If this is your first time here, why not consider subscribing to my RSS feed?

Sony’s Blu-Ray Format Battle on the Shoulders of Betamax and Mini-Disc

Posted on January 7, 2008
Filed Under Console Gaming, Minidisc |

Just before the weekend, Warner’s announcement that they were dropping support for HD-DVD in favour of Blu-Ray in the high definition video format ‘war’ made some waves as CES approached. But I think the reaction from Toshiba (the main consumer company behind HD-DVD) and the HD-DVD’s association is telling. By canceling their press conference and media briefings at CES, to all intent’s and purposes the battle is over, Blu-Ray won out, and Sony finally have a mass-media format that they’ve always wanted.

The timing of the announcement left the HD-DVD camp almost no room to maneuver. They were either going to face a particularly brutal press call along the lines of ‘has Blu-Ray won?’ or they would run away and hide in a corner… conceding to Blu-Ray in the eyes of the media and the public.

Of course the studio’s noting that Blu-Ray has region encoding if required and HD-DVD doesn’t might have swung it; or that Blu-Ray has a few more security keys than HD-DVD so isn’t yet ‘fully cracked’; or the volume of Blu-Ray drives in households through sales of the PS3 over the festive period topped 1.4 million players could have been it as well.

I think Sony (who may well be just part of the consortium but are a driving force behind the Blu-Ray format) have learned a lot from previous format wars. They never licensed Betamax out to other home video makers, where JVC chucked VHS out to all and sundry. Betamax became a legend, and not just for the US Supreme Court judgment. When mini-disc came along, they did happily licence it out - my first players well all Sharp MD machines - but they were let down by content from music publishers not enough rapid adoption by mainstream users to make a difference.

Blu-Ray took both of those and built from them. Move houses were courted, so the content was there for everyone to see. As to mass-market adoption, the gamble of placing a Blu-Ray player in ever Playstation 3 certainly impacted on the bottom line of console sales last year due to early manufacturing problems,but looks to have been a master stroke in terms of long term strategy (especially considering the fat the Xbox 360 could have carried an HD-DVD drive but didn’t).

In any case, capitalism has decided. Whether that means the marketplace or a dump-truck of money to the studios… time will tell.

Comments

Leave a Reply