Toshiba Drops HD DVD; Sony Finally Wins a Format War

As someone who remembers Betamax, owns multiple Mini Disc players and has a couple of SACD players laying around, the first thought that came to mind when Toshiba (TOSBF.PK) threw in the towel on HD DVD was: “Sony (SNE) has finally won a mainstream format war”. I say mainstream because whilst Sony did win the format war between SACD and DVD Audio, neither format really found an audience beyond audiophiles. Mini Disc beat out DCC, but (again) the former merely found an audience in professional audio world (Radio commercials, sound effects, etc) and had a limited shelf-life due to the advent of hard drive based recording.

I think the difference this time around is that Sony licensed the technology to others (Unlike Beta Max) and didn’t hold back the best Blu-ray technology for itself (With Mini Disc other manufacturer’s units were always a generation behind technology wise). Once Sony had the manufacturing piece nailed down, adoption by retailers and studios was the final piece of the puzzle.

Now that the “war’ is over what’s next for Blu-ray? I think people that were sitting on the fence may purchase units, and it’s quite possible that some HD DVD owners will switch over to Blu Ray. However, I think these changes will be primarily driven by the earlier adopter crowd who were the bulk of the consumers paying attention to the war in the first place. I think the true impact of the “Blu-ray Victory”, won’t be felt for another 6-18 months when a wealth of new movie content and technologies based around Blu-ray will be available in the marketplace. Rapid consumer adoption of Blu-ray players probably won’t happen until there are several fold more Blue-ray movies available, right now the pickings are still rather slim.

Personally, I’m most excited about the possible audiophile devices high-end manufactures will produce now that there is a clear format winner.

However when I think long-term, I wonder if mediums like CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, etc, are already passé and obsolete. When it comes to digital media the real issue isn’t about the storage medium, it’s about the format of the content ON the medium. I think storage formats is old thinking from people who came up in the days of Vinyl Records, Cassette Tapes, CDs, etc. In the future, I think media companies will simply sell you a small HD with your content on it that you simply plug into some sort of media reader, media computer, etc. The type of content your reader can playback will be determined by the type of software (or firmware) on your device, the quality of playback will be determined by the hardware plus on-board software and processing. You won’t need to necessarily change your media device when new technology/formats are invented, you would just upgrade the firmware and/or some of your hardware.

The idea of upgradeable media readers already exists as you can easily do it with a PC, and high-end manufacturers sell high-end CD/DVD players and surround sound processors that allow you to update the firmware and/or hardware to accommodate new formats. The medium that we buy our digital content on just needs to catch-up. Toshiba and Sony should’ve been selling the software to decode HD-DVD or Blu-ray movies, with the movies themselves on some sort of cheap universal storage medium that we could plug into media players.

Blu-ray and HD DVD may very well be the last of the major format wars in the mold of VHS vs. Betamax; the next format wars will be more about the format of the content itself that’s stored on universal storage mediums. Future format wars will be more in the style of MP3 vs. WMA. The manufacturers to bet on in the consumer electronic space, will be the ones that already realize this.

Disclosure: the author doesn’t own a position in any of the companies mentioned in this article. He is (however), quite excited about the possibilities of high-end manufacturers like Classe’, Mark Levinson or Denon producing Blu-Ray players with super-high resolution audio playback.

Comments

[Tom B]

"In the future, I think media companies will simply sell you a small HD with your content on it that you simply plug into some sort of media reader, media computer, etc. "

Downloadable. iTunes everywhere. Actually, when the internet gets fast enough and reliable enough, we may see the end of local storage. All the world's knowledge could be on Google data centers around the world. Go ahead 100 years, maybe our own brains will be backed up to RAID arrays, if you believe Ray Kurzweil (I don't).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...