Originally Posted by smcbeath:
“>snip<
I have always said lets leave sony and universal stay on there sides, and all the other studios go neutral, because as the sony ceo says, it looks like we have a stalement.”
1 remark in a 90 minute interview that's been spun beyond all belief.
Here's what was actually said, courtesy of the digitalbits:
Quote:
“Now then... we wanted to say a few words about all the recent brouhaha over Sony CEO Howard Stringer's "stalemate" comment from last week with regard to Blu-ray and HD-DVD. I don't know how many e-mails I've gotten in the last few days on this, either from HD-DVD fans eager to gloat that Stinger was clearly conceding the format war, or Blu-ray fans wondering why Stringer was being so pessimistic. As it turns out, he wasn't. I've done a little digging over the weekend, and have managed to obtain a transcript of his actual comments. Remember how last week, during Blu-ray fest, Warner Home Video's Dan Silverberg's comments were taken out of context by supporters of both high-def camps to suggest that Warner was about to chose sides in the format war? Except that's not what he actually said or meant to imply? This is the same sort of thing... yet another case of much ado about nothing.
The deal is this: Howard Stringer was being interviewed by Business Week's Steven J. Adler about his career at the 92nd Street Y in NYC on Thursday. He was asked a few questions about Blu-ray Disc and the format war, and he spoke about it for maybe 5 minutes out of a 90 minute interview. Here's the actual text of the relevant portion of the interview:
---begin excerpt---
Adler: Of course, one of the big fights right now is Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD for the high definition video market. I mean, the first and most obvious question is: Shouldn't there just be one format? Why should people have to choose between the two? And is there any possibility that we'll be heading there?
Stringer: I should point out that that is not part of the software battle. I mean, that's actually in some ways sort of anachronistic. We're fighting over a packaged goods hardware that will not go on forever, from a classic sense. We have a more expensive version, as Sony tends to, and Toshiba has a cheaper version, which seems to keep getting cheaper. I believe it has slowed down the progress of high definition packaged goods. Oddly, the studios kind of liked it for a while. They were able to leverage one of us against each other. But in the end, it's counterproductive. We have a sort of stalemate at the moment. As you know, they had fewer studios, but then they paid a lot of money for Paramount. So we have four studios and they have two or three studios. It's a difficult... it's a difficult fight. There was a chance to integrate it before I became CEO. This is something I inherited. And I don't know what broke down. I wish I could go back there, because I heard it was all about saving face and losing face, and all the rest of it. But it's not a battle about the digital future. That's what's so strange about it. If it doesn't work out, that doesn't say very much about where we're all going. It's just... it's a scorecard: one-nothing or something. But it doesn't mean as much as all that. PlayStation 3 will still go on playing games. It would have to have a different disk drive. And that's about it really.
Adler: So when a consumer now has to choose between the two, if they want to get into the high definition video, Wal-Mart was selling the Toshiba HD-DVD for $99 last Friday for a couple of days. Usually, it's been $199 there. I think your list price is $499 for Blu-ray. That's an enormously big difference, particularly in a slowing economy. Can you play that game with the difference being that great?
Stringer: Well... we've been selling them as fast as we're making them because the brand -- first of all, we're not the only ones selling them at that price. So is Panasonic, so is Samsung, so is Sharp. And one of the reasons it's more expensive is because it does more. The bandwidth is greater. If you just want a two-hour movie, the Toshiba version is a high definition picture. But we thought that to drive high definition into the customer's imagination, you should future-proof the disks so that you could have director's cuts, which are fairly obvious. We have six to seven hours of bandwidth available. You can have interactivity in three dimensions. We would be prepared to allow the package goods to survive much longer by making it much more innovative. But that does make the player more expensive. Now, they all come down. The race is to bring costs down. It always is in consumer electronics. So it isn't going to stay at $499.
Adler: But are you surprised by how little Toshiba can sell its unit for?
Stringer: No, because -- look, I can sell it for a dollar. I'd lose a lot of money, but if you want to go that route, it's a tough competition, and it seems to be about a lot of things, including face. So if you want to cut the price down and engage us in a price war, that's a different system. We were trying to win on the merits, which we were doing for a while until Paramount changed sides.
Adler: Microsoft seems to have an interesting role in this. They're selling add-on HD-DVD drives for the -- they're taking HD-DVD to the Xbox, and Xbox competes strongly with you. Is Microsoft kind of working in cahoots or in alliance with Toshiba on HD-DVD? Is that a competitive challenge to you?
Stringer: Only the spirits know. [laughs] Yeah... you never know with Microsoft do you? You never know. Xbox versus PS3 is sort of a subplot. What Microsoft's role is in that? I don't know. We're still selling software at a faster level than Toshiba. Obviously, we care about the software side more than the Toshiba does. It doesn't have a studio. It doesn't own a studio. So it's in our interest to -- actually the most significant thing in some ways about Blu-ray, going back to Microsoft... the Blu-ray Disc has a very high security level, which Fox in particular, but also other studios, was most excited about -- wanted to have some protection from instant ripping. So the specs that went into the Blu-ray, which were done in conjunction with many studios, had this security level. That is probably not in Microsoft's interests. The Toshiba disk is certainly far easier to rip. Whether you like that or don't like that depends on your consumer enthusiasm.
---end of excerpt---
That was the extent of it. Naturally, the one comment out of the entire 90 minutes (or even this small portion) that the AP ran with is the stalemate bit. Since then, it's been spun like crazy. We've seen commentary from people who weren't there proclaiming what a "remarkable admission" it is. Some have even gone so far as to claim that Stringer declared Blu-ray a failure and that Sony is about to give up the battle. All of which mischaracterizes what he actually said and meant.”
Adding the context and the full quote "...at the moment" changes it completely. The actual inference is that the stalemate will not last.
