The industry and consumers need a reality check.
We can’t exactly have a “format war” when there is NO real consumer demand. This isn’t Beta vs VHS or Vinyl vs Cassette. This is a situation where major corporations decided that it is time to supplant a perfectly functional and ubiqutious format, even though there is barely enough of an installed base of consumers to profitably take advantage of the new one.
Keep in mind the following:
Vinyl Records solved a problem - they let people actually listen to recorded music (wax cylinders were too short lived).
Cassettes solved a problem - they actually let people affordably record music and take it with them wherever they want.
CDs solved a problem - they allowed people to randomly access and listen to music over and over in crystal-clear quality without any degradation over time and and an almost limitless archival life-span.
DVDs solved a problem - they did for VHS what CDs did for tapes and vinyl.
So where are we now? We’ve got VERY expensive HDTVs with no singular, required resolution format. HD broadcasts almost exclusively come from cable, sattelite and other pay-services, except for a few terrestrial stations. DVDs are ubiquitous, they have saturated the market, and people have stockpiles of them. And best of all, DVDs work very well! Plus, unless you get a 1080p HDTV (damned expensive), you wont notice any difference between a Blue-Ray/HD DVD or an upconverted (3/2 pulldown) DVD over component cables on a 720p screen.
So what are we fixing? HD DVD and Blue Ray are essentially DVDs with higher resolution. Keep in mind that SACD and DVD-Audio are also CDs with “higher resolution” (and muli-channel processing). Those formats have the market penetration of MiniDiscs - very small.
I challange anyone to explain exactly what kind of “format war” this supposed “consumer demand” is actually fueling.
As for the rest of these formats, they are propreietary and geared more towards commercial use. They don’t live and die by the standards of market penetration. There are hundreds of other recording formats that are in active use today by companies around the world, from tape drives to magneto-optical discs (think LARGE MiniDiscs).
To become a standard, a format (in this case, recording format) has to solve a number of important problems that arise from a “Perfect Storm” of market conditions:
- A long awaited emerging technology.
- Affordable pricing that not only entices early adopters, but even main-stream consumers.
- World-wide acceptance of the technology and the need to create a storage medium for it.
- And lastly, consumer acceptance of a single, superior medium that will store the content to be accessed on this new technology that is already being actively adopted on a grand scale.
- Most importantly, the improvements have to be great enough to convince most consumers to abandon their old technology and adopt the new one.
Tags: blu-ray, dvd, formats, recording, technology
