As we know the home video rights for movies are many times sold by the studios to a third party for home video release.

What would prevent such a third party such as "Criterion Collection" or even a new company from purchasing movie rights for release on HD-DVD in the future?

Toshiba use to have a movie releasing division, what would prevent them from recreating this division and purchasing the rights to press HD-DVD's from Warner Bro's or other studios, for retail through like Amazon?

This would leave the studio as backing their "HD" and allow HD-DVD owners to have copies of movies.

--David

[Side note: I posted a like idea else where and it was deleted for what I can only guess as he wrong forum?]

Seriously?

because when a horse is dead it doesn't make much sense to beat it anymore?

a good idea in theory (yes, I know), but...

the studios would charge ridiculous licensing fees to make this happen, or simply reject it altogether.

I have a movie ive been hoarding to myself to release on Blu-Ray Exclusively, but i feel your cause is so wonderful and TRUE that i want you to use it as your first 3rd Party Movie!

The title:

HD DVD Supporters who cannot get over the fact that their 98 dollar players are now worthless and keep coming up with ideas to give a multi-billion dollar corporation on a flippin audio/video science forum.

Catchy name huh. I demand you use TrueHD tho, unless there wont be enough bandwidth, then you can use DD+ 1.5 and tell everyone it sounds the same as TrueHD when it doesnt. KThxBye.

The only audience such a move would serve would be early HD-DVD adopters who have an emotional resistance to picking up a BD player, ever.

That's too small an audience to build the kind of business you suggest around.

Things like that did happen with Laserdisc, I suppose (?) but the cost of the technology was much higher in real terms, and the pace of change was much lower.

These days, it's all about replicating the DVD mass market, and no one will care about anything other than that.

I know my idea is getting laughed at but... < so do many of my ideas at work that end up saving the company money and time once tried..>

Many _12"_ laser disc were released this way.... even by "Criterion Collection"
And many early DVD releases were done this way..

I would not give up my "Criterion Collection" releases of: Armageddon, Robocop, Spinal Tap, just to name a few..

While the studios released later versions, I still feel that these "Criterion Collection" releases have better image, sound, features, than the studio releases have ever had.
{I have even been told this by a friend that owns the 'BluRay' versions of these movies, that my SD-DVD Criterion Collection releases look better up-converted than his official BluRay releases?!?}

So while my idea may seem crazy.. it does have merit.

And if the studios really feel that there is no money to be made in the HD-DVD market place why would they charge high licence fees?

It would be free money from a revenue stream that they might not other wise have.


--David

It would be free money from a revenue stream that they might not other wise have.
Because the revenue generated from this 'revenue stream' would easily be swamped by development/manufacturing/marketing costs. Not worth it.

That's why you don't see high-value/limited edition audio collections being released on DAT or Minidisc. The market is too small to recoup the investment you'd have to put into it.

Criterion has already stated that they're waiting for the format war to be decided before they publish on HDM.

I do not think they meant that they would then publish on the losing format.

As we know the home video rights for movies are many times sold by the studios to a third party for home video release.

What would prevent such a third party such as "Criterion Collection" or even a new company from purchasing movie rights for release on HD-DVD in the future?

Toshiba use to have a movie releasing division, what would prevent them from recreating this division and purchasing the rights to press HD-DVD's from Warner Bro's or other studios, for retail through like Amazon?


Typically, movie rights are subdivided by territory and medium: you might sell all US/Canada rights to one distributor and then you might sell the Australian DVD rights to a second distributor, the Australian cable TV rights to a third, and the Australian broadcast TV rights to a fourth.

However, in 99.99% of cases, all "home video" formats are going to be licensed together within a territory: one distributor has the rights to DVD, VHS, betaMAX, HD-DVD, Laserdisk, Blu-Ray, UMD, etc. But as you might imagine, the distributor is not going to release the title in all possible formats--but he is going to retain the right to do so in order to ensure that nobody else does.

In theory, anyone who licensed the home video rights in one territory could sub-license another company to release a title in HD-DVD, but if they are already releasing the title in Blu-Ray, that's either unlikely or would be prohibitively expensive for a major title. The only market where I see a little of that going on is sublicensing titles to the mobile market which, presumably, the distributors don't see as direct competition to their mainsteam format home video sales.

In theory, a boutique label like Criterion could negotiate sub-license deals, but to make it practical, HD-DVD would have to have more of a boutique appeal, which I don't think is going to happen.

And if the studios really feel that there is no money to be made in the HD-DVD market place why would they charge high licence fees?

Because they're like that.

In this case, I'm sure they would because they're likely to see all currently available HDM formats as inter-competing.

But even apart from that, when negotiating some release deals for titles that they had collecting dust in their vaults and were not selling in any home video format (high-def or otherwise), the license fee structure I was offered would simply not have been economically viable for any small distribution company.

By and large, in any large company, business decisions are not made on the basis of what will be best for the business as a whole or its bottom line. Decisions are made based on what is the safest option for the continued employment of the decision-maker. It's not unreasonable for people to feel that they would be more likely to hurt their career path by selling the rights too cheaply to a title that later turns out to be a hot seller, than to turn away a lot of potential deals and thereby make nothing at all.