ZachInglis.com

The HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray war is almost at an end. I say almost as it is not official yet, but now Best Buy and Netflix are jumping to Blu-Ray, it is close. The only thing left is for Paramount and Universal Studios to jump ship and Microsoft to support Blu-ray.

It did not even come down to the technical aspects, like it should have been. HD-DVD had shown that it was the better format, with larger capacity disks in the market than that of Blu-ray (Though of course Blu-ray was technically larger, this had not been shown.) Even so, the HD-DVD team had been reported to be working on a 45gb disk.

With this in mind, I think there are a lot more reasons why HD-DVD should have won. For example, the naming convention is also a plus for non-technical users. People know the acronym HD. I feel that people trusted Sony too much without considering their past experience. Sony are persistently trying to create new format technologies and locking people into them. Sony is known for their failed formats: Betamax and UMD, and this should have been a bigger factor than it was.

I have also hard reports from equitable close friends that have said they found their HD-DVD to provide a better experience. I personally have not seen a Blu-ray video so cannot confirm this.

Where HD-DVD really failed? They had a hugely rich company supporting them, Microsoft. Microsoft were lazy in their support and in my mind the sole reason that Blu-ray won. Microsoft specifically said that there will be no HD-DVD games, I suspect for when the Xbox 3 emerges, and that you have to pay a premium (no pun intended) to get the add-on or a unit with the player hardware built-in.

If Microsoft aggressively pursued (let’s face it, they’re well known for their aggressive tactics) they could have very successful with HD-DVD, even taking a reasonable loss on the players would have ultimately helped them. What is worse for Microsoft though, is if they did succed, they would cause the Playstation 3 to take a huge hit. On the flip-side, we will now see a huge rise in the Playstation market share due to the Blu-ray win. People wanting to purchase a new console will pick the Playstation because Blu-ray is the winning format and that Xbox does not have support for it yet, will go for a Playstation 3. This is especially the case as a Blu-ray reader is around the same price as a PS3, so why not pick one up while you are at it, and a game or two.

Contrary to my bashing, I have been watching Blu-ray’s development for what is probably about 4 years now. I was very excited and very upset to see its gone the way it has. I own a HD-DVD player and will continue to use it still.