Don't look now, but while HD-DVD and Blu-ray look to be the big Goliaths slugging it out for the future formatting of high-definition DVD, there's a little David lining up his slingshot and taking dead aim at the market: DivX Networks and its DivX 6 software.
"We're just going straight to market," Jordan Greenhall, chief executive of DivXNetworks, told the New York Times this week. "It's cheap. It's great, and it's going to be in the DVD players."
It's going to be, all right. Earlier this month, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, DivXNetworks announced that Apex Digital – a top North American seller of DVD players – partnered with DivX to integrate the DivX video technology into Apex's full line of consumer electronics this year, including DVD players, DVD-R devices, and high-definition devices, not to mention portable video players and recorders.
“Our customers have told us that they want the flexibility to playback more of their entertainment content on one device, regardless of file format,” said Apex Digital spokesman Steve Brothers when the deal was done.
“Apex was one of the first manufacturers to build MP3 and JPEG playback into our devices," he continued, "and now that DivX has emerged as a popular compression format, we want to be among the first to offer consumers the ability playback those files away from their computers.”
“Apex Digital is one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics companies in history, and their industry leadership has helped bring a wide range of high-quality, affordable products to consumers,” said DivX president Shahi Ghanem after doing the deal.
“Apex is again demonstrating their innovative market approach and leadership by deploying DivX technology across their complete product line in 2005," he continued. "Next year, consumers in North America and the rest of the world will be able to find the DivX logo on many Apex products, including DVD players, high-definition devices, portable video players, and more. These DivX Certified devices will let consumers with Apex products easily and seamlessly tap into the DivX Ecosystem – enabling them to create, play and share high-quality videos anywhere, anytime.”
DivX Networks' boldness doesn't exactly mean that the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle is going to get kicked to the curb or disintegrated by any means. As Greenhall was talking to the Times, a group of companies promoting Blu-ray under the Blu-ray Disc Association announced the number of its member companies – those supporting Blu-ray over or in addition to HD-DVD – has hit 100, over three months after they set up shop in early October with 73 member companies.
The new joiners included Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, and Bandai Visual Company. The Blu-ray Disc Association was created under the leadership of Sony and Matsushita, both of whom are developing Blu-ray disc technology, and they're challenging the HD-DVD format created and developed by Toshiba and NEC.
Even before DivX made itself known as a player for the future format standard of DVD, some analysts were wondering if the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray wouldn't get nasty enough that the future DVD market might end up temporarily paralyzed until the clear enough preferred standard was resolved.
In fact, as if to say they weren't going to bother waiting for the war to be won one way or the other, disc-maker Thomson said in early December that not only could two or more high-definition formats co-exist, they planned to make HD-DVD compatible discs and Blu-ray compatible discs, though they also said at that time they'd make DVD players for HD-DVD under RCA and Thomson brand names.
"The problem is that we're getting into another round of format wars," Jupiter Research research director Michael Gartenberg said at the time of the Thomson announcement. "And, until it shakes out, consumers are not likely to buy much of anything."
