30 HD-DVD titles will be shipped in Europe by Studio Canal, the film production arm of the French Canal Plus TV and media group. This is hardly a surprise, but it’s good news for us poor Europeans who felt like leftovers of the CES 2006 orgy…
Five European countries will be part of the fiesta… and among them, the winners are: France, Spain, Germany, maybe also Italy , Poland, Denmark or Belgium?
When in 2006? That remains a mystery so far. The launch of HD formats Blu-ray and HD-DVD had been delayed, and one of last CES good surprises was the, sometimes imminent, launch of both readers and titles in both formats, with the Hollywood moguls delivering dates and names one after the other.
So that a deep anxiety had suddenly invaded Europe; and moisture was already collecting in the corner of European eyes…
How longer would they have to wait, before they could, at long last, lighten their wallets of $1800 (EUR1500, £1080) for a Sony Blu-ray, or £500 (€413, £290) for a Toshiba HD-DVD? One sure thing though: should you live in France, Belgium, Spain and other countries, AND be a Canal Plus paying customer, then you should normally have fallen for HD-DVD, because they support it, for the time being that’s to say. Rumours were true about encoding; these discs will be encoded using the VC-HD codec from Microsoft. This codec is also a part of the Blu-ray specifications.
The time equation was not that simple. (1) There were delays, (2) the nasty Americans will come first, (3) the Old Europe, as usual, will be abandoned until the next D-Day, but none of this was actually true, so one might reasonably expect these films to reach retailers’ stores by the second half of 2006. Nevertheless, 30 titles seems to look pretty petty compared to the 5000 titles of the Canal Plus catalogue.
We’ll get them anyway.
Visit Canal Plus here