Note that the technical superiority of one format over the other has no bearing on this discussion. Betamax was provably superior to VHS at the time.

So. Based on what we know about why VHS eventually triumphed over Betamax, where's the smart money on the high def DVD wars?

I think they will both be usurped by an as-yet-unnamed competitor within 5 years, but not before most players support both formats, making the format war moot anyway.

Yup, I suspect the VHS-Laserdisc "wars" will be a much more apt comparison. It's better, but most people won't care enough to upgrade. Some people will pay the inflated prices that the studios will try and charge, but for most people, paying twice as much won't be worth it.

If one of the formats gets the player price under $150, and gets titles regularly priced at $25 or less, it'll have a fighting chance. Otherwise, they'll both stay firmly in laserdisc territory.

Matthew

Right now, I'm just barley giving an advantage to HD-DVD for winning the war, mostly due to the lead start and the fact that the stores really don't want two HD movie formats. However talk is cheep there, and I'll believe their dislike when a major chain actually refuses to carry one or the other.

Personally, I'm not buying either until one has won, or a dual format player comes out at $400-$500.

I've seen a number of references (but can't find one now of course) that say that the BR (and maybe the HDVD too) licensing agreements explicitly prevent licensees from offering a dual format player. So that may never happen.

Regards

Mark

I think it is going to be Blu-Ray, all because of one device - the Playstation 3.

When the PS2 came out, it was most peoples first DVD player. In fact, many people bought them as DVD players with a little bit of gaming on the side. The price gap between a standard DVD player and a PS2 was not much back then.

A big fighting point about the PS3 is that it is the only next gen console with high def movie playback. I don't think it will soak the market like the PS2 (its going to be expensive), but it will spread Blu Ray players around in homes. Where there are players, there will be content, and so there will be a market.

HD-DVD obviously has the better namesake. I'm hoping for both of them to fail. They just don't offer the storage increase over DVD i'd like to see in a truly next-generation product. They should have both been beyond the 100GB mark to give us greater than an order of magnitude increase over DVD. The other thing that bothers me is the form factor. It's just too easy to stick with the 5" disc I suppose, but as I mentioned in another thread, I'd have liked to see something 3" or smaller (3" discs are compatible with most current player trays out there - though I suppose current slot-load mechanisms would be a problem).

My ideal would have been UMD size with 100GB.

BTW, I'd say BETA was vastly inferior to VHS due to one of the most important factors. You could often not fit a whole movie on one tape! The record length was too short. I'd call that as much a technical issue as picture quality/line resolution.

The HD format "war" also faces similar issues of capacity, though the picture quality comparison is moot. I don't think we'll see the adoption rate with HD formats like we did with DVD (which completely shamed CD and VHS adoption rates).

Then of course there's the notion of solid state or media-free distribution. I suspect that will be a bigger factor on how all of this plays out rather than one physical form factor over another. Again, knock of wood for HD-DVD and BluRay irrelevance ASAP.

Bruno

Technically, Blu Ray is not a Sony format. It is a Blu Ray Disc Association format, of which Sony is one of the 17 companies on the board of directors (there are 90 members). See this wikipedia article.

What I wrote was quite misleading.

I have always approached the next-gen format from the eyes of Mr Average Consumer.

Mr AC is not reading the technology news every day. He is not reading every Engadget post about the subject. He's reading what little he sees in the Post or WSJ. He's finding out about this stuff from Mossberg. All these sources cater to him, because he doesn't get all that technical mumbo jumbo.

Mr AC thinks "I don't have one of those plasmas or LCDs. And those Playstation 3's are going to cost a heck of a lot of money. Oh yeah, and this tiny Cyberhome DVD player I picked up at Best Buy only cost me forty bucks."

Mr AC isn't dumb. He saw the obvious advantage of purchasing DVDs over VHS. He saw the smaller cases and those nice discs that reminded him of those CDs he already owns. VHS reminded him of those cassette tapes he threw away years ago. He remembered his crummy VCR that ate the tape from his VHS movies. And rewinding. Oh, he remembers rewinding. But these new DVDs? He doesn't see the difference. It's the same size. It all looks the same to him. He's going to stick to what he's got.

Those are my main arguments as to why neither is going to do well. As for who is going to "win"? Well...

Mr AC is a simple person. He has DVDs now. If he's going to switch to something because he's hearing that this "high definition" stuff looks good, well, there's that "HD-DVD." That makes sense to Mr Average Consumer!


ps- all that aside, I've been saying since before Mr Gates did that media is going to go digital next. Physical media's days are numbered as we increase storage sizes. Only the transfer speeds and the greed/distrust of the record and movie industries hold us back now.

pps- I'm only hoping for BR because of more data, but again, Mr AC doesn't know what that translates to.

Excellent points, all of them.

Just one note on the storage capacity advantage of BR over HDDVD. It's 50GB versus about 30GB, right? The problem is that hard drive prices are lower than blank HD media prices. For now it just doesn't make sense to get into either format for personal storage. For that I'd be more interested in holographic storage (HVD) or even stacked volumetric storage (SVOD): http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/20/hitachi-maxell-1tb-svod-optical-disc-cart/

I still think my next storage-related peripheral purchase will be a ReadyNAS with 2TB - then I'll rip my entire DVD collection to that (among other things).

Bruno

For the record, both Netflix and Blockbuster Online carry HD-DVDs.

I think they will both fail. They would have had a better chance if Sony wasn't so stupid in preventing the player manufacturers from making one that will play both formats.

I don't think the PS3 will help because yeah maybe 600.00 is cheap for a blu-ray player but 600.00 is a bunch of money. I remember DVDs getting really popular when the players dropped under 100.00 and they started selling them everyplace (gas stations, grocery stores).

Hmm. I hadn't seen anyone here post this. Basically, it says that most of the movie studios aren't initially going to set the flag to lower resolution for non-HDCP connections on their HD-DVDs and BDs, at least at first.

That might have an effect on whether people buy them. Maybe only early adopters, though.

Only on ANALOG connections as far as I recall (YPrPb/YPbPr). That's quite a bit different than being able to connect an HD source to your non-HDCP DVI display.

B.

Did you see the video of Sony demonstrating Blue Ray at some Sony event? Sony guy ejects disc to show people what a blu-ray disc looks like, and its a DVD-R blank with some pen written on it

Story here:

http://gearlog.com/blogs/gearlog/archive/2006/05/16/11622.aspx

Heh. And it's not even a Sony DVD+R.

He popped open the drive on one of two systems there. The system he opened the drive had a DVD specifically so people could compare DVD and BluRay on the spot.

His own correction is here http://gearlog.com/blogs/gearlog/archive/2006/05/17/11993.aspx

Amazing how rapidly false information spreads these days via blog news sites. "Hey, that site over there linked to that other site that said they read on some site that such and such happened!"

Okay, yeah, the way we believe everything we read on the web really sucks. Thanks for clarifying that and reminding us what gullible people we, collectively, are.

And here I am thinking I'm a pretty good skeptic.

Next generation storage will need a new storage medium. Reel to reel video, then VHS, then DVD. Next, download or solid state.

Mr AC will say "Hey, I can get a movie from a website using my 8mbps cable line? That's familiar, just like when I download por^K stock quotes from websites." Or, he'll say "Hey, movies now come on 16 gig compact flash cards. That's familiar, just like the card in my camera, which also has a slot on my laptop, and I can use on the card reader on my PC."

And for personal storage, the "write once, read many" design of CDs and DVDs is outdated by solid state, just like linear playback of tape/VHS was outdated by non-linear CD/DVD. I agree that the cost of HD media (and dual layer DVDRs) is way too high. Mr AC is smart enough to buy a removable hard drive these days (I know, becuase average users have mentioned this to me).

No sense in paying a lot for technical engineering feats of brilliance squeezing 30gig on a 5" disc when you can buy an external drive or a (in a few years) comparable solid state media card. Discs are done.

Discs are incredibly cheap to press. Flash memory and hard drives are expensive to produce.

That's pretty much what I'm thinking too, except I fear the heaps of DRM that will accompany future (and current) download services. That, and the exorbitant prices they'll try to force on us.

With any luck their tactics will be met with a lack of sales due to Mr AC's frustration with his product, and an eventual comprimise will be made. You know, like the digital form of the Satan-inspired sticker of eternal frustration that is put on every CD and DVD to thwart old-school media theifs. I don't really understand that anymore1. How rampant is shoplifting these days that we still have those damn stickers?

*BUMP*

Just so folks can look back at what they wrote a year and a half ago. Now that Blu-Ray has come out as the clear winner, It's interesting to see what the high-def disc format wars looked like to us back then.