Honourably Dead DVD
On February 19 2008, a major digital format died when Toshiba officially announced the discontinuation of HD-DVD. The first few gripping lines of the company’s statement on the subject read:
“Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market.”
By “major changes in the market,” I assume they mean Sony’s Blu-Ray standard, which has seen consistently better sales and a larger installed user base. A major contributing factor (actually THE major contributing factor) is the inclusion of a cut-price Blu-Ray player in Sony’s PlayStation 3.
This is certainly not the first time that a company used a console as a “trojan horse” to get technology into the hands of consumers, often without consumers realising it. Nintendo’s Family Computer (or “Famicom“) was a bizarre cream and burgundy machine that was eventually redesigned into a two-tone grey option and released in the west as the Nintendo Entertainment System. Although disguised as a simple cartridge based home console not only had support for a keyboard and disc drive and cassette deck for memory storage to turn it into a computer on which you could do a variant of BASIC, it also had support for a modem (remember, this is 1983) through which the customer could get jokes and news as well as check stock tips and bet on horses!
When Sony launched the PS3, there were rumbles among the less generous elements of online society (forum dwellers) that the primary function of the machine was to introduce Blu-Ray to as many people as possible so that Sony could claim a superior installed userbase over HD-DVD - and that any thought of it being a videogames machine were of a much lower priority. Paranoid videogamer waffle aside, any discussion of the victory of Blu-Ray in the marketplace cannot afford to ignore the contribution the PlayStation 3 had to offer.
The PS3 may well be the poorest seller amongst the current generation of videogame consoles (and it is, too - at time of writing, estimated sales put total sales of the machine at roughly 8.2m units, behind the Microsoft Xbox 360 with 17.2m units and Nintendo’s Wii console 20.1m units sold - and I always thought that the PlayStation 2 was meant to be The Third Place…!), but in terms of the take-up of the new DVD formats, that’s enough to cause a major HD-DVD upset. Another thing to consider is the business of profiles. Sony updates Blu-Ray by adding new functionalities. These updates are called “profiles.” For example, Profile 2.0 brings a feature called picture-in-picture (something that was always an HD-DVD standard), meaning that if you have an older profile player, you cannot view picture-in-picture features on discs, as your player doesn’t understand how to process them.
To make a Blu-Ray player truly future-proof, you’d need one that was able to access the internet and had a hard drive on which to store the considerable amount of data required. Thankfully, one such Blu-Ray player exists. Can you guess which one?
The Xbox 360 is compatible with HD-DVD via an add-on, but would it have been a different case if Toshiba had done a deal with Microsoft to include it as standard in all the machines? Well, now we will never know.
Of course, those with longer memories will see the victory of Blu-Ray as Sony’s revenge for their Betamax video cassette, the rival to VHS, developed by JVC. Although many aficionados claim Beta to be the superior format, VHS did the wonder of becoming a catch-all term for video itself. If I tell you to picture a video cassette, changes are the image in your mind was one of these.
This is one of the earliest format wars that most people remember these days. However, the wars didn’t begin there - they are as old as home entertainment itself. If you have an 8-track deck, a Beta player, a laserdisc machine, an HD-DVD player and, if you’re particularly senior, a machine to play back Edison cylinders in your house, then chances are you’ve learned the hard way that early adopters run the risk of getting saddled with an expensive white elephant. (Though personally, I’d still love to hear the Criterion laserdisc commentary for This is Spinal Tap, featuring the lead actors out of character and actually talking about the making of the film, which is not included in MGM’s otherwise extremely good DVD edition).
We can only speculate on Blu-Ray’s ability to challenge the standard DVD format to become a market leader, especially as DVD is clearly the strongest ever market for home video. But for now, the future looks Blu.
