Format Wars, and the Big Players
March 30th, 2006The Battle is about to begin. Spring 2006 represents the calm before the storm that Will decide who wins the next generation of the consumer video format war. Also it will decide a good deal about the general direction of what these 2 quarrelsome formats deliver: High Definition Video content.
In case you don’t know the 2 formats are Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Basically they are both different technologies to fit more data on a CD sized Disc. Blu-Ray does this better by offering some 54GB of space. HD-DVD offers 30GB. Today’s DVD technology offers 9.4GB.
Now in my reading I have found that there was another such format war, before I was born, in the 1980’s between Betamax and VHS. Even though Betamax was superior, it lost the war. Betamax was a creation of Sony in the 80’s and lost because it didn’t gain popularity. I would hope that Blu-ray, also Sony’s, has enough supporters to catch the public popularity. It does have the disadvantage of not having ’DVD’ in it’s name. Which to you and me may not mean anything, but joe’s grandma might not be reading articles like this and may not know that Blu-Ray is the superior successor to the DVD.
Unlike in the 80’s battle Sony has bet big and their survival may depend on the success of the Blu-Ray. This is because of it’s tie in with the PlayStation 3. Sony’s theory is that there is more money to be made on titles if there are more consoles in the market, so they take a loss on each console.
It makes me wonder if there will be a gold rush for PS3 consoles just to play Blu-Ray movies or for some of it’s other features besides games. It is after all pretty high powered computer and with the reported price of only $400 its much cheaper than the cheapest announced Blu-Ray player at $1500.
My vote is for the Blu-Ray, and the PS3. For 2 reasons, first because Blu-Ray is superior and will hold more data, this means more extra features, almost twice as much storage space as HD-DVD. (as a video editor, backing up projects on 54GB discs sounds much more appealing than 30GB discs) and second because I never liked the XBOX 360.