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Tuesday 19 February 2008, 11:45 AM
HD-DVD explodes on the launchpad
There may be ways back from a 10:1 ratio, but not this time. Without a working launch vehicle, Toshiba had no answer. Savage price cuts and bundling deals - Amazon was selling hundred quid HD-DVD players with seven discs - just made the format look desperate. Consumers can smell that. So can retailers. And the studios? Even Hollywood understands 10:1.
And so, Toshiba found itself in the unenviable position of the Soviet space programme, with the smouldering wreckage of its N1 rocket still on the launchpad while Apollo astronauts played golf on the Moon. You can pretend for so long, but eventually you have to admit to yourself that there are better things to be getting on with.
As for Sony, it gambled big and won. Not for the first time, the company stuck to its guns in the face of severe criticism and got through. The parallels with the original PS/2 are strong; that had a DVD drive in the days when DVD was rare and had an uncertain future (video CD was still a contender back then), and that cost Sony plenty yen. Adjusted for inflation, the costs were comparable with those for the PS/3.
Toshiba couldn't make that gamble, and while its partner Microsoft could have done it chose not to (although that may have been a blessing in disguise).
One final thought: Apollo was a huge victory at the time. But it was also a giant dead end. The race to the moon consumed everything, including alternative ideas that in retrospect would have been capable of far more flexibility and long-term development. It's not inconceivable that we'd be twenty years further along by now had Apollo never happened.
Is putting data on optical disks really the future?
PreviousComments on this post
PS3 sales hardly translates to Blu-ray sales. If the sole purpose of the PS3 was for Blu-ray then yes but it's a games console. One that Sony have been desperately trying to sell without much success until recently. Why have sales suddenly spike - because people want blu-ray? No because finally they had a decent line-up of games. The sales increase was lead by games, the buyers were gamers.
Sony's rep for dead formats is legendary with betamax, Mini-disc and soon UMD. Blu-ray would have and should have been the next one but it got pushed by clever PR tricks with figures like this 10:1 ratio non-sense and scared people off buying HD players full-stop.
If the consumer sees the HD-DVD players with movies at such a low price it would be hard to justify paying 5x more for a blu-ray player or buying a games machine just for the blu-ray playback. If HD-DVD cut price attracts enough buyers Sony knows that studios will be forced to start making movies for the HD-DVD format regardless of what deals they've made with Sony and HD-DVD would make a comeback and probably win. For this reason Sony and the other Blu-Ray backers have to release sales figures like this to try and make it sound like the battle is over and scare the consumer into waiting or buying blu-ray when the real power is still with the consumer as relatively few people are buying HD movies on disc and currently most of the better movies are on HD-DVD not Blu-Ray.
But the battle is over. HD-DVD is dead. Toshiba is closing down production. It sold 1 million players in total. Blu-Ray has sold 10 million plus. When, where, how and why doesn't really matter now: Sony's strategy paid off.
Game over!
OK, so Sony "wins". Big deal, Blu-Ray is still too expensive and my TV isn't HD-ready anyway. My 1680x1050 computer screen could probably be made to work for a 1280x720 picture, but there's still no point until there's a practical DeAACS available and a cost-effective Blu-Ray SATA(?) drive.
Now upscaling an ordinary DVD; that would probably be enough for me until my existing hardware all dies a natural death.
It's not an unalloyed joy, certainly. Sony's custodianship of formats it controls has rarely been perfect, and there are plenty of reasons why the whole idea of HD may not be what the consumers want anyway. I've got no plans to go HD any time in the future (but then, I listen to a hundred times more audio than I watch video and my TV is so old it doesn't even have a SCART connector. )
R
Well it was a dirty little war and the better team may not have won. Guess I am lucky I have blu-ray in my laptop rather than HD-DVD then.
Chris, my advice to you is; unless you need a games console, its ok to wait, my bet is 2 years from now we'll see a £50 Blue-Ray player in Asda. by then, even the films will be realistically priced.
In the mean time, i believe the studios will continue the archiac DVD format alongside blue-ray films; they just can't ignore a big chunk of the population who are yet to afford Blue-Ray.
Does it really matter? The future of video is IP. Let Blu-ray enjoy its moment in the spotlight.
It's all very simple - what do consumers want? And that's simple to answer: value for money, convenience, and the pleasure of ownership in, I think, that order.
I've got friends with walls and walls of DVDs and some top-notch AV gear, and they clearly take great pleasure in that. I have others without so much as a DVD player but thousands (and I mean thousands) of downloaded movies they watch on their laptop - and most of those are from interesting online communities dedicated to the obscure, the forgotten and the frankly weird stuff you can't get any other way. If all those were available at a guaranteed quality on an all-you-can-eat download service for a moderate monthly fee, then who'd torrent?
Neither of these groups is typical. Most people, I think, will be happy with the video rental model, and if that's deliverable over the Internet then that'll do them. They'll also have a few Blu-Ray disks and a player, when the prices settle down, but it won't account for most of their spending; after all, upsampled DVDs actually look pretty good.
We're certainly not going to get another VHS or another DVD. Now that people will be confident that they won't get stung with an obsolete format (and that assumes that Sony won't do something spectacularly stupid, like announce an incompatible Blu-Ray Part Deux), they'll be happy buying a player and occasional films in the format, but there won't be a wholesale transfer to the standard.
My two groups of friends certainly won't be switching everything over.
I am still replacing my Video collection with the first generation DVDs for two reasons, first of all storage space and secondly picture quality. I really cannot see myself buying something like 'The Terminator' for the third time just for HD quality!
Although I love technology, I still don't have digital TV, I don't have a HD ready TV and still record programs on video cassettes (yes, they are VHS!) I have ordered my iPod Nano to replace my antiquated 1GB MP3 player and bog standard Broadband is fine with me ... just as long as you don't impose any download limits!
In short I don't give a blue ray about HD at the minute. Well done Sony but until I can buy 3 HD DVDs for £10 at Asda as I did at Christmas, you can keep it!
