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Sony's Revenge For Betamax
February 27, 2008 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
The Blu-ray vs. HD DVD format battle is over, and Sony is basking in the afterglow of victory. Blu-ray will now go on to become the standard for high-definition DVD players, and Sony executives can laugh about finally getting revenge for Betamax.
All I can say is that it's about time. I've been watching the HD DVD/Blu-ray skirmish for years. I don't want to buy the wrong DVD player.
And it is possible to wind up with a piece of expensive electronic junk. My friends recently bought a new 42" flat-panel LCD HDTV. The picture is almost better than real life, but the TV isn't compatible with their existing 500-watt Onkyo home theater system. The TV requires one special HD hook-up line, and the home theater has old-fashioned (three-year-old) multiple lines.
Now, if my friends want to hook up a home theater, they'll have to buy a special HD home theater for their special flat-panel HDTV. Everything in their living room now revolves around that TV.
So, while I need to update my TV and DVD players, I've been taking my time, waiting for a sure sign that either Blu-ray or HD DVD was the clear winner, and last week Toshiba threw in the towel on HD DVD.
What pushed Blu-ray over the top? Both formats started out strong - Blu-ray had Sony, Pioneer, Panasonic, Sharp, and JVC in its corner. HD DVD was backed by Toshiba, Microsoft, Intel, NEC and Sanyo.
Both use blue lasers, which can provide more storage capacity than my red-lasered DVD player. (Blue light's wavelength is shorter than that of red light, so a blue laser requires much less space to record bits of data.) Blu-ray boasts 50 gigs of storage for dual-layer disks, while HD DVD clocks in at 30 gigs for disks with two layers. Both formats are backward-compatible with old-school DVDs.
But over the past six years, the tide slowly turned. The HD DVD format lagged 10-20 gigs behind Blu-ray in storage capacity, a big turn-off. Every PlayStation 3 comes equipped with a built-in Blu-ray player, pushing the format into hundreds of thousands of households. Eventually, almost all the big players had sided with Blu-ray. Warner Brothers was the only studio left still supporting movies in both formats, and in January the studio pulled the plug on HD DVD.
When Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Amazon decided to drop HD DVD and support Blu-ray, that was that.
So Toshiba lost millions backing a losing horse. But to be fair, if HD DVD had won the day, we'd be talking about how Toshiba was chock-full of geniuses who can predict the future. As always, the winner gets to write history.
But in the end, Blu-ray has really won one battle in a much bigger war. The DVD market is worth $24 million, but viewers could wind up ditching DVDs entirely, thanks to all manner of new media. Cable and satellite operators offer HD movies, and then there are the DVRs like TiVo. Apple's iTunes offers high-defintion films over the Web, and newer, super-clever services likeVudu let users watch HD movies through a set-top box. No old-fashioned player required.
Blu-ray may be on its way to becoming as obsolete as the DVD it's replacing. But at least Sony got its revenge for Betamax.