It looks like another battle similar to VHS vs. BetaMax (or dare I say PC vs. Apple?).
Toshiba has launched the first volley, introducing their HD-DVD player today. Meanwhile Sony and others will be rolling out the competing Blu-Ray DVD format in a few months.
Those with HDTV are asking, “Why can’t they agree on a single standard?” I wouldn’t even mind if they could build a single player that would handle both formats, but as I understand it because of technical and licensing considerations this won’t be happening any time soon.
And it’s not like you can choose one or the other and still be able to buy any movie you want in your chosen format. Most of the major studios have aligned themselves with one camp or the other and will be releasing their movies only in that format.
Yes, I know that engineers on both sides have compelling arguments why theirs is better. But why can’t they sit down at a table and come up with a single format that will make everyone happy? That’s what they did with CDs and regular DVDs, as well as a host of other technology.
It just seems like they have to prove that they are better than the other guy, and to hell with the consumers.
That’s why you don’t ever buy anything early, be it TVs or VCRs or DVD players or cars or anything else. It takes time for these things to shake out, and it’s all a question of money. They won’t come up with a single standard because each of them has mad licensing fees at stake if their standard becomes THE standard. VHS became the standard because Sony wouldn’t license Beta and the tapes were too short to cover a one hour show. IBM became the standard because Apple wouldn’t license their stuff.
Sooner or later one of these standards will win, and when it does your “wrong” standard equipment will be limited-use junk. Wait for it to shake out. Besides, it’s only DVDs. How can it be that urgent?
I’m not old enough to really remember Beta rentals, but I do remember that the initial Beta tapes for home recording use were only one hour long, which was a massive handicap compared to VHS and their three hour record time.
I seriously hope Sony loses this battle like they did with Beta-Max. From what I understand, Blu-Ray is going to ahve a shit-ton more DRM, mal-ware, and othe crap associated with it than HD-DVD. Remember that crap that was on a ton of Sony CDs? You don’t think for a second they aren’t going to try something similar with the Blu-Ray DVDs?
When video recorders aimed at the domestic market first appeared, there were three competing (and incompatible) formats: Philipps 2000, Betamax and VHS. I worked in the video industry at the time and it was kind of interesting to see who won and why. The full story of why VHS emerged triumphant could fill a book, and there probably is one out there somewhere. However, I don’t recall that Beta cassettes offered any less recording time than VHS - I seem to recall that, in all formats, you could buy 1 hr, 2 hr or 3 hr tapes. And even if there was a difference, this wasn’t even close to being the determining factor.
In a nutshell, VHS benefitted from smarter, more ‘savvy’ marketing. Sony concentrated on technical superiority (and the Beta system did deliver technically superior picture quality to VHS). JVC realised that a major factor in the war was the availability of movie titles on their own format. For a while, every movie that came out on video was released in both formats. The studios hated this duplication of effort. JVC were quicker to do exclusive VHS-only licensing deals with more studios and owners of movie rights; quicker to sign up retail outlets and give them better in-store promotional stuff to promote the VHS standard; quicker to promote their format to the consumer as ‘the one that you can get more movies on’; quicker to improve the look and feel and idiot-proof operation of their machines so that people would prefer them. In other words, they spotted the key marketing differential (suitablity for home movie watching) and managed to out-smart Sony in the marketing.
And that’s it in a nutshell. But there’s lots of detail in the story, and it has become a modern ‘classic’ of marketing theory and practice.
These are the standard reasons given by virtually everybody. You can get into the technical nuts and bolts and stuff like that, but the bottom line was what I said: short recording times and failure of Sony to license is what did Beta in.
Both formats are chock-a-block full of DRM security, much of it exactly the same, except that Blu-Ray uses a hidden watermark as a crypto key to decode the content.
I haven’t picked a pony yet. On the one hand, Blu-Ray has a much more attractive capacity. My main concern, though, is how the durability of the medium compares with HD-DVD – the coating on the disk is necessarily much thinner. If it’s going to be difficult or impossible for me to make backups, I don’t see myself in a hurry to spend a lot of cash on movies or HD versions of TV shows until I’m confident that they’ll still be around if I want to watch them ten years later.
If it were, it would be monumentally foolish on the part of both HDDVD and Blu-Ray, and the movie studios. Who’s going to buy a next-gen system when they won’t be able to get general releases for it?
I won’t be buying either an HD-DVD player or a Blu-Ray player until the DRM has been cracked. Maybe by the time that happens, HDTV sets will be priced such that mere mortals like myself can afford them, and I’ll actually be able to enjoy the improved picture.
Everyone seems to agree that marketing and licensing savvy (and lack thereof) caused the ultimate demise of Betamax. Tape length was a mistake that certainly didn’t help things, but it wasn’t the death knell of Beta. I didn’t much care for the article in the first cite, but the author did sum the issue up well by saying “VHS won because “the whole product” did what people wanted at a price they were willing to pay.”
I do have to nit pick one thing from the second cite though “The final chapter on Beta has yet to be written; for now, consider this merely to be the introduction.”
And then there’s the holographic DVD just waiting around the bend. I can’t help being spoiled and greedy. I used to dream about storing all my movies on DVD. Now I’m dreaming about storing all my DVDs on one or two DVDs.
