So we have a winner for the new super high definition discs that we will all be buying our movies on for the next decade, and it's Sony's Blu-Ray. Toshiba have thrown in the towel and will stop producing the HD-DVD format.Despite having both feet firmly in the early adopter camp, TVs and DVD formats etc did not excite me and so thankfully I am committed to neither. I am told that HD-DVD was in fact the higher quality format, but that is never a guarantee of winning in this consumer-demand led market.
Remember the good old war of VHS versus Betamax? Same thing happened, the lesser quality format won out and became visible in households up and down the country.
Why? Well VHS allowed itself to be licenced for distributing adult movies, Betamax didn't. Quite simply porn drives technical development in many areas and people wanted the convenience of adult movies in their own living room! I read a few years back that BT attributed the demand for pornography as one of the leading reasons why people started to shift to broadband in the home. It has also given us many developments online, including payment gateways, security, viruses, micro-payments and the list goes on.In the Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD battle it wasn't porn that ultimately won over the consumer and forced Toshiba to concede, but it was content of sorts. What Sony acheived over Toshiba was to signup more and larger movie studios than Toshiba. Simple.
The consumer is King.
The other difference was that Blu-Ray has greater capacity, a very solid 25Gb over HD-DVDs not unimpressive 15Gb. On the flipside, HD-DVD made it market first as the presses for producing standard DVDs could be modified easily to produce HD-DVDs, but the manufacturing of Blu-Ray requires entirely new kit.
All this aside, the war is over, the battle is won. The only question remaining is will sales of high definition DVD players actually start to pick up now? 2007 figures show 32m DVD players were sold in the US and only 4% of those were high definition.
:~Dax~:
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