Format Wars: Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD

standards are nice sure they can lead to massive commercial monopolies over an industry but at the same time they ensure that wherever they're used interoperability wins the alternative is to have two or more competing standards that don't work with each other making them more expensive to develop and get adopted raising the potential for all of that development money to go to waste imposing the risk to Consumers that the new technologies they buy will be out of date if they choose the wrong side one of the most recent stories of a largely preventable standards Clash is the war over the two highdefinition Optical formats Blu-ray and HD DVD as the '90s were coming to a close HD TVs were beginning to become a viable market prices were going down TVs were getting larger but there wasn't very much content to watch in HD movies were either on VHS analog stored 480p or DVDs digitally stored 480p both standard definition but except for a few unpopular tape-based formats nothing was available to make full use of the sharper pi that HDTVs offered the first step to the solution arrived when a man named shuji Nakamura developed a commercially practical blue laser diode with Optical media like CDs and DVDs wavelength of the laser being used determines the amount of data that can be stored the thinner the wavelength the more data can be compressed into the same space that's why DVDs with a 650 NM wavelength can hold more data than CDs with a 780 NM wavelength so to increase the storage on a disc more the wavelength had to be push even shorter from red light to Blue with the blue laser diode ready to be used in Optical Media Tech companies got to work on creating a format to put HD content on a disc Sony and Phillips started the ultra density Optical in DVR blue projects but their early prototypes for what they called Blu-ray discs weren't appealing to the DVD Forum a group of companies who managed the DVD's format standardization since they needed a plastic caddy to hold the disc that would drive up the manufacturing costs the DVD Forum decided to make its own blue laser format which it eventually adopted from Toshiba and NEC it was originally called Advanced optical storage but quickly got renamed to HD DVD conflicting formats are bad for everyone and the companies behind both Optical discs knew that DVDs were able to avoid that problem by having all companies agree on one standard so in attempts to prevent the war both the DVD forum and the Blu-ray Association attempted to compromise on one format in early 2005 some of the main points of issue were the physical design of the disc in the software platform for interactive content either bdj for Blu-rays or HDI for HD DVDs Bill Gates himself argued that Blu-rays wouldn't work as smoothly on personal computers and shortly afterward Microsoft and Intel both announced their support for HD DVD HP tried to form a compromise by suggesting running HDI on the Blu-ray disc format and threatened to support HD DVD otherwise the Blu-ray Association disregarded the suggestion and negot NE iations came to a close it was time for the formats to go to war and let consumers decide what disc would be the future of home video before the release of both Technologies the war was still anyone's game each format had three of the Big Six movie Producers over time though Blu-ray features began to attract some companies like Warner Bros and Paramount but Paramount soon stepped back to exclusive support of HD DVD the lack of exclusive support for HD DVD by movie studios prompted retailers to back away from the format both Blockbuster yeah they were still a thing back then and Target began to focus primarily on Blu-ray Warner Brother soon followed suit the next year after originally publishing to both formats with his dropping support for HD DVD the end was becoming a parent to Toshiba in a last Stitch effort to push the format they drastically reduced the price of their HD DVD player to almost half what it was originally being sold for the move tanked and not long after Best Buy on Walmart the largest vendor of DVDs both announced they soon would be dropping support for hddvd within 4 days Toshiba 2 announced they would stop selling developing and Manufacturing HD DVD essentially bringing an end to the war the remaining companies after Toshiba jump ship didn't take long to do the same Microsoft stopped producing their HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 and the last two of the big six Studios Universal and Paramount joined the Blu-ray camp in an attempt to help clean up the remaining HD DVDs floating around and ease consumers in their transition to the winning format Warner Brothers exchanged HD DVD collections with their Blu-ray counterparts at a greatly reduced cost compared to Simply reing the movies how did blu-ray win if both formats had relatively even support towards the beginning of the war it mostly comes down to the fact that in practice the companies on both sides were far from even in their capabilities to sway the market Blu-ray had more Studios on the fence than opposed because of the features it offered like an improved system for DRM the companies behind Blu-ray also contributed significantly to promoting the format especially Disney who published display videos to be used as instore demonstrations probably the biggest determining Factor though was Sony's decision to include a Blu-ray Drive in their PS3 at the time it was a daring move since it jacked up the price of the console significantly compared to its predecessors in competing consoles and lost Sony about $200 to $300 per console in the end though it proved to be the right choice Since By the time Toshiba had given up on HD DVD 10.5 million PS3s had been sold worldwide compared to 1 million HD DVD players from blueberry's successful launch the format has become more widely adopted though not nearly as quickly as had been seen with DVDs the amount of data able to be stored on the discs has been consistently improved in new features like support for 4K video narrower wavelength lasers for potentially 1 taby discs larger color spaces and even discs that are able to be played in both normal DVD players and Blu-ray players have been developed the future for blu-ray looks bright though HD DVD a project that lost Toshiba about 986 million is largely [Music] forgotten

Channel: The Science Elf

Views: 235,717

Keywords: blu-ray, hd dvd, hd, format wars, dvd, vhs, home video, electronics, technology, formats, disks, discs, cd, optics, optical media, betamax

Id: haP2UOju9TM

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2017