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Bill Hunt, of The Digital Bits, has had an impact. In the early days of dvd, he was on the front line fighting against Divx. No, not the video encoding format. Divx was originally a dvd byproduct pushed by Circuit City. The format was a pay-per-view dvd. For $5 (I think it was), you could unlock the disc for a day or two. After that time, it turned into a coaster until you unlocked it again. Bill saw that as a dreadful thing (and I agree). He rallied the enthusiast community. Thanks to his help to educate people, Divx died.
He’s played a similar role in the HD DVD/Blu-ray role. This time, the role appears to be different, though. He started writing for a Blu-ray owned site. He stopped taking advertising for HD DVDs. He will tell you his role was the same in both the Divx and HD DVD deaths, except there are notable differences.
Divx was launched by Circuit City. There were legitimate concerns as to how you’d play your discs long term like “What happens if the player’s modem died?” or “If the servers that unlocked the discs shut down?” HD DVD was a product that was ready for the market. It’s only disadvantage in the face of Blu-ray is that the maximum for disc storage space was 60% that of Blu-ray’s (which, incidentally, is why I am writing this on a laptop with a Blu-ray burner).
HD DVD had advantages, though, like price. The format was an outgrowth of standard dvd and authoring was cheaper because current dvd fabbing plants could upgrade, whereas for Blu-ray it was a new set of equipment that needed to be purchased. Another HD DVD advantage was that it had a complete format specification. Their format was complete at launch, whereas the Blu-ray spec wasn’t finalized until a few months after they started selling players, and all players don’t have to match the final spec until fall of 2008. That’s right, even today, on the eve of HD DVDs death, you can go buy a Blu-ray player that won’t play some of the content on discs on shelves right now. Hunt hasn’t rallied against this. He’s said comments that suggest this is an ok tactic to take…releasing a product before it’s ready. He points out that some HD DVD players have trouble, too. What he doesn’t mention is that every HD DVD player, because it’s spec-final, has an ethernet port so you can patch the firmware of your player.
He did have a column that was critical of the Blu-ray firmware update system by a columnist, but that column did not mention that the problem didn’t exist for HD DVD.
He readily criticized HD DVD releases for any fault he could find, but never offered similar criticisms of Blu-ray releases. If there was a release that HD DVD had the better release of, you simply find no mention of that title on his site, save for when the title was announced for release. The latest Harry Potter film featured an entirely new feature: The ability to sync HD DVD players over the internet where multiple people watched the movie as a screening. HD DVD offered live commentaries, too. Blu-ray can’t offer such until that final spec is in place, though.
The worst, in my opinion, though is that there is one Blu-ray player on the market that will play every disc: The Playstation 3. He mentions other players people can buy, but never suggests people buy the full featured one.
On Sunday, the 17th, he responded to people saying it sounded as though he was paid off with comments that there had been a lot of accusations of that in this format war. He also said that he only did what he thought was best. What he didn’t do was suggest he wasn’t paid by the Blu-ray backers.
I don’t think it would have mattered in this electronics fight. Nearly twice as much storage is a huge advantage, and Toshiba, to their benefit, didn’t force an update for HD DVD out that would have fixed this and left people holding the bag on non format compliant players.
This situation does call into question Hunt’s ability to be objective while reporting. Hopefully he will say whether he did or didn’t accept payments from Blu-ray backers to work against HD DVD. Until he does, there will be a cloud hanging over him that prohibits him from being considered a journalist.
Journalists work too hard to protect their reputations to have someone who doesn’t take the commitment to objectivity seriously damage everyone’s credibility.