High Def Home Entertainment is scheduled to release the classic adult film Deep Throat in the new HD DVD format.
The title, featuring the late Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems, will be available at the end of April along with three other releases produced by the company. They are Girls Gone Skiing, issued earlier this year, starring Sharon Wild and Katrina Star; and the 2005 releases, High Def Lesbians, with Katie Morgan and Alexis Malone; and Dreamcummers, featuring Cherokee and Venus.
“There’s a format war, with HD DVD going against Blu-ray, and Toshiba against Sony, so there's confusion out there,” said High Def Home Entertainment CEO Thomas Funk.
“But HD DVD has a huge jump on this and a lot of people are getting these players, so it makes sense to get these titles out,” he said.
Sony’s competing Blu-ray laser disk format players are set to roll out in September in what could bring the format wars to a head, Funk said.
Blu-ray is a recordable DVD format that uses blue and violet lasers on disks that can hold up to 27 gigabites of memory, compared to regular DVD disks which hold 4.7 GBs and HD DVD disks which hold 15 GBs.
The company’s initial HD DVD releases will include three formats on two disks, with Disc 1 in standard definition and playable on any regular DVD player and a high-def version playable on a PC or on the WMV/HD-format high def DVD players.
Disc 2 includes is playable in the HD DVD format which is also available on PCs featuring HD DVD software player by Microsoft.
The first batch of releases will be followed by additional ones each month in the HD DVD format, Funk said.
“All our movies are shot with high-end High Def cameras. A $120,000 camera is used instead of a little $2,000 one and that’s a big difference,” he said.
But even as the format battle heats up between HD DVD and upstart Blu-ray, Funk said it won’t likely affect his company much.
“In the end it doesn’t matter because I’ll put out movies in any format, but in the meantime, it makes a lot of people crazy… Nobody knows which player they need to buy,” he added.
The company is also working with Hotmovies.com in order to offer its high-def movies for downloading through the Internet.
Meanwhile, High Def Entertainment is planning a promotional tour to stores around the country, giving consumers a chance to see the new technology and understand it for themselves.
Funk said people remain confused by the technology and the format wars between backers of the opposing systems.
