HD DVD vs. Blu-ray

before the video starts can I just take a second to thank everybody this channel celebrated its two-year anniversary a couple days ago and that's a big accomplishment it sounds cheesy but you all keep me motivated to continue with these videos each week so without all your support I doubt we would have made it here not with this amount of success anyway but this channel is far from done in fact I want to take this opportunity to tell you about a new way you can impact the topics discussed on this channel it's a new website company man ideas dot-com there's a link in the description if you go there you can submit ideas for future episodes and vote on ideas already submitted by others I'll be using it as a tool to help ensure that the topics that I talk about are the topics that you want to hear about bookmark it and check back often and I think this can become a cool part of the channel also related to the two-year anniversary is this video it was actually one of the first videos I ever created for this channel I made it in June of 2017 and for whatever reason never released it I think it holds up there's nothing outdated about the information and I stand by all of it so to celebrate two years of the company man channel here's the rare opportunity to see how the channel has evolved while watching some never-before-seen content so thanks again everybody and let's start the video with my initial first lame intro today we have two forms of physical media they're DVDs and blu-rays when you check out at the red box you'll have the option of renting the DVD or the blu-ray version of your movie and if you want to purchase a new release you'll buy the DVD or if you're really into the movie you'll buy the blu-ray but what you'll never see is the HD DVD every so often there's a war between two formats the most notable of these was around 40 years ago between Betamax and VHS two separate means of playing a video battling against each other and it was the VHS that came out on top then we all transitioned to DVDs but when the time came to advance to the next format again we had to that wanted to be the standard blu-ray and HD DVD the company behind blu-ray is Sony and the one behind HD DVD was Toshiba first let's look at why the world needed either one of these video quality had gotten much better and higher quality takes up more memory a DVD can hold about 4.7 gigabytes whereas an HD DVD could hold 15 and the blu-ray can hold 25 so the idea is that they can support more memory and therefore provide people with higher quality videos the new formats were basically like a DVD but in HD that's obviously where the name HD DVD comes from it's a high definition digital video disc it's a lot to say but makes perfect sense the name blu-ray comes from the fact that the laser used to read the disc has a wavelength of 405 nanometers which is a blue light the standard DVD had a wavelength of 650 nanometers which was red and according to the Sony website a blue laser allows for much higher density and hence larger storage capacity it's all a little confusing and that's why I think the HD DVD had a better name the user realizes that it's an upgrade from the DVD just by hearing the name and they don't have to be a scientist to fully understand it technically the two formats were very similar they both used that fancy blue laser and held a high capacity the blu-ray held a little more but that came at a slightly higher price to produce it there were other technical differences but as far as the average consumer was concerned they were practically the same so you might think that they could both exist alongside each other and the customer could choose which one they want here's why that's not practical it's the movie studios that release the movies Sony and Toshiba provide the means for getting it to the customer but it's these studios that only actual rights to the movie some studios supported the blu-ray and others supported the HD DVD in order for both formats to coexist every studio would have to support both formats which isn't a practical idea they would have to estimate with each release how many potential buyers own blu-ray players and how many own HD DVD players if they released the formats equally they would have to many of one format and not enough of the other and if the studios remain loyal to a certain format the user would have to purchase a player for both formats in order to have the potential to play a movie in HD for example Universal Studios used to release all their movies only on HD DVD so if you had a blu-ray player you'd never get to see meet the parents in HD and can you really call that living if you haven't seen meet the parents in HD the ideal system only allows for one format and the blu-ray emerged as that format let's look at how they did it as I said before blu-ray is associated with Sony and Sony had two assets that gave them a distinct advantage remember a second ago when I was talking about the movie studios it's the movie studios that release the movies Sony and Toshiba provide the means for getting it to the customer but it's these studios that only actual rights to the movie well there's six major studios the studio's can either pledge allegiance to a certain format or remain neutral the goal of the entire format war was to get as many of these studios on your site as possible and once you have all six of them you've won here's the six Studios 20th Century Fox Disney paramount Universal Warner Brothers and Columbia which was owned by Sony this is why Sony had an inherent advantage in the war the entire goal was to attract six Studios and Sony owned one of them which puts one of the six on Sony site automatically and makes it next to impossible for the HD DVD to attain all six from the beginning they were fighting an uphill battle the two formats were released two months apart from each other in 2006 at the launch this was the landscape blu-rays were supported by Disney Fox and of course Columbia HD DVDs were supported by only Universal and Paramount and Warner Brothers were neutral in that they supported both the other asset Sony was able to use to their advantage was conveniently set to be released in November of the same year the PlayStation 3 Sony releases a new PlayStation every six or seven years and the timing for this one couldn't have worked out better here we have a company that's trying to put blu-ray players in people's homes that also has a product that they know is going to sell a ton of units and also plays discs so they did the logical thing when they decided to make the ps3 a blu-ray player now all of a sudden the millions of people who purchased the ps3 owned a blu-ray player and were potential purchasers of blu-ray discs but it came at a cost it was expensive for Sony to put this Hardware in their PlayStation so much so that they had to sell it at a much higher cost than their customers expected it was more expensive than the Xbox 360 or a ps2 at its launch and even with the hefty price tag Sony was still losing money on each unit sold it was Sony's attempt to throw a haymaker Toshiba zwey it didn't knock them out but it hurt now Microsoft was a supporter of the HD DVD and sold an add-on for the 360 that would allow the user to play them through the Xbox but as you can imagine the add-on didn't sell nearly as many units as the ps3 there were now many more people that owned a blu-ray player than an HD DVD player so it only made sense for the retailer's to focus their sale efforts on the blu-ray discs in June of 2007 blockbuster who was still a big deal at the time went exclusively to blu-rays / HD DVDs they had a period where they tested both formats in a select number of stores and just concluded that the blu-ray rentals far exceeded the ones of HD DVDs so much so that they determined it wasn't practical for them to hold on to the HD DVDs at all the next month target said they would focus on blu-ray players and discs it seemed like the HD DVD was going to be a thing of the past but in August of that year paramount who had been neutral decided to join HD DVD and make that their exclusive format but when 2008 came around things went bad very fast On January 4th Warren Brothers announced that they would only be releasing blu-rays of the six major studios this one was probably the most important because it had the biggest presence in the DVD world this is what many people viewed as the point of no return and it's hard to argue soon after everything just seemed to unravel Netflix who had provided bolt up until this point announced the switch to exclusively to blu-ray and Walmart did the same thing Toshiba knew it was over On February 19th they announced they would stop making HD DVD players and on that same day Universal who had been the only company to offer exclusively HD DVDs announced they were moving to the side of the blu-rays this left them with only paramount on their side who switched over the next day the HD DVD made a great effort and at times it looked like they might make it but Sony had Columbia and the ps3 on their side and used them perfectly was it worth it to lose so much money on the ps3 sales it's hard to say they not only lost money on the sales they lost some customers along the way some people who were loyal to PlayStation moved over to Xbox just based on the lower price and that fact would potentially have an impact on the ps4 sales you would have to compare the revenue earned from the blu-ray licenses to the money lost from the ps3 units and the loss of projected sales I'm not sure if it was worth it or not some support for it being not worth it is the fact that blu-rays haven't taken off like Sony had hoped many thought by now they would have completely replaced the DVDs in the way that DVDs completely replaced the VHS that transition only took a few years and here we are 10 years later and DVDs are still the more popular medium and I don't even want to mention how the streaming industry is impacted the sales of all physical media I suppose I did just mention it didn't I unclear if it was worth it or not but I'll bet they expected a greater return than they've received and may have second-guessed doing it if they knew then what they know now the success of the blu-ray is an interesting story of how a business could use its different two visions to its advantage if Sony hadn't been in the film studio DVD and video game business we all may be watching HD DVDs right now but Sony used their resources to their advantage and were able to knock out a core competitor in what was essentially a war a media war and the failure of the HD DVD is an interesting story of failure it's a media format that didn't make it to the two-year mark they were at a disadvantage from the beginning and just kept taking punches at a certain point Toshiba could have gotten up at the eight count but knew it was over and decided to stay down but as much as a failure this may be for Toshiba the real losers are the people who bought the HD DVD players and the Xbox add-ons because they bought something that became completely useless probably within the year usually the customers tend to benefit from competition but for something like this it just wasn't the case the whole thing was sort of a disaster the customer didn't benefit Toshiba didn't benefit and even the benefit for Sony was questionable it shows how intense competition like this could actually be harmful I never bought an HD DVD or anything that plays then but let me know in the comments if you did and on the other end let me know if you've never even heard of an HD DVD before this I'm curious as to how popular the format actually was and as always let me know any other thoughts you have on anything discussed I'd like to hear what you have to say thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Company Man

Views: 1,260,548

Keywords: Blu-Ray, HD DVD, DVD, Physical Media, Media, Sony, Toshiba, Format wars

Id: op6FnQrGk_Q

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2019