The HVD sounds awesome but the entertainment industry probably won’t support it because it’s capacity is too big. It’s attractive to me because I could store a bunch of movies on one disc but that would involve defeating DRM, which I’d imagine the entertainment industry will actively resist.
I do hope they make it to market, though.
I’m skeptical that Blu-Ray will ever be ubiquitous and almost certain the HVD will never gain widespread popularity.
I think that the smart money is on Flash storage taking over as the dominant high-density storage devices. It will be simply re-recordable, which is a weakness of HVD and Blu-Ray, and it will be smaller and won’t require a spindle. The media technology is already mature and will quickly become cheaper to mass produce. Importantly it is also much more durable than any optical disc medium.
As for the huge volume of data the HVD allows, I think it will ultimately end up being pointless as far as home entertainment goes. I don’t suspect we’ll be seeing another sea change in display technology, without that there’s no reason to assume that movies will need much more storage than is available on Blu-Ray and flash storage.
Well, now that it’s official that Blu-Ray has won, is there a Monday-morning-quarterbacking answer to the OP’s question from over a month ago: “Wow, so blu-ray won. What happened?”
The linked Gizmodo article from last December had all kinds of terribly logical reasons why HD should have won. But it didn’t. Hindsight being 20/20, is there an obvious reason why?
Perhaps you’re simply just not aware of the true purpose of the Internet. 
I don’t think the Gizmodo article made a case that HD DVD should have won. It highlighted some of it’s better qualities and some ways in which is was different from Blu-Ray, but pretty much every detail could be spun either way. One of his key points was that Toshiba and Microsoft made for a fairly tight, streamlined, non-competitive consortium that could create a consistent product with a well defined and universally implemented technology. The flipside to that argument is that Blu-Ray had many more powerful and rich backers. Those big companies made it difficult for Blu-Ray to come to some consistent standard, but they also made it easy for it to have a wide range of players on the market and an ability to market to a broad audience. It cuts both ways.
Personally, I think the two biggest factors in the battle were simple ones. Blu-Ray is a good brand name. People knew it and remembered it. It was evocative of ultra-modern products while not being inaccessible to the lowest common denominator. Secondly, the Sony PS3 played a major role. Microsoft made a big mistake by not including an HD-DVD player in the 360, though some might argue that they prefer to have streaming content over any high-density optical format, and there are enough PS3 owners out there buying Blu-Ray discs to turn the tide in their favor.
Whatever the case, it’s probably safe to say that technology had almost nothing to do with it.
Well, downloaded content or people staying with DVD are also possible.
Though I think there probably is enough reasons for Blu-ray to survive (and possibly thrive).
Brian
I missed this until today. Why is that ironic? I’ve owned the PS3 since the release, with my current one being the most expensive at $600. Six months afterward even the cheapest HD-DVD players were being sold for +$1,000.
Meanwhile I’ve been able to watch simply awesome video, stream high-quality movies and media to my PS3 from around the ranch, browse the web from the living room and play some pretty cool games. Mostly. (Ubisoft, you still got the stinkeye.)
Not to nitpick, but laserdisc lost to DVD, not VHS. I still own a laserdisc player, but haven’t used it since I got a widescreen TV. Anamorphic DVDs can’t be beat by laserdisc.
Just how long have you had your PS3? I seem to remember HD DVD players in the $300 range for at least the last year (Toshiba branded).
I think what happened is most people aren’t early adopters and wisely stuck with their VHS and waited though the brief laserdisc period until DVD’s became thoroughly adopted.
A lot of people now are sticking with their DVD’s and waiting out not only the HD-DVD/Blu-ray war but possibly also just waiting to see if these discs are going to be skipped altogether.
Can I also say I hate typing HD-DVD and I also hate saying HD-DVD and am willing to let the whole technology die for that reason alone? They should have called it “Bob” or something.
Heh, I liked HD-DVD, but I guess I can see how the nerds like me who like names like that might have not been as numerous as those who like schooshy fashionable names like “BLU-RAY!”
Just wait, Blu-Ray will soon be rendered irrelevant by MEDIATRON3000! 
At the risk of sending this thread careening head-first into GD, I’ll say that it was decided by payoffs to studios, marketing, and the heavy subsidizing of the PS3 platform by Sony.
The Blu-Ray Disc Authority (BDA) would have you believe that it was due to “consumer choice”, which is dubious at best. Had all studios been format neutral from the get-go, and all studios released on both formats from the beginning, the outcome may very well have been different. However, the BDA were able to secure Fox, Disney, and (surprise surprise) Sony’s studios from the get-go. Three very large studios with an impressive catalog.
It’s likely that Fox and Disney received “incentives” either in the form of cash payoffs or other “financial or promotional considerations” for Blu-Ray exclusivity. In fact, at the BDA press conference at the IFA in Berlin in August of last year, when asked point-blank whether they had received financial incentives for their exclusive support of Blu-Ray, Disney’s VP of European Marketing responded with “No Comment”.
There’s still a lot of speculation as to why Warner had chosen to go Blu-Ray exclusive. Perhaps out of the goodness of their hearts they knew that they held the winning hand in deciding the outcome of the war, and decided to just go with Blu-Ray and put an end to the “war” for the consumer’s sake. However, this is business, and if Paramount and Disney were receiving payouts for their support of their exclusivity, why wouldn’t they try to secure a nice incentive package? I say the jury’s still out on this one, and it may be some time before we know what actually went down in Warner’s meetings with the BDA/Sony two weeks prior to CES 2008.
The fact is, the battle between HD DVD and Blu-Ray may be over, but I agree with others here that the war itself is not over. So much time has been lost over this feuding that Blu-Ray may have set itself up for losing to other HD options, including downloadable content, and, as mentioned previously, HVD and Flash options. Blu-Ray has many problems to surmount:
Another dangerous factor for the viability of Blu-Ray is the gamble that Sony took with heavily subsidizing the PS3 to ensure Blu-Ray’s dominance. They have lost over $1.7B US on the thing to date, and while they are forecasting a turning point in mid-to-late 2008 on it (due to cheaper chip manufacturing process et. al), it’s hard to say whether this is yet another lip service to their investors (“please… just give us another year”).
All is not doom and gloom though. For the money, the PS3 is an excellent Blu-Ray player, and the cheapest Blu-Ray player option which will ultimately support the newest “profile” definitions to boot. Additionally it is a quality product… well made, and some hot technology. Look at it this way: if the PS3 fails as a platform, and Blu-Ray takes the world by storm, you have yourself a helluva BD player.
Note that Toshiba also payed studios to use HD-DVD and subsidized players.
Toshiba is supposed to surrender at 5PM Tokyo time Tuesday.
Brian
Turning point for what? I can’t see it being relevant to the blu-ray/hd-dvd issue, so do you mean turning point in deciding on the ps3 vs the xbox 360? I stuck a DVD with xvid files on my friend’s xbox 360 last week and was surprised to find that after a quick codec download it played the videos.
I bet this played a bigger role than any technical difference.
“Blu-Ray” just SOUNDS ZO COOL LOLZZZ!!!11 u iz PWNED
I know a guy who swore up and down that HD-DVD would win the format wars because “It has ‘DVD’ right in the name! Of course people will buy that over something called Blu-Ray!”
He also claims that VHS only won the format war over Betamax because it sounds more like “VCR”.
To be fair, any uncommitted consumer just wouldn’t care very much if Blu-ray or HD-DVD won the format wars. As long as somebody won and cheap players were available, and there was a compelling reason to upgrade from DVD. We now have between 1/3 and 2/3 of that equation completed, depending on what consumers find compelling.
Woops, I meant to say XVID videos.
The “problem” with downloadable movies is that in HD, they’re around 50 gigs or so, which means that unless you’ve got a fibre connection and scads of harddrive space, you’re going to spend a long time waiting for the movie to download, and it’ll be tough to store very many of them.
Toshiba press release:
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2008_02/pr1903.htm
Brian