual(which should be in color!).
And this is all assuming digital downloads get to the point where they let you "purchase" them and by that I mean actually keep them for more than a few days and be able to move them to other sources. Having my media trapped on a 120 gb 360 drive isn't my idea of a good time.
If you think 720p downloads from Live look like good BluRay or HD-DVD movies, you haven't seen any good BluRay or HD-DVD movies, at least not on a decent TV.
A BluRay or HD-DVD movie uses a comparable codec (or even the same codec) as a Live download, and has 4X the data or more. And double the pixels (1080p vs 720p).
It's fine that you like the 720p stuff you're getting off Live, but I don't, and I'd be really sad if I can't get the quality I want simply because MS decided to stick it to disc formats.
I don't see digital downloads working for movies while the DRM is so hideous, the quality so low and the price is so high. It might work great for rentals though.
A serious problem with downloading is that without the storage - hard disks not reliable in the long run - people have to download repeatedly if there is a problem, can't easily take just a disc with them out the door. Or make a copy easily. I'd stick to discs and if there was no alternative I'd be unwilling to pay for such downloads. Ever.
Makes perfect sense to me. I don't LIKE Bay too much, but it's a good theory....
Go Blu!
The thing is, this theory makes a lot of sense. I think it could be very much true.
CUBSWILLWIN... That pretty much sums it all.
I didn't even know this was considered a "conspiracy".
1) Sony wants to control it all with the PS3/Blu-Ray. Their entire approach was to lock in both the next-gen gaming platform and the next-gen movie format in one device-thats why they went for such a (stupidly, in retrospect) expensive solution.
2) Microsoft didn't care about the format, EXCEPT that they wanted to stop Sony from taking both markets. So they took a different approach-get out a next gen console first, to get a head start, and back the competing standard, HD-DVD, to confuse the market long enough to keep Sony from gaining total dominance.
Bay may be a crappy director, but I don't see any conspiracy; just two companies doing anything they can to win the next gen video game market, and eventually the movie market.
Yes he should make movies, its usually individuals that society deems as 'weird' as the most creative. Is there anything you have done creative besides blogging really poor insult attempts out of jealousy?
Or was it just a joke?
Yes it was a joke, just like Bay is a joke.
Please don't use the words creative and Michael Bay in the same sentence. It offends those of us that actually are creative. Many of the bloggers here are creative. Why do you think so many people read it? They take the news and sum it up in a short paragraph and try and make it funny most of the time.
With statistic showing internet could reach its bandwidth capacity by 2009, M$ dream isn't going to happening.
WHAT? Fiber optics man, fiber optics.
I'd like to see these statistics. That $ sign never gets old I tell ya!
Oil is always 15 years from running out, the oceans are always 20 years away from rising 10 feet, and the internet always has only 10 years left before it gets too crowded. Color me skeptical.
Hah... i was just going to say the same thing about the M$ money sign... it used to be an apple fanboy standby, but in the last year or so Apple has pretty much shown us their greed matches every other corporations... might be time to head in a new direction with the insults.
And i am typing this on a MacBook Pro, and i have an iPhone, so no, i'm not some bitter dude stuck in windows (untill i get to work) with OSX envy or something. It is what it is.
Well, which study are you talking about? The one which says we'll run out of bandwidth, when bandwidth isn't a fixed resource which can't be created? Or the one that says switching technologies won't be able to keep up with the amount of traffic expected to go through them? Even though the problem is supposed to be at the point the consumer hooks up to the internet, in which adding more substations removes the problem? Or is it the paper by the guys who came up with TCP/IP, and said that we can do better, and get rid of a lot of these headaches? When that will cost more in software and hardware than both of the above fixes combined? There have been people shouting "oh noes, the tubes are going down!" for years now. But it just keeps chugging along.
Microsoft's 'dream' (if they have such a dream) could actually happen! just not yet, no the problem is not the bandwidth but the speed. i bet no one is gonna wait for a few weeks to download something on a (in uk) at most 8mbps download speed! until the internet doesn't go to 100mbps worldwide (yeah i know in some places this exist), this dream is far from happening ;)
greetzz
It's called BPL (Broadband over Powerlines). Though the cost is huge, within 100 meters of the transformer and you can achieve speeds of 100Gb/s. E-Line FTW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_line_communication
http://www.computingunplugged.com/figures/figure?figCaption=Different+technologies+result+in+different+bandwidths.&figLetter=B&filename=00001828-b.gif&graphicType=gif&id=00001828&imagePath=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.zatz.com%2Fwebsites%2Fcomputingunplugged%2Fissues%2Fissue200608%2F&issue=issue200608&url=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.zatz.com%2Fwebsites%2Fcomputingunplugged%2Fissues%2Fissue200608%2F00001828-b.gif
Oh...and that wasn't a pun on "Transformers". :-)
Meh they are doing it with Iraq and Iran (wars that are just sustained and not won like vietnam) so I don't see why they cant do it with formats.
who is "they"?
"They" is obviously Microsoft. MS has been prolonging the war in Iraq so that they can rush out their new OS, and so that they can grab market share away from Apple.
As for Vietnam, well, notice when the war ended? 1975. Microsoft (w/o the hyphen) started in 1976(!), so obviously, Gates was prolonging the Vietnam war so he and Paul Allen could come up with a good name. Obviously, he must have built a time machine, and gone back to prolong the war.
That, obviously, was what jroc was saying. He also must have inside information about Microsoft's plans to invade Iran.
Hahaha dramamoose That would be a funny scenario. The "they" I refer to is the CFR and the government. They do that all the time by financing both sides of the war so nobody can win for 'x' amount of years and then they can reap all of the profits.
"Cost of Iraq war could surpass $1 trillion" - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11880954/
Because nothing says "profit" quite like losing over a trillion dollars. Great theory though.
uhh dwells, i think that article just strengthens jroc's argument. where do you think that 1 trillion dollars is going? someone just flushing it down the toilet to la-la land or lighting bills on fire? no, obviously contractors (*cough* halliburton *cough*) are profiting as well as military "outsourcers" such as blackwater who are buddy buddy with the war happy administration.
so who's really losing the 1 trillion? us, the taxpayers.
@DWells
You really made me laugh hard there. You don't really think all the major corporations are concerned about the US losing money when they are making all of it? Sure, the war will cost the US Government a trillion dollars, but most of that is lining the pockets of major corporations... and dare I say, politicians!
@sam
have you ever wondered if someone else could have the same exact thought as you at the same time? I think it just happened lol.
The Iraq has nothing to do with it, such as.
I'll take cheap downloadable HD movies over expensive boxes with movies in them any day.
Yeah, until your HDD crashes or you decide to sell your XBOX for the next model. You know you can't move your movies or games to the next machine, right?
uhh thats exactly why live kicks so much ass... you can lose the hard drive and recover all your content and can move to any 360 and redownload it there. xbox live content is tied to your account.