photo credit: yngrich

There’s a lot of buzz about Freeview at the moment. They’re almost through their DVB-T rollout. DVB-T means Digital Video Broadcast and differs from Sky and the current Freeview implementation in that it doesn’t require a satellite to recieve broadcasts, it uses the bog-standard UHF arial almost ubiquitously installed across New Zealand. Difference is, the broadcast is digital and will enable broadcasters to, finally, broadcast shows in full 1080p HD.

I know a few people that have gotten their grubby little mitts on Freeview set top boxes (Interested? Head down to Eastern Hi-Fi with a few hundred bucks and see what happens!) that realise this new standard and the feedback that I’ve heard from them is absolutely stellar.

All well and good, but for the love of God I don’t want another set-top box. What I want is a PlayTV. It’s a dual-tuner, well integrated little box for your Playstation 3 thats incredibly easy to use and integrates with the rest of my devices (UPnp NAS, PSP, HDTV). For those who are interested – here’s a little video showing off some of what it can do.

I don’t want Sky anymore. I don’t want their re-hashed movie channels, their proprietary access methods and all the buggy firmware to go with them, I don’t want to pay them for MySky for their half-baked PVR and I don’t want to pay them again to upgrade to HD.

If Sony gets their act together and releases this product here as soon as possible, they can quite easily position the PS3 as the gadget to have for all AV setups. They’ve also recently announced that they’ll be hosting a “Video On Demand” service – basically streaming High Definition movie downloads from the Playstation Store over your broadband connection. So between gaming, Bluray, HDTV PVR and video on demand it will become an impressive centerpiece for any living room.

This leads the way for Blu-ray to plug the gap in consumer-level High Definition format and finally bring some composure to the industry.

A lot of people are worried that lack of format competition will cause prices to jack up and stay up. All though all the “Buy one get one free” deals happening on both sides of the divide recently may add evidence to this theory I don’t believe this will cause inflated prices for the remaining Blu-ray format. On the contrary, I predict that many of the fence-sitters (that is, end-users, studios and hardware developers) will feel much more inclined to pursue a HD strategy going forward now that there appears to be a clear winner. This will cause production to ramp up and as everyone knows cheaper production costs lead to cheaper consumer costs. Anyway, most price competition will come from the studios battling each other – not the group that controls the format as they are only entitled to a minimal licensing fee per-unit.

Don’t worry, Sony & Co. still has a big chance to mess this up – although they are only part of a board the governs direction of the Blu-ray format. Should they continue to pursue heavy DRM, nixing backwards compatibility between Profiles and other anti-consumer practices that is definitely a way to turn end-users off to this still budding format.

A big downside of Blu-ray compared to HD-DVD is the studios absolute, pig-headed insistence that removable media be restricted by region! As a lot of people have found out, region-locking is a big problem over here in New Zealand. With more retailers selling Region 1 & 2 DVD’s (JB Hi-Fi is one culprit) alongside with Region 4 to which NZ belongs – people are getting bitten when they take their new purchases home to find out they can’t watch them without either applying warranty-voiding hacks to their players/computers or buying an entire new machine.

Having seen one or two Hi-def movies in my time of both formats I can’t wait for this technology to become more commonplace. In the meantime, goodbye HD-DVD and a warm welcome to Blu-ray. But unless Sony and the other stakeholders stop pandering to the greedy studios who would happily sell you the same content 3-4 times could they get away with it, consumers will quickly get tired of having restrictions on the content they payed a premium to own.