At the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) being held this week in Las Vegas, HBO and distributor Warner Home Video have announced that
The Sopranos and
Deadwood will be among this year's opening wave of releases in the new HD-DVD high definition video disc format. They will join HBO's
Band of Brothers, which was
already revealed the other day. No timeline or pricing has been set for any of these TV-on-HD-DVD releases quite yet.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray will both be competing for the attention of consumers in the coming year, as these incompatible formats (incompatible with each other, that is, although both camp's players will play current DVDs and CDs) each try to up the other with HDTV-level television and film graphics. Blu-ray is expected to have the advantage both with larger support from the studios that put out the features, and with the plans from Sony (who developed Blu-ray) to put out a PlayStation 3 videogame system later this year which will also play Blu-ray discs. The PlayStation 3 is expected to sell for about $500. This will be a drastic price difference from the first stand-alone Blu-ray players, which are expected to go for $1000 - $1800.
To counter Sony's plans, Toshiba (the company primarily driving HD-DVD) is pushing fellow HD-DVD makers to drive down the prices of their players, and has succeeded with announcements at CES that Toshiba's first models will go for $500 to $800. Those prices are meant to take direct aim at Sony's expected low-ball price for watching Blu-ray's on PlayStation 3 game systems.
Bear in mind that none of the initial models on either side will be recordable. It will be interesting to watch how all of this shakes out, or whether either can stick around long enough to make enough of a dent before new better formats come along, such as a possible consumer version of
the "HVD" format. Stay tuned!
