Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's largest IT firms, surprisingly joined the HD-DVD camp on Friday. Previously, it had been exclusively pushing Sony's Blu-ray format for next generation DVDs.
HP's justification for straddling the fence was the "unreasonable cost we have to bear in supporting the Blu-ray format." Overall Blu-ray royalties total $30 per PC drive. That's what Maureen Weber, general manager of HP's Personal Storage Business unit, told EE Times. According to the story:
Weber said Java-based Blu-ray format royalties include: licensing the GEM (Globally-Executable MHP) standard; the cost of a Java test kit from Sun Microsystems; and the cost of BD Java. While the licensing costs PC vendors must support HD-DVD remain unclear, HP has been assured by Microsoft of "roughly a 10-percent addition to cost of the current DVD drive," Weber added.
The HP press release also says it asked the Blu-ray camp to support iHD, but it has not agreed to do so. iHD is an XML-based format co-developed by Disney, Microsoft and the HD-DVD forum. It's not platform-specific but, it has just been announced, will be included in Windows Vista.
There was an interesting report in Video Business Online on October 28 on the horse-trading going on in the background -- or "pork-barreling," as the author puts it.
BD-J was already part of the spec and had the support of Fox, which the Blu-ray camp was ardently trying to woo. When it came time to choose, a majority of BDA board members actually voted in favor of iHD. But eight companies abstained, denying iHD the supermajority it needed under BDA bylaws. So BD-J stayed in, and Fox stayed on board.
Even Sony voted yea on iHD when it first came up before the BDA board.
