IFA Stage to Host Official European Debut of Blu-ray and HD DVD

Blu-ray has scheduled a 4 p.m. Thurs. IFA briefing to update PS3 and “breaking films” from Fox, Sony and Warner, said a media alert. It said the event also will have an unspecified “key partner announcement.” We're also told that Fox Home Entertainment Pres. Mike Dunn will be a featured speaker at Philips’s IFA news conference earlier that afternoon. Blu-ray backer Fox remains the only major studio in either camp that hasn’t yet announced its introductory title slate for the U.S. -- let alone Europe -- including dates and pricing. Panasonic, another Blu-ray supporter, caps the day with a 5 p.m. news conference, where it may unveil plans in Europe to market the stand-alone Blu-ray deck and related components it’s due to ship in the U.S. next month.

Next Fri. is HD DVD’s day in the IFA spotlight, with back-to-back briefings in the afternoon. At 3 p.m., senior Toshiba executives are scheduled to unveil their latest plans for HD DVD and HDTV in Europe,. At a 4:15 p.m. HD DVD Promotion Group media briefing, “leading members and partners” from the CE, IT and entertainment industries “will unveil their latest HD DVD strategies and plans in Europe,” an announcement said.

Yoshihide Fujii, CEO of Toshiba’s Digital Media Network Co., likely will shed additional light on HD DVD when he gives an IFA keynote Sept. 2. Fujii was Toshiba’s point man last year in failed talks with Sony and Panasonic to unify Blu-ray and HD DVD. Fujii brought unique Sony connections to the unification table: He had led a Toshiba engineering team that collaborated with IBM and Sony on the Cell microprocessor for PS3.

Ironies abound regarding Fujii’s role in the current format war. Despite his background with Cell for PS3, it’s now the PS3’s rival Xbox 360 that’s solidly in the HD DVD camp. And Fujii was once considered a dove within Toshiba -- more willing than others within HD DVD to make concessions to Blu-ray. But the unification talks evaporated and Fujii since has sounded like the consummate HD DVD hawk (CED May 13/05 p1).

Fujii’s counterpart at Samsung -- Gee Sung Choi, pres. of the company’s Digital Media Business -- gives the opening IFA keynote Sept. 1. IFA organizers said Choi promises a major product announcement. That teaser immediately renews speculation -- triggered by Samsung at last year’s IFA -- that the company will introduce a dual-format player. Samsung is well positioned technologically and strategically to make such a device. It’s 49% owner in the Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology joint venture with Toshiba, based in Japan, that a year ago introduced the world’s first slim HD DVD read drive for notebook PCs. For the time being, Samsung remains the only Blu-ray hardware brand available at retail in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Dolby Labs -- trumpeting the Dolby Digital and MLP capabilities of Blu-ray and HD DVD -- seems to have taken the lead in promoting the formats ahead of their IFA debuts. It treated Blu-ray and HD DVD evenhandedly at media briefings in San Francisco, N.Y. and London, because the formats offer the same Dolby capabilities.

At a recent London seminar, Dolby Worldwide Technology Evangelist Jack Buser radiated enthusiasm as he played HD video clips from a hard drive server and from Panasonic’s DMP-BD10 Blu-ray player. A handout included a color copy of a promotional flyer for Toshiba’s HD-A1 HD DVD deck, but Dolby said it failed to land an HD-DVD player to use for demonstrations at the seminar. “There’s a lot of ink being spilled in the format war,” said Buser. “So we're showing journalists how both formats -- and preferably a [dual- format] combo player so that it’s not a nightmare for the consumer -- can deliver fantastic audio.”

Buser complained that “a whole generation of kids has been raised” on inferior 128-kbps audio. “Hopefully, this MP3 generation will experience what the new systems can offer and say, ‘Wow!'” Buser said: “Then maybe, just maybe, we can convert them.” Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio were “fantastic” packaged music formats, but iPod “pulled the rug out from under both of them,” he said. “Now we've got another chance to move the tide toward higher quality. If we don’t do it well, we'll be right back where we were.”

Using a 5.1 B&W Matrix 805 speaker system and 50W Panasonic plasma TV, Buser played a music video recording of Madonna at the Grammys. Synchronization of video and voice was erratic on the recording, but he jokingly assured journalists that Madonna wasn’t lip-syncing, because “she’s put of tune.” Meanwhile, a 1.5-Mbps Dolby Digital Plus recording we observed of Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony performing the Firebird was very impressive, as was a drum sequence from House of Flying Daggers in Dolby lossless True HD. A Blu-ray demo disc with Dolby Digital Plus at 640 kbps -- supplied by Panasonic -- was far less appealing. Most of the material from animated movies and the live action Kingdom of Heaven was badly out of sync.